Revelation at Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron Begins

Revelation at Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron Begins Exhibition at the October Gallery, London

October 27, 2014 at 4:39pm

Owusu-Ankomah-Microcron-Kusum-No-1-2011

"Amidst the galaxy of forms it appeared to me, the distillation of a lifetime of effort.....the Microcron constellation"


I had a revelation on the 25th of October 2014.

I was led to better appreciate the limitations of the corner of the universe that I occupy.

This expansion of understanding of the conscription of my knowledge is also framed by a sharper awareness of the fact that I am not sufficiently informed to appreciate those boundaries because of the inadequacy of my frames of reference.

How is one to grasp the limitations of one’s knowledge if one is not aware of the scope of what is to be known?

I was privileged to see the exhibition of paintings, “Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron Begins”, on its closing day at the October Gallery, London, the 25th of October 2014 (http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2014ank/).

My encounter with the paintings, with Chili Hawes, the Gallery director and her friends, with Alana Pryce Tojcic, the artistic director, and Nichol, the receptionist, human interactions which gave me a little insight into the spirit involved in the management of such treasures of achievement as the paintings represent, my brief visit to the nearby Warburg Institute, embodying, in another context, the conjunction of image and ideation that animates Owosu-Ankomah’s work and the institutional environment required to adequately distill the significance of such work,  and my serendipitous meeting with Jotham Munyarai on the train to London, discussing the potentially self empowering and world shaping impact of one’s ambitions, ensured that the man, myself, who went to London on the fateful 25th was not the same man who returned from London.

The world characterized by my perceptions has undergone a permanent shift, like a heretofore immobile celestial body shifting decisively on its axis.

I used to think I had been considerably exposed to the work of Owusu-Ankomah, placing me in a position to make some statements of significance about it.

I have been very proud of having contributed an essay to the monumental book on his art, Owusu-Ankomah:Microcron Begins,  accompanying the multi-continent exhibition, recurrently pointing out this input to people.

I now realize that, having relied wholly on pictures for my knowledge of the artist’s work, I was equivalent to a person viewing a magnificent room and the intricate sublimity of its contents from the opening in a small keyhole, the details of these contents obscured, dwarfed to my vision on account of the distances created by the immensity of the space within which they are located.

 I could see the objects only in terms of dim outlines, with the few more brightly coloured creations being easier to perceive in their essential forms, while the greater number of constructs, less colourful but more intricate, being only occasionally perceptible in their complex and subtle symmetry, this greater number of structurations being as clear in their distinctiveness as the starry sky seen within a dim pool of water.

My previous acquaintance with the artist’s work is like perceiving a dot in the night sky which is the best one can see of the light of a giant star on account of the vast distance the light has travelled to reach terrestrial eyes, a journey commencing at the beginning of time, but reaching the earth only in the 21st century, having crossed space at the speed of light, the fastest speed known to humanity.

The technology might not yet exist to visualize most of Owusu-Ankomah’s paintings in a form that can suggest, talk less represent accurately, their glory.

As it is, I was privileged to walk into a small, but significantly representative section of the vast space of realization embodied by the artist’s work to date, the sheer volume of his productivity making the marvelous offering at the exhibition a small fraction of the whole.

Everything written up till this point about Owusu-Ankomah, on a scale of 1-10 of possibilities of explication, in which 10 stands for infinity, since the work’s possibilities of explication are infinite, may be likened to the first emergence into visibility of forms hitherto hidden in the myriad multiplications of micro-organismic entities, or to put it another way, the expression of the possibility of the existence of the universe, at the dawn of time, as different from the materialization of the universe itself, a preliminary sonic throbbing that suggests the mighty magnificence slowly palpating into being.

All expositions so far of Owusu-Ankomah’s work are at best basic groundwork, laying of skeletal foundations, the construction of an antechamber, a foyer from which people may walk into the grand hall yet to be fashioned.

What quality of his work inspires these superlatives?

It is not simply the sheer numerical scope or even the majestic size of some of the paintings.

It is the living texture he has created from canvas, like the shaping of an organic universe of his own, constituted by its own unique life forms, suggested by the rippling concreteness of space in dialogue with human and geometric forms, across a symphonic rhythm between works at various scales.

It was the texture of the paintings’ surfaces and the vivid power of the images that first astonished me.

His greater body of work is a sequence of paintings in stark black and white, but the intricate symmetry and sheer visual potency of these works never emerge in any pictures, online or in print.

That means 90%, if not more, of the power of the artist’s work is lost in translation from canvas to representational image.

Could a hologram, solve this problem, projecting images of the works in three dimensions?

