Post by Onyango Oloo on Apr 22, 2013 11:34:01 GMT 3
Jakaswanga:
Thanks for nourishing my mind with those morsels of cerebral wisdom, peppered with your customary witticisms and withering skewerings.
Since I feature somewhat in your narrative above, let me intervene thus:
Philosophically, I am trained in the dialectical and materialist school.
That often seeps into my style of writing.
If you take another reading of my digital essay, you may observe that part of the word play, a bit of my postulations, entreaties and proposals are dialectically conditional.
What do I mean?
Just one example:
When I invite Uhuru Muigai to declare independence from Kenyatta, I am, in effect, asking the leopard to change its spots.
Is it possible?
Let us talk about the cougar or the black panther.
Is a black panther a leopard with a different design or a completely different feline?
This is what Wikipedia tells us:
Panthera, the feline genus which contains lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars
Panther (in Africa and Asia), the leopard (Panthera pardus)
Panther (in North America), the cougar or mountain lion (Puma concolor)
Florida panther, a subspecies of cougar (Puma concolor coryi or Puma concolor couguar) found in southern Florida
Panther (in South and Central America), the jaguar (Panthera onca)
Black panther, a black variant of leopard, jaguar or cougar
White panther, a white or very pale variant of leopard, jaguar or cougar
So a panther IS a leopard, believe it or not!
Let us view the two cats:
Here is your panther:
And here is your leopard:
On a more serious note, when I am telling Uhuru to rebrand himself, I am also inspired by this famous exhortation from someone I consider to be Africa's foremost revolutionary ideologue,
Amilcar Cabral
Here is an excerpt from a monograph by Antero Benedito Da Silva, a scholar who studied Cabral's ideas, including his concept of "class suicide":
In 1959, Amilcar Cabral abandoned his job as an agronomist in Lisbon and returned to Guinea Bissau to fight for independence of his country, a fight which he saw as an act of culture. The first challenge and premise which he put forward was that the peasantry was not a revolutionary force in Guinea. In saying this, he differentiated between physical and political force, as the peasantry was actually a great force in Guinea. They were almost the whole population and produced the nation‘s wealth. However, because
there was no history of peasants‘ revolts, it was difficult to build support among the peasantry for the idea of national liberation (Chabal 2003.p.175).
Cabral‘s second premise was that some elements of the petite bourgeoisie were revolutionary. By petite bourgeoisie, he meant people working in the colonial state apparatus, the people Abilio Araujo called ‘the colonial elites’, that is, people who benefited from colonialism but were never fully integrated
into the colonial system. According to Cabral, these people were the colonial culture and the colonized culture, with no clear interests in carrying out a revolution. (Chilcote 1999.p.174-6). Acknowledging this weakness, Cabral wrote:
"But however high the degree of revolutionary consciousness of the sector of the petite bourgeoisie called to fulfill its historical function, it can not free itself from one objective : the petite bourgeoisie, as a service class (that is to say a class not directly involved in the process of production), does not possess the economic base to guarantee the taking over of power. In fact, history has shown that whatever the role—sometimes important—played by the individuals coming from the petite bourgeoisie in the process of a revolution, this class has possessed political control. And it could never possesses it, since political control (the state) is based on the economic capacity of ruling class, and in the conditions of colonial and neocolonial society this capacity is retained by two entities: imperialist capital and the native working class" (Chabal 2003:176).
The petite bourgeoisie, according to Cabral, was a new class created by foreign domination and indispensable to the operation of colonial exploitation. But the petite bourgeoisie could never integrate itself into the foreign minority in Guinea and remained prisoner of the cultural and social contradictions imposed on it by the colonial reality, which defines it as a marginal or marginalized class. But it is on them, the petite bourgeoisie, which the PAIGC revolution should rely (Chilcote 1999:80). Cabral delivered another speech in Havana in 1966, stating that:
"..the alternative -to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class -constitutes the dilemma of the petite bourgeoise in the general framework of the national liberation struggle…"
(cited Chabal 2003:179).
To carry out their historical function for national liberation, the petite bourgeoise needed to undergo a process of déclassé or class suicide, in order to organize and build alliances with the farmers to fight against colonialism