Week Ten: The Power of One – Nelson Mandela

After reviewing how organizations and mass movements can catalyze change, this week we will look into the power that a lone actor can have. Surely, many have heard of Nelson Mandela and most are at least somewhat familiar with his battle against apartheid and history in prison prior to being elected President of South Africa. What is truly remarkable though is Mandela’s ideological shift from the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation/MK), a militant branch of the African National Congress (ANC), to an outspoken advocate of Gandhi’s satyagraha, non-violent resistance.

Left with little room for negotiation with the white-minority-ran South African government, the young Mandela was an advocate of violent resistance, personally organizing and fundraising for guerilla military training of MK members. It was this focus on sabotage and militant operations that led to Mandela’s nearly three-decade long sentence in prison. Standing in front of the South African magistrate prior to sentencing, Mandela concluded his remarks:

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

 

Mandela was found guilty and became prisoner 466/64, sequestered to the remote Robben Island prison. In his isolation, Mandela reflected on his activism and embraced the philosophies of a fellow South African, Mahatma Gandhi. While his approaches to resistance were transformed on Robben Island, his integrity and ideals of egalitarian, democratic governance never waivered. He contributed leadership to the ANC from his prison cell and was released in 1990. Voting for the first time in 1994, Mandela was elected President and inaugurated several weeks later. Standing before a nation that had been infamously divided by apartheid for decades, he began:

“We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have become reality. Freedom is their reward. We are both humbled and elevated by the honour and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first President of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist government.”

 

While a remarkable leader, Mandela’s integrity is not an exclusive characteristic, rather it should serve as a model in which we each aim to follow. Studying Mandela’s tumultuous biography can elucidate his growth as a leader and simultaneously humanize him in a way that can make him more accessible to each of us who aspire to affect positive change in our lives.

 

Mandela Biography

Week Nine: Apartheid, Liberation and Critical Pedagogy

To use an oft-cited analogy in development, approaches must be holistic in character and, like a sitting stool requires three legs to stand, they require a tri-parted strategy to achieve sustainability. In previous week’s lectures we have reviewed economic and environmental barriers to development and the holistic approaches to address them by analyzing the Acumen Fund and the Green Belt Movement. In recognition of the co-dependent nature of these themes, education intuitively follows as this week’s topic.

“Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it,” wrote Paulo Friere in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Friere, a Brazilian educator and activist, recognized the humanizing aspects of education and, alternatively, the oppressive potential that educational institutions can have. He wrote that education is be characterized by two approaches, banking and dialogical. The banking method describes a subject and an object, where the teacher (subject) is the expert and imparts their expertise upon the students (objects). Analogous to a banking transaction, the unit of value (knowledge) flows in one direction and is placed in an open receptacle (the student). It is in this dichotomy that oppressor and oppressed exist and the illusion of liberation and empowerment persists. No policy better epitomizes this “banking method” than the South African Bantu Education Act of 1953, where government funding for schools became contingent upon the instruction of a curriculum that sought to reinforce the oppression of the policies of Apartheid. It was through education that Apartheid—South Africa’s infamous policies of institutionalized racism—was to be engrained and sustained in black South Africans. The following passage also epitomizes the “false generosity” of the oppressor that Friere describes:

“There is no space for him [the “Native”] in the European Community above certain forms of labor. For this reason it is of no avail for him to receive training which has its aim in the absorption of the European Community, where he cannot be absorbed. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze.” –Henrik Verwoerd, South African Minister of Native Affairs

 

The alternative approach to education was dialogical, where teacher and student approach problems as equals. The dialogical method is egalitarian in nature, it deconstructs the teacher-student/subject-object dichotomy, constructed myths of oppressor and, in doing so, humanizes all. Thus education focuses on the Aristotelian notion of praxis: thought and action. This dialogical approach and true generosity “lies in striving so that [the hands of the oppressed]—whether of individuals or of entire peoples—need to be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become the human hands which work and, working, transform the world.” While Friere’s description of the dialogical method is not prescriptive, it has greatly influenced a variety of pedagogical theories that have been applied in contexts ranging from liberation theology—the re-interpretation of the role of Christ, the Church and Christians on earth—to participatory approaches to development all over the world.