Would the images on which the holograms are based be able to capture the dynamism of the network constituted by the raised surfaces of the paintings, surfaces that demonstrate a palpitating tactility, a physicality inviting caresses, a texture evocative of the dynamic surfaces of rock and organic forms?

Would such attempts at recreating the art be able to project its suggestion of living space?

Would it be able to make vivid the resonance between a sense of biological dynamism and the dialectic of the anthropomorphic and the abstract, the rhythm of the human form and the symbols in terms of which the human being distills cognition, the relationships between abstraction and concreteness that is core to Owusu-Ankomah’s work?

An ideal representation of such art would be a form of virtual reality that can simulate the organicity of the paintings’ surfaces, enabling one to both see and touch the works, though in terms of a simulacrum, a physical and a visual encounter that takes one closer to living imaginatively in the work of art, achieving an increasingly intimate bond with it as a concretization of cognitive possibility.

Who knows, perhaps such a visual and tactile engagement with the works could lead one to a transformative mental state in which one experiences oneself as living inside the work of art, encountering its human figures as living forms, perhaps even knowing oneself as those forms, engaged in the quest for meaning that Owusu-Ankomah’s work dramatizes, to the degree that such an ontological miracle is possible.

Can such near ultimate encounter with art be simulated through technology, thereby facilitating an understanding of the cognitive quest the art represents?

I dream of buying all Owusu-Ankomah’s paintings and housing them in a gallery designed for the permanent display of his work.

The work needs to be seen in its entirety, face to face, for its overwhelming power to be experienced in a way that does justice to its stupendous vision.

Meanwhile, it is imperative one takes time to relate with these paintings individually, as intimately as possible, spending a day, a week or more, interacting with one painting at a time, meditating on it in its primary presence, not the secondary presence of a representational image, so as to begin to attune properly with its wealth of figural and abstract symbolism.

Such intimacy of relationship needs to be complemented with breadth and depth of scholarship in global symbolism, religious, scientific, philosophical, artistic, and more perhaps, so as to help develop a conceptual and expressive base to give voice, as one is able to hear it at the intersection of generic and individual understanding, to the song resonating from the symphony constituted by the human-abstract dramatization that is the work of Owusu-Ankomah.

A gallery devoted to his work could change its displays from time to time to depict the various patterns, the different interpretive vantage points in terms of which the artist’s work can be perceived.

Displays of his Owusu-Ankomah’s could also include exhibitions that demonstrate the prismatic range of his creativity in its potential for interaction with other artists and disciplines with whom his work may be related through a variety of associations.

Such exhibitions could make explicit the artist’s dialogues with masters that have shaped his work at the intersection of human physicality and ideation, such as Michelangelo Buonarroti’s creations suggestive of Neo-Platonic expressions of abstract ideal in material embodiment and of the perfection of the soul expressed in the human body, Auguste Rodin and his evocation of thought through the dynamism of the male form, William Blake and his mythic masculinities within the context of his elaborately verbalized philosophy, among others.

Other exhibitions could correlate Owusu-Ankomah’s art with creativity across different disciplines addressing similar subjects as he does at  the intersection of human embodiment and cosmological possibility.

These include the verbal art of Dante Aligheri, the consummating vision of his cosmological narrative the Divine Comedy, in its integration of human form and the image of the circle as demonstrating human situatedness within infinity, converging with Owusu-Ankomah’s similar visualization in the Microcron symbolism that entices the questing human figures in his paintings.

Another possible correlation is with the scientific cosmology of Michael Faux and Sylvester James Gates, who use their self-created Adinkra mathematical symbols in exploring the character of the universe.

Their work references classical Adinkra symbolism in terms of visual similarity and the scientists’ guiding philosophy of knowledge, classical Adinkra being an inspirational matrix for Owusu-Ankomah in the journeys within cosmological space his art depicts in terms of human interaction with a variety of symbols.

Other contextualization of Owusu-Ankomah’s work could include juxtapositions with other artists demonstrating humanity’s engagement with symbols across time, as in the continuity between symbolic representation in classical and modern African and Asian art, represented, for example, by Victor Ekpuk’s transformation of Nigerian Nsibidi symbolism and Sohan Qadri’s recreation  of Asian Tantric iconography.

The director of the October Gallery, Chili Hawes, the artistic director, Alana Pryce Tojcic and the receptionist, Nichol, were all wonderful in their reception of me, Chilli even giving me some memorable food and drink, on the house, all of them identifying with my efforts to make a video of the exhibition and my response to it, a video I intend to present on YouTube, hoping it came out well since I have not used that camera for some time.

It is most helpful to undergo experiences that help one appreciate the inadequacies of one’s position, in general, and in particular instances, so that one may better understand the scope of what one needs to achieve, the kind of experience represented by my visit to the “Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron Begins” exhibition at the October Gallery.

Image source :

Source : October Gallery

URL : http://www.octobergalleryeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Owusu-Ankomah-Microcron-Kusum-No-1-2011-Acrylic-on-canvas170-x-135cm-Image-courtesy-OG-London.jpg

‘Kele’ | Dr. Atta Kwami’s fourth solo exhibition at the Beardsmore Gallery.

Rabo, 2014, acrylic on linen, 122 x 122 cm

‘Kele’ | Dr. Atta Kwami’s fourth solo exhibition at the Beardsmore Gallery.

The Show Kele (translated as ke-roots; le-exist) is the Ewe word for elephant grasses that reach their fullest height in the month of October | Black History Month throughout England. During this month in Ghana and Togo the elephant grasses are cleared in the minor or second harvest period and new corn is planted. Uprootedness, replanting and renewal are implied in this process of cultivation and these key aspects of life are of great significant to the artist, who splits his time between two countries and two opposing cultures - England and Ghana - Colonial and Colonized. Dr. Kwami was born in 1956, in a time of British occupation of Ghana and in this year Independence was claim on the Gold Coast under Kwame Nkrumah and full Independence a year later. Nkrumah gave birth to the idea of Pan-Africanism and the hope of a United Africa. 57 years on from those times Art is now the driving force for the Cultural Independence of Africa. Art is the root to all things and Dr. Kwami is in the glorious position to shape new ways of educating and revolutionary ideas of seeing. The time for Africans to learn about their Culture via SOAS (Part of London University) and elsewhere are almost at an end. It is the time for the Post-Colonialized to gain their true Independence by transforming and expanding the parameters of life and education, which are only half enjoyed, throughout the West Hemisphere. The pillars of Society are quietly creaking as we open up the idea of African Art. Exposing the chains that are so easily attached upon us all; forcing us to be apart of a mast that just keeps on whipping us. An Establishment that excludes the Continent and has even gone as far as building up a framework in order to keep Africa in the dark. Why do you think that is? What is so important about Africa? What has Africa got that the Establishment wants to hide so badly? It’s all about the Art, for authentic African Art is simply the freedom to be. It is not to be trapped and presented as scenes on a stage or on a page or even a tweet. The canvas can not hold these ideas for they are too Grand and high-feluted and so we must ask ourselves, how does Dr. Atta Kwami present these thoughts that occupy everything? How on earth will he be able to communicate this magnitude that is Art of Africa?

Having trained in England and written out his PhD via the Open University, Dr. Kwami is acutely aware just how rigid the West is. How narrow it is; streamlined down a tight-pipe, like sewage it runs and continues, seemingly, to flow forever in the favour of Post-Colonial eyeballs. With these thoughts in mind he constructs a series of paintings that serve as a mapping system as an Aid for a Western audience. Using only the visual bare necessities of the horizontal and vertical lines, which could also be seen as a loom of sorts; reducing the art down to its basic, a Modern African Abstraction, using a colourful binary system that acts like digital code in order to communicate. Dr. Kwami quietly explains his challenging ideas and concepts.

Gaining a Solo show outside the mainstream of controlled Post-Colonial Africa is quite something, especially in London. Here in England the support for Contemporary African art in the established art world is near to non-existent. The African stables are via the October Gallery in Holborn, Jack Bell Gallery in Mayfair, the African Rooms in the basement of the British Museum or via the occasional Nigerian Sponsored Bonhams Africa Now Sale, there are very few other places or individuals, that would dare to take the risk. Tiwani Contemporary in Little Portland Street, has taken an interesting approach in trying to fill the gap but although the artists are all of African descent, the art being produced is created by the brianwashed, Post-Imperial Art Colleges of the West, in Paris, London and even Oxford University. The practitioners all have a full understanding and a trained eye in regards to the successful Goldsmiths YBA artists of the 80’s and the constant following on from the 1920s Marcel Duchamp influences. It is understandable that black artists are not keen to be regarded as African as they have invested so much in becoming European. The necessity to be regarded as equal, in terms of their Art is imperative but that leaves the artists in Africa out on a limb. So it becomes clear we are at a turning point in the History of African Art.