Friere, Chapter One

Friere, Chapter Two

Pedagogy of the Oppressed Summary 

 Bantu Education Act Overview

Week Eight: Patient Capital

For many citizens in developing nations, entrepreneurship—innovation and the capacity for creation—is the mode of overcoming quotidian barriers of poverty. Micro-business is a common outlet for entrepreneurially minded individuals, where a product or service is provided to a localized market in order to generate subsistence levels of income. This form of enterprise is ubiquitous throughout East Africa and while the region’s nations enjoy a common potential for transformational growth, they also share in similar barriers to private sector development including inefficient trade and investment services, inadequate infrastructure and limited private sector capacity (World Bank).

Most banks in developing countries actually charge interest of their stakeholders rather than pay it out. This is due to the high-risk of lending in developing nations, a consequence of loosely defined and rarely enforced property rights. This scenario makes capital access difficult for most entrepreneurs who lack credit. Furthermore, it makes capital expensive, meaning borrowers need an especially lucrative and stable market for investment in order to generate a return sufficient for recouping interest expenses and making a profit. Many lenders lack the education, training and/or experience necessary to maximize loan effectiveness and/or utilize equity. These factors are not independent, but rather, are interlinked barriers to development.

This week (and next), we’ll be looking into the economic barriers that affect entrepreneurs and strategies that micro-finance and social-venture capital firms have undertaken to address them. Continuing in the trend of organizational analysis, we’ll be studying the Acumen Fund as a model organization. Their signature “patient capital” operates as a revolving loan fund for small and medium enterprise. By extending payback periods, adjusting appropriate interest and offering a multitude of investment mechanisms (ex. quasi-equity), Acumen has been able to fill a niche that traditional markets have missed for decades.

 

Acumen Ten Year Report

Week Seven – Kenya: Colonialism, Corruption, Environmental Degradation and The Green Belt Movement as Antithesis

In many ways, Kenya is an archetype for an African nation. Once a British Colony, the Mau Mau rebellion initiated independence through subversion and limited violence. Despite a flash point in 2007, Kenya remained peaceful for decades following, though experienced much of the barriers that face many developing nations: corruption, dictatorship, tumultuous economic growth and environmental degradation. In spite of this, Kenya has emerged as a vanguard of development in the East Africa region: economic growth averaging 7% annually, a billion-dollar tourist industry, an active civil society and relative peace. And yet, many of these barriers to development persist. The country is notorious for corruption and while experiencing substantial economic activity, income disparities are becoming more polarized and social mobility is becoming paralyzed.

While public policy solutions can be generated, implemented and replicated by a myriad of organizations—public and private, grassroots and bureaucratic—a holistic process is necessary to achieve sustainable success. Few efforts have been more successful in Kenya than the Green Belt Movement. Its founder, Wangari Maathai, was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her leadership and the organization’s successful outcomes.

“Although initially the Green Belt Movement’s tree planting activities did not address issues of democracy and peace, it soon became clear that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. Therefore, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya. Citizens were mobilised to challenge widespread abuses of power, corruption and environmental mismanagement. In Nairobi ‘s Uhuru Park, at Freedom Corner, and in many parts of the country, trees of peace were planted to demand the release of prisoners of conscience and a peaceful transition to democracy.

Through the Green Belt Movement, thousands of ordinary citizens were mobilized and empowered to take action and effect change. They learned to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and moved to defend democratic rights… Entire communities also come to understand that while it is necessary to hold their governments accountable, it is equally important that in their own relationships with each other, they exemplify the leadership values they wish to see in their own leaders, namely justice, integrity and trust.” –Maathai, 2004

For this week, the class will explore current events in Kenya: political, social, environmental and economic.  We will juxtapose the Green Belt Movement with these events and analyze the manner in which the organization addresses prevailing development issues in a holistic and sustainable manner. We will also discuss the meaning of these terms: “holistic” and “sustainable.” Begin by reading Maathai’s Nobel acceptance speech and explore the Green Belt Movement website. The NY Times link include a brief overview of some of the prevailing current events in Kenya while the State Department link offers a data-driven analysis of the country.

 

 Maathai – Nobel Acceptance Speech, 2004

The Green Belt Movement  

The New York Times: Kenya

U.S. Department of State: Kenya

 

 

Week Six: Poverty Is…

“Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.” —United Nations

Poverty is not being: a moral agent/having dignity (Kant)

Poverty is not being: a political animal/a social being (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau)

Poverty is not having: access to sufficient resources to secure any conception of the good life.