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history; teach you your true heroes; if they know that, that knowledge will help set you free.”
― Assata Shakur

Life is a series of complex systems. Industries if you like. You pay your way to educate and find yourself agreeing and accepting into a ghastly system. A system only allowing those that have financially contributed into it, to have a say. It excludes everybody else that hasn't learnt or coughed up the cash to support this broken system. All is so rigid and suffocating and in joining this kind of cult, so much of the rest of the world is lost. The understanding of happiness is denied or is regimented and regulated. The idea of rituals, worship and love of the natural world are blocked and our creativity is stunted. We need to jump out of this box, this terrible empty and lonely windowless white room. Although it is bright there seems to be no light whatsoever. In thinking about the way in which we approach Africa it is interesting to see how these ideas are paralleled by James Rhodes, the Concert Pianist who is campaigning for a similar approached to be taken up at the earliest of ages with musical instruments. “Don’t Stop the Music” Campaign. Of course he is correct in all that he is thinking. We must learn to dance on stilts, wear colourful trousers, drum and sweat and put on terrifying masks and learn what it means to be free.

*Michael Harris from Yale University states: “You might consider the philosophical writing of Rowland Abiodun who works to define African art within its cultural intention and language. Art is a verb, but the West tries to turn it into a noun.”

An Open Letter to African Intellectuals

October 13, 2014 — The tag, 'intellectual' in reference to Africa refers to a certain type: western educated and visible in western media, maybe published in the West and maybe teaching at a western university. Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire writes to this type of African Intellectual.

Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ideas were (and still are) relevant to Kenya and Kenyans, so the post-colonial Kenyan establishment had to shut him up. Pro-African intellectualism not welcome here. Photo: EPA

Dear contemporary African Intellectuals,

We find your names on lists published in western media, among the top African Public Intellectuals, sometimes among the lists of Global Thinkers. And we celebrate. ‘Our’ thinkers are shaping the world, we say. You appear in TIME’s lists of Influential People. You have theorised about important things. About the end of capitalist hegemony. About the failure of the African state. About the representations of Africanness. About the rise of Afro-capitalism. About many things your Western audiences find very captivating. And this is why they rank you highly alongside their own intellectuals. You are indeed one of their intellectuals as well.

What if Africa needs or desires a different intellectual from what the West needs? How do you become an intellectual for both societies without losing relevance in the other? These are questions I want you to think about. I am writing because I seek knowledge. I want to understand if, on the streets of Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and other African countries, you are still the intellectual you are in the West. Let us exclude the prophet is not appreciated in their own home alibi, because we know for sure that Africa, or Asia, or South America does not identify intellectuals for Europe or North America. It can’t be that this prophetisation of intellectuals applies only to Africa!

What if Africa needs or desires a different intellectual from what the West needs?

I will refer to Africa’s immediate post-colonial period to show what I mean by relevance of an intellectual to the African condition. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Haunted out of Kenya because his theorising was ‘radicalising’ the Kenyan rural masses and pockets of the urban elite, where he was taking his plays that hit hard on the neo-colonial nature of post-colonial Kenya, he has since found refuge in the West. You see, Ngugi’s intellectualism was in the language the majority of his people understand. Gikuyu. And so he became so influential in his own homeland and too dangerous to Euro-American interests in Kenya, and thus had to be eliminated. The story of his imprisonment over his writing is known to you. The story of the novel he wrote on toilet paper in his prison cell is also known. The story of his liberation of the Literature Department at University of Nairobi from the hegemony of English Literature to the fresh shores of African Literature is also known to you. No one will deny that Ngugi was therefore a Kenyan intellectual in his prime. His ideas were not only relevant to Kenya and Kenyans but also influential. We know this because were they not influential enough, the post-colonial Kenyan establishment would not have shut him up by all means.

Cross the border into Uganda, where Ngugi studied, at Makerere University. His contemporary Okot P’Bitek also exemplifies the image of a relevant intellectual to their society. P’Bitek believed that theory does not only belong to the hollowed walls of universities and addled pages of newspapers and books. He was head of the extra-mural department of Makerere University, based in his home-town of Gulu, not the ivory tower at Makerere. Ideas live with people. While he was director of the Uganda National Theatre (the first African director of the institution), he took theatre out of the elitist urban Kampala to the people, through festivals in the countryside and the work of a travelling theatre troupe. He was also active in Kenya with travelling theatre companies, after running away from Idi Amin’s regime. As he wrote in his posthumously published collection of essays, Artist, the Ruler, “In an African society, art is life. It is not a performance. It is not necessarily a profession. It is life.” I would like to extend the argument to intellectualism. Ideas are life. They must be relevant. Lived. Or they are dead and non-existent.

I return to you, our esteemed contemporary African intellectuals. Where are your ideas in our life, us Africans living in Africa today? I understand that your theorising makes sense to those who praise you and list you among the most influential thinkers of our time. But do they make sense to us? Do they benefit us? Do we live by them? When you leave your busy lives in Western universities, your non-stop lecture schedules in all the world’s (read ‘developed’ world) capitals and retreat to Africa, where majority of the population still lives in rural areas and obviously does not consume Western media, do you feel that your intellectualism is relevant to the lives we lead? Do you feel that the Socrates, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Kant, Keynes etc. that you are always citing is relevant to our lives?

Of course you know for sure that every society is based on certain philosophies, ideas and systems. Or else it would not be a society. Who or how do you think the ideas, philosophies and systems that inform our lives came to exist? Or are you still purveying the fiction that these philosophies are dead-dying? They are not, I can tell you. They are evolving and what they are becoming is not necessarily a replica of Euro-American life. There is such a thing as African contemporaneity that is not mimicry of European culture nor is it a re-imagination of an African past. If you refuse, come and I take you to Nyanja, the village of my birth and upbringing. Or do you think the okadas in Lagos or boda bodas in Kampala are mimicry of the West? Did our ancestors ride them? There is your hint. But you are the same advising African city managers to ban these things because in your Euro-American vision, they do not exist!

Know why our sewage pipes keep bursting? Workers of National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) yet another burst pipe on Jinja Road in Kampala. Photo: Wilfred Sanya

I will share something I learnt from a renowned African journalist, Charles Onyango Obbo. In Kampala, there is a big sewerage problem. Whenever it rains, or even when it does not, you find sewage freely flowing on the city streets. According to Charles Onyango Obbo, much of Kampala under colonial times was inhabited by Europeans and Asians, and so the infrastructure was to serve their needs. He says that these Europeans and Asians did not eat heavy organic food and so their waste was lighter. Africans on the other hand eat heavy organic food. The sewage pipes made for Kampala in colonial times were therefore light as the waste would not be heavy. Africans took over most of these houses that used to be inhabited by the Asians and Europeans on independence. The size of sewage pipes has not changed. Even new pipes bought are as small as they were then. Africans have not urbanised culturally. They still eat their heavy organic food. And the pipes are always bursting. Kampala is stuck with its sewerage flowing on the streets? Why? Because the post-colonial intellectuals have not decolonised their thinking. They think for Euro-America shadows. But Africa has not necessarily become a shadow of Europe. This is probably why in the West, Africa has intellectuals that speak to a reality the West knows. In Africa, these same intellectuals are leading to solutions that cause more problems. Like the flowing sewerage.

There is such a thing as African contemporaneity that is not mimicry of European culture

Most of you have been insistent on the need to ‘develop’ Africa. Some of you speak about this development in the economic sense, while some of you talk of social development. You are partly responsible for the cliché that Africa is bedevilled with ignorance, poverty and disease. Our esteemed African intellectuals, have you asked yourselves if this development you preach is necessary or even desirable for African populations? Have you re-thought what development actually means? You now talk of Globalisation! Dear fellow Africans, is Africa the centre of the globe in your globalisation vision? If Euro-America is the centre in this globalisation vision, is this then, not Westernisation? Isn’t this why Euro-America calls you African intellectuals? Is this not your utility to them? You centre the future on them and yet you are African by descent. You intellectualise for them. You are their intellectual but also African.

As I conclude, I would like to quote one of you, Andrew Mujuni Mwenda, Foreign Policy Top 100 Thinker, TED speaker etc., to whom I wrote in January 2014 about his obsession with Socrates and search for an irrelevant intellectual space in the Ugandan media (see my letter to him here). After a visit to Dubai, he literally swallowed much of his preaching about neo-liberalism and confessed:

” … what makes nations successful is the ability to find public policies and political institutions that their people understand. Part of the problem of Uganda (and Africa) is that we spend so much time reciting foreign ideologies chapter and verse but always fail to relate them to our realities. Thus while our problems are local and the demands to solve them are locally generated, the tendency is that when it comes to designing solutions, we retreated to theories drawn from textbooks.

These theories evolved in North America and Europe to explain a specific historical experience – how changing technology drove structural change and all this led to political struggles. These struggles were nourished by existing norms, values, traditions, and shared cultural understandings and therefore produced a specific institutional set-up. It is unlikely that one can cut and paste it on a society with different social dynamics and they work. Therefore, a major source of failure in Africa may be this mismatch between demands and solutions.” Read the whole column here.

EBOLA - The Designer War

From Ghana: Ebola is not real and the only people who have gotten sick are those who got shots from the red cross. Other than the original facebook post, this web site is the first one to carry this and it needs to be spread, the future may be riding on this one, ARCHIVE, POST POST AND RE-POST!