Poverty is not having: access to justice.

Poverty can be thought of in two respects: being/immaterial and material/wealth; and in two degrees: absolute and relative.

Being human means we create complex ends and means that fulfill the wants and needs of a “self.” Poverty means that a human is denied the “choices and opportunities” to conceive of the means to reach their ends: goals or desires of attaining basic human needs. This can equate to a deprivation of material wealth—resources to be able to attain nutritional sustenance, basic education or healthcare—as well as the inability to consistently operate as a moral agent. Kant argued that by treating another moral agent purely as a means to your ends, rather than as an end in themselves, one was harming the other’s dignity: not recognizing their capacity as a moral agent. In this sense, poverty, and the perpetuation of it, violates human dignity. Furthermore, human beings are social animals, possessing the ability to enter into social contracts with one another, furthering mutual goals. At a fundamental level, these social contracts are what form societies. Poverty equates to an inability to enter in to and uphold social contracts. This is an inability to participate in a civil society, which can lead to violence, “living in marginal or fragile environments” and lacking access to basic needs. These immaterial deprivations indicate absolute poverty.

Material resources enabling access to basic needs—food, water and shelter—as well as ancillary needs, including education and healthcare, differentiate relative poverty from absolute. One example of relative poverty is the comparative measure of income per capita in a universal unit, accounting for the purchasing power of each unit in a respective area. For example, if I earned $14,000 annually in the U.S. and lived in Bozeman, MT, I would not be nearly as well off as if I earned that same amount in Burundi. The purchasing power of the dollar—the basic goods that one can attain—goes much further in Burundi than it does in Bozeman, MT. So while I may be “poor” if I have an income of $14,000 a year in Bozeman, it is a fundamentally different kind of poor than if I was “poor” in Burundi. Even as a “poor” person in Bozeman, I still have access to clean water, sanitation and can attain basic social justice: I have rights, can vote and am equally (in theory) protected by rule of law.

Factors Contributing to Poverty

Inequality – “focuses on the distribution of attributes, such as income or consumption, across the whole population. In the context of poverty analysis, inequality requires examination if one believes that the welfare of individuals depends on their economic position relative to others in society.” –World Bank

Vulnerability/Insecurity – “is defined as the risk of falling into poverty in the future, even if the person is not necessarily poor now; it is often associated with the effects of “shocks” such as a drought, a drop in farm prices, or a financial crisis. Vulnerability is a key dimension of well-being since it affects individuals’ behavior in terms of investment, production patterns, and coping strategies, and in terms of the perceptions of their own situations.” –World Bank

World Bank: “What is Poverty and Why Measure it?”

Week Five: From Leopold to Lumumba

Few places are more illustrious of the duality of mankind than the Congo. While Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness chronicled the brutality of colonialism, typified by the heinous “Mistah Kurtz,” his work has been predictive, if not prescient, of the Congo’s future.

The Congo’s history has been the most tumultuous of any other African nation. With massive reserves of mineral and natural resources, hundreds of tribes and some of the most extensive and impenetrable territory, the Congo has come to characterize Africa’s greatest challenge.

This week, we’ll be analyzing leadership and power in the Congo, starting with Belgium’s King Leopold II and ending with Patrice Lumumba, the once Prime Minister, assassinated by the West. Readings will be excerpted from Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa.

Unlike other European protectorates and colonies, Belgium’s King Leopold II treated the Congo as a personal property. At one point declaring himself “Emperor of the Congo,” Leopold enriched himself off of ivory and, as bicycles and the automobile began to develop, rubber. The Congo was a treasure trove and was treated as such, where the Belgian authorities created a system of pure efficiency with no regard for indigenous humanity. Villages were required to submit quotas of rubber and if they failed to meet the Belgian’s ever-increasing demand they were subject to torture, ranging from flogging to amputation or execution. Terror was leveraged wherever it could prove useful to Belgium’s greed.

At the Congo’s independence ceremonies in 1960, the thirty-five year old Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, rose to respond to Belgian King Baudoin’s (great-nephew of Leopold II) patronizing address to the now independent Congolese: “We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms of what was supposedly the law of the land but which only recognized the right of the strongest. We have seen that the law was quite different for a white than for a black: accommodating for the former, cruel and inhuman for the latter. We have seen the terrible suffering of those banished to remote regions because of their political opinions or religious beliefs; exiled within their own country, their fate was truly worse than death itself…” “Nous ne sommes plus vos singes,” concluded Lumumba: We are no longer your monkeys.