Nana Kwame wrote: 

People in the Western World need to know what’s happening here in West Africa. THEY ARE LYING!!! “Ebola” as a virus does NOT Exist and is NOT “Spread”. The Red Cross has brought a disease to 4 specific countries for 4 specific reasons and it is only contracted by those who receive treatments and injections from the Red Cross. That is why Liberians and Nigerians have begun kicking the Red Cross out of their countries and reporting in the news the truth. Now bear with me:

REASONS:

Most people jump to “depopulation” which is no doubt always on the mind of the West when it comes to Africa. But I assure you Africa can NEVER be depopulated by killing 160 people a day when thousands are born per day. So the real reasons are much more tangible.

Reason 1: This vaccine implemented sickness being “called” Ebola was introduced into West Africa for the end goal of getting troops on the ground in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. If you remember America was just trying to get into Nigeria for “Boko Haram” #BULLSHIT but that fell apart when Nigerians started telling the truth. There ARE NO GIRLS MISSING. Global support fell through the floor, and a new reason was needed to get troops into Nigeria and steal the new oil reserves they have discovered.

Reason 2: Sierra Leone is the World’s Largest Supplier of Diamonds. For the past 4 months they have been on strike, refusing to provide diamonds due to horrible working conditions and slave pay. The West will not pay a fair wage for the resources because the idea is to keep these people surviving on rice bags and foreign aid so that they remain a source of cheap slave labor forever. A reason was also needed to get troops on the ground in Sierra Leone to force an end to the diamond miners strikes. This is not the first time this has been done. When miners refuse to work troops are sent in and even if they have to kill and replace them all, the only desire is to get diamonds back flowing out of the country.
Of course to launch multiple campaigns to invade these countries separately would be way too fishy. But something like “Ebola” allows access to an entire area simultaneously…

Reason 3: In addition to stealing Nigerian oil, and forcing Sierra Leone back to mining, troops have also been sent in to FORCE vaccinations (Deadly “Ebola” Poison) onto those Africans who are not foolish enough to take them willingly.

3000 troops are being sent in to make sure that this “poison” continues to spread, because again it is only spread through vaccination. As more and more news articles are released as they have been in Liberia, informing the populous of the US lies and manipulation, more and more Africans are refusing to visit the Red Cross. Troops will force these vaccinations upon the people to ensure the visible appearance of an Ebola pandemic. In addition to this they will protect the Red Cross from the Liberians and Nigerians who have been rightfully ejecting them from their countries.

Reason 4: Last but not least, the APPEARANCE of this Ebola “pandemic” (should Americans not catch on) will be used to scare the countless millions into taking an “Ebola vaccine” which in reality is the pandemic. Already they have started with stories of how it has been brought to the U.S. and has appeared in Dallas, how white doctors were cured but black infected are not being allowed to be treated, etc.

ALL that will do is make blacks STRIVE to get the vaccine, because it appears that the “cure” is being held back from blacks. They will run out in droves to get it and then there will be serious problems. With all we have seen revealed about vaccines this year you would think we learned our lesson. All I can do is hope so, Because they rely on our ignorance to complete their agendas.

Ask yourself: If Ebola really was spread from person to person, instead of controlled spread through vaccination – then WHY would the CDC and the US Government continue to allow flights in and out of these countries with absolutely no regulation, Or At All? We have got to start thinking and sharing information globally because they do not give the true perspective of the people who live here in West Africa. They are lying for their own benefit and there aren’t enough voices out there with a platform to help share our reality. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, paralyzed and disabled by these and other “new” vaccines all over the world and we are finally becoming aware of it. Now what will we do with all this information?

Reference: Jim Stone Freelance

Related:

• Ebola: How To Stage A Fake Epidemic
• A Historical Timeline of Population Control
• FINAL NAILS IN THE EBOLA SCAM COFFIN: The 2014 Ebola Outbreak is a PROVEN FRAUD, Here is the Evidence.
• A brief history of governments deploying weaponized pandemics against innocent populations
• Ebola can be turned into bioweapon, Russian & UK experts warn
• Governments seize colloidal silver being used to successfully treat Ebola patients
• Ebola, biological warfare against Africa?
• Why did the U.S. Government patent the Ebola virus in 2009?
• CDC owns patent on Ebola virus; agency to collect royalties on all future Ebola vaccines
• Ebola: Covert Op in a Hypnotized World
• Kevin Barrett: Ebola threat — Real or False Flag?
• Jon Rappoport: Is It Ebola or Psychological Warfare?
• US bioweapons lab with links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at core of Ebola epidemic
• Connecting Dots: George Soros, his Ebola bioweapons lab and the death of WHO spokesperson Glenn Thomas in the Ukraine

Schools in Uganda | Article by Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire

Why are schools punishing children for speaking African languages?