Lumumba had a mercurial rise to power though his messianic-complex made his personality no less volatile and toxic. After rioting and a military mutiny, Lumumba enticed military intervention from an array of Western powers including Belgium, the U.S., the Soviet Union and the United Nations; pitting each against one another. Meredith writes: “In the sixty-seven days that Lumumba had held office of Prime Minister, he had squandered all goodwill and accumulated a powerful array of adversaries.” A little over two months after assuming office, Lumumba was tortured, assassinated and his remains were scattered for miles across the Congo by Western intelligence agents, leaving no physical trace. And yet, his legacy persists.

 

Meredith; “Heart of Darkness” Pgs. 93-115 

Week Four: Achebe, Conrad and Fiction

This week’s class will focus on the portrayal of Africa in fiction, most famously in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-writing Novelists. His 1903 Heart of Darkness is an account of an Englishman’s voyage up the Congo River to find a maniacal trading agent named Kurtz. While Heart of Darkness is fiction, it is based off of Conrad’s own experience as a riverboat captain in the Congo and his impressions of the reality of colonialism and African people and their customs. Conrad reflects on the duality of three central themes in his book: civilization versus wilderness; civility and cruelty; as well as humanity and inhumanity.

Chinua Achebe (1930—   ) is the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart, a massively popular novel recounting the clash of Igbo tribal culture with early colonialism in Nigeria. Things Fall Apart is considered a seminal work in modern African literature. Much of Achebe’s novels and essays focus on the cultural destruction of African oral, religious and tribal identities the resulted from early 19^th-Century Christian missionaries and the ravages of European colonialism on African people, wildlife and environment.

In a 1975 lecture, delivered at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, Achebe criticized Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and academia’s embrace of his work.  “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.” Achebe’s protest focuses not only on Conrad’s juxtaposition of the civilization and lightness of London’s River Thames (civilization) versus the wilderness and darkness of the River Congo, but how Conrad ignores any humanity on the part of the African. “Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: ‘What thrilled you was just the thought of their inhumanity – like yours… Ugly.’”

Achebe’s address included several excerpts from Conrad’s writing and should provide sufficient context in and of itself. However, please review the Wikipedia entries on both Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart in addition to Achebe’s address, links are below.

 

Heart of Darkness Overview

Things Fall Apart Overview

Achebe’s Address 

 

Week Three: MLK vs. Fanon

For the third week of the Africa Free Class, we will compare the theoretical constructs of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre’s arguments in favor of violent resistance with Martin Luther King’s construct of non-violence as a means for revolution.

Some central themes to consider when reading Fanon, Sartre and King:

 

Active vs. Passive Resistance: Consider the following quote on the necessity for active resistance and Sartre’s criticism of the passive nature of the French Liberal establishment, insinuating that if they are not acting for change:

“…colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat.” – Excerpt from leaflet distributed during the FLN’s violent resistance early in the Battle of Algiers, 1955.

“In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives… Sometimes the Left scolds them … ‘you’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides.” – Sartre, “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth

Now compare Martin Luther King Jr.’s (MLK) assertion that non-violence is, in fact, an active form of resistance:

“[We] make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.” –King, “The Power of Non-Violence”

 

Consistent Humanism vs. Humanization: Sartre and Fanon argue that it is through violence that the oppressed assert their humanity over their oppressors, that is, violence is a humanizing process:

“The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.” – Sartre, “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth

While MLK argues that violence is a dehumanizing process and, instead, recognizes the simultaneous humanity of both the oppressor and the oppressed. It is a system (colonialism) that supports oppression and the agents that compose it can, and must, be changed:

“[We] make it clear… that the nonviolent resister seeks to attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system.” –King, “The Power of Non-Violence”

After Violence: Consider the remnants of violence, what happens to a society after revolution. While King argues that violence only begets more violence and bitterness, Fanon and Sartre argue that violence is a cleansing process and despite the wounds it creates, they are necessary.

“The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.” –King, “The Power of Non-Violence”

Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we are bound hand and foot, humiliated and sick with fear; we cannot fall lower.” – Sartre, “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth

 

Finally, consider the cognitive dissonance that MLK uses in separating the agents from the system and his sacred approach to justice, that it is rooted in “an unmoving mover.” Compare this to Fanon and Sartre’s secular approach.

 

MLK: The Power of Non-Violence

Week Two: Fanon, Algiers & Violence

We started the free-class with readings that focused on the conceptual issues we may have with academic inquiry. Using Fukuyama and Diamond as primary readings, we juxtaposed different renderings of history. For Fukuyama, history is evolutionary and progressive. With the rise and fall of empires, technological development and the exercise of new ideas, humanity learns and progresses. This rendering of history is entirely secular as causation can be reduced, defined and analyzed.

Diamond’s Primitivism offers a counter-point. A primitive history is entirely cyclical and is composed of sacred, eternal forces. Foreign intervention by colonists, introduction of technology or other “progressive” historical events aren’t valued in a way commensurate with Western thought. These “developments” are viewed as pragmatic and they have no role in “history” as such. This reading of history from a primitive perspective is fundamentally problematic for western notions of change and development.

For the next several weeks we will explore mechanisms for change and development, one of the most notable is violence. We will be reading an excerpt from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to the book as well as a chapter from Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa that describes the Battle for Algiers, a story that best exemplifies, and was heavily influenced by, Fanon’s writing.

As you will find in these readings, Fanon and Sartre are timeless and couldn’t be more relevant with the most recent revolution in North Africa. Here is an excerpt from Sartre:

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.

Meredith, The Fate of Africa; Ch. 3 “Land of the Setting Sun” (Pgs 45-57)

Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon, ” The Wretched of the Earth; “Concerning Violence”

Week One: Universalism & Primitivism

The refined goal of this Africa Free Class is to discuss Change and Development in an African context, mirroring a concurrent Honors Seminar on the same subject. We want to help refocus the lens in which class participants analyze concepts like freedom, equality and the rule of law, eventually we hope that we will begin to influence how each student looks at history. It is not so much the focus that we realize that opinions come out in the transcription of history, but that we are often unaware of our inability to learn about the how and why of supposedly “concrete” facts. We will begin with examining the ideologies of universalism and relativism in order to preface the class’ inquiry into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial literature and history.

In his 2008 Violence, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek examines notions of supposedly contradicting convictions and realities, “the coincidence of opposites”, articulating much of the these clashes as different forms of “violence.” He characterizes our common perceptions of violence—harm being inflicted by an agent upon another or a material thing—as “subjective violence”, while we overlook the “systemic violence” that is ubiquitous, a backdrop to defined conflicts. This systemic violence is, in fact, the status quo: the quotidian systems of capitalism, classism and regular inequalities that are taken as facts of life, none are especially noteworthy compared to the subjective violence of clear cause and effect.

“We live in a society where a kind of Hegelian speculative identity of opposites exists. Certain features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral non-ideological, natural, commonsensical. We designate as ideology that which stands out from this background: extreme religious zeal or dedication to a particular political orientation. The Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely the naturalization of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and most effective. This is the dialectical ‘coincidence of opposites’: the actualization of a notion or an ideology at its purest coincides with, or, more precisely, appears as its purest as its opposite, as the spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air we breathe.” –Zizek, pg. 36

The central dichotomy, or coincidence of opposites, is the supposed universalism of Western conceptions of human rights, social justice, rule of law and, above all, history. Fukuyama articulates an especially narcissistic example of the ethnocentrism of this notion of the Universal in his 1989 essay, “The End of History?” In it, Fukuyama characterizes history as an evolutionary process, in which the rise and fall of states, societies and their respective cultures, governments and ethical structures eventually culminate to an ideal: Western liberalism. Regardless of its accuracy, Fukuyama’s thesis teases out the biases that underlie Western intellectualism, ones that will especially hinder inquiry into African thought, literature and history.

This week, we will review Fukuyama’s “The End of History” (Section III optional) and seek to identify which aspects of it we personally regard as universal in nature versus aspects that may be relative or ethnocentric. We will also read Stanley Diamond’s “The Search for the Primitive” in an effort to juxtapose the two articles. Please keep Zizek’s point in mind with respect to the Universalism of Fukuyama and the Primitivism of Diamond.

Fukuyama: The End of History?

Diamond: The Search for the Primitive