September 17, 2014 — Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire looks at the various reasons for ostracising African languages in African schools and shows how unconvincing they are, arguing for more vigilance in the defence of the use of local languages in African schools.

In various schools in Uganda, and some other parts of Africa, children as young as five are punished for speaking African languages, indigenous languages and mother tongues at school. The modes of punishment differ. The most common one in Uganda is wearing a dirty sack until you meet someone else speaking their mother tongue and then you pass the sack on to them. In some schools, there are specific pupils and students tasked with compiling lists of fellow pupils and students speaking mother tongues. This list is then handed over to a teacher responsible for punishing these language rule-breakers. According to Gilbert Kaburu, some schools have aprons that read: “Shame on me, I was speaking vernacular” handed over to an offender of the No Vernacular rule, who then is tasked with finding the next culprit to give the apron. Most of the punishments, in their symbolism emphasise the uselessness of the African languages.

Commenting on a photo of two children in Uganda wearing dirty sacks as punishment for speaking their mother tongues, Zimbabwean writer, Tendai Huchu says:

“That sums up our self loathing and inferiority complex. Junot Diaz once said we do a better job of enforcing white supremacy ourselves than white supremacists ever could. I should add, notice how the punishment consists of wearing sack-cloth. The image is telling. You are rags if you speak your own language.”

Halima Hosh, agreeing with Tendai Huchu opines:

“It’s outrageous. What a slave mentality that a colonial language is considered higher or better/more worth than their own local language. Unbelievable. Do the Europeans learn any African language in school? No. Why not? Because we are not proud of our heritage, not proud of our languages, not proud of Black African history. These teachers need to be fired.”

This image of two kids forced to wear sacks for speaking Luganda in school generated much discussion on Facebook this week.

The loud symbolism and absurdity of the punishments for speaking local languages and the colonial roots of the practice aside, there is no convincing argument for the contemporary ostracization of African languages in African schools, fifty years and thereabouts after independence. The justifications for the present-day banning of African languages in African schools range from the need to prioritise the learning and quality of English/French (insert any other European colonial Language) over the local languages to the building of national unity and identity through globalisation. Below I show the demerits of these arguments.

Speaking African languages affects the learning of English

It has been argued that vernacular affects the learning and speaking of English (or any other colonial language) thus children need to unlearn their mother-tongues so they can learn and speak English better. Speaking English with indigenous language-inflected accents to those who make this argument is not a good job of speaking the language. There is effort put into enforcing a British accent (whatever that means). The assumption is that the less local language you speak the better your English speaking and writing abilities and vice versa.

Henry Odhiambo II, who studied from a school where children would be caned for using their mother-tongues at school in rural Kenya says that:

“it instilled so much fear that when we met outside school the kids weren’t sure what language to speak to each other thinking they may be reported and get a beating, the sad thing is that what was being spoken would pass for gibberish if a true English speaker were to give their own honest opinion.”

This elite was deliberately mis-educated to hate their own ethnic identities

From Odhiambo’s experience, we see that children lose confidence so young for being punished for speaking ‘vernacular’ yet confidence is an important attribute for good learning. Learning by punishment is not necessarily effective learning, thus the more children are forced to learn English by sacrificing their mother-tongues, the worse their English language proficiency gets.

English is needed as a common language

For many a multi-ethnic African country, with several indigenous languages, it is argued that it is important to ‘enforce’ English as a common language. Kibibi (not her real name) says that unless you start conducting official business and exams in vernacular, which she has problems with because it reinforces differences, it is important to enforce the speaking of English. She adds that she was bullied for being ‘uppity’ in primary school because she could not speak Luganda, which is not her language and thus is not spoken in her home.

The vulgarisation of ethnicity in many African countries was essential to the divide and rule policy of the British as it emphasised the de-tribalisation of a class of elite that would be left in charge of the colonies at independence to easily transition into neo-colonies. This elite was deliberately mis-educated to hate their own ethnic identities while the majorities of the populations were deliberately left to continue their life as normal in their ethnic organisations. In multi-ethnic countries like Uganda, the offspring of the Anglicised elite feel that ethnicity is a negative influence on the growth of national unity. They thus support a de-tribalisation policy.

The problem is that de-tribalisation in post-colonial Africa is impossible. People are tied to their ethnic identities and education does not necessarily de-tribalise them. Neither is it true that speaking the same language guarantees unity. Rwanda and Somalia are good examples. Despite linguistic unity, the two countries have had enough experience of civil strife. Kenya, with its Kiswahili promotion policy and English preference since 1963, still experienced ethnic strife in 2007. Co-existence is not necessarily homogeneity. There can be unity in diversity, including linguistically.

English is the international language of business

It is also argued that English and other colonial languages offer advantages to children in today’s global language. It is their passport to the global stage. Business within the hallowed walls of the Bretton Woods institutions, or at the World Economic Forum is not yet conducted in IsiZulu, Yoruba, Luganda, Lingala and other African languages and so African children need to know an ‘international’ language to survive at that stage.

Shiphrah Nidoi suggests that:

“we can learn western languages without shunning our own. English is our official language, it is internationally recognised. For popular African languages to be recognised internationally, we need to stand our ground and draw attention to them by speaking the languages. Embrace your heritage, it is beautiful. The world will go with what goes.”

I agree with Nidoi. Despite the fact that indigenous languages are not effectively supported by state policy and none has been made Uganda’s official or national language, communication in the country happens more in indigenous languages than English (the official language) or Kiswahili (the national language). Mass retail trade in Kampala is largely impossible without the knowledge of Luganda, the most spoken indigenous language in the country. Multinational companies in the telecommunications sector have to translate their adverts to a minimum of four indigenous languages to reach the target markets. There are far more indigenous language radio stations in the country than English speaking stations, reaching a much larger audience. The Luganda daily tabloid-newspaper Bukedde sells more copies than any other daily newspaper, many of which are in English. Global businesses thus need the indigenous languages to be able to penetrate African markets.

It is illogical to abandon the indigenous languages while the populations that provide market for products stay hooked to them. We are losing our competitive advantage over foreign companies in our own markets. The list of the United Nations official languages (or any other international organisation) is not fixed. More languages can be added if there is proof that they are important for the conduct of their business. The core purpose of language is communication and people in the business of running international organisations understand this hence the encouragement of multilingualism in diplomacy and international relations schools. If Africans do not support the use of their own languages, no one will do it for them.

Amos Kasibante, who once confronted a Uganda Education Minister in the 1980s over the policy of punishing children for speaking indigenous languages is livid about the situation. He asks:

If Africans do not support the use of their own languages, no one will do it for them

“Why are politicians who are engaged in anti-colonialist rhetoric not challenging this practice? How can it survive today under the fundamental change ushered in by the NRM (the Yoweri Museveni-led National Resistance Movement came into power in Uganda in 1986 promising very many reforms, with a decolonisation rhetoric underpinning many of the suggested reforms)? How come there is no flood of protests in the media about the prevalence of this practice? How come the Ministry of Education is quiet about or oblivious to its existence? How come that even churches are quiet about it and even some church schools could be perpetuating the abuse?”

Barbra Natifu agreeing with Tendai Huchu and Halima Hosh reasons that the practice is a consequence of colonised minds. She suggests that the language debate should be re-tabled and the dehumanising treatment of children stopped. She labels the punishment of children for identifying with their own cultural and linguistic identities a crime against humanity. In her opinion, this must end and the education curriculum reformed to incorporate indigenous languages.

There have been debates as to the extent and relevance of indigenous languages in the Ugandan curriculum at many levels. No such debate exists when it comes to English. In 2012, a proposed new curriculum scrapping Ugandan indigenous languages from the Ordinary Level sparked an outcry in local language rights activists’ circles, including an online petition to the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament. The idea was reportedly dropped.

In the same country Uganda, there is a policy that the language of instruction at early primary school education levels is the predominant indigenous language of the area, up to Primary Three. In Primary Four, teachers are guided to use both the indigenous language and slowly transition to using English. This policy is however grossly disregarded by a number of private schools, especially in urban areas whose logic according to Gilbert Kaburu, an Education expert, is to prepare pupils early enough for national examinations set in English. Most government-aided schools in the rural areas comply and indeed there are cases when it is suggested that their dismal performance in national examinations is due to the use of indigenous languages in the lower levels of education.

There is hope that with sustained advocacy, that the ostracization of indigenous languages will end. The Ministry of Education can be put on pressure to monitor schools that implement a No Vernacular policy. The Ministry can also be pushed to ensure the implementation of instruction in local languages in the early stages of primary education. We are the same people who lose out in the global marketplace, but also in our own home-grown markets because we are losing our competitive advantage in the name of speaking others’ languages best. The core purpose of language is communication and to communicate with the larger mass of the African population, one needs to speak the African indigenous languages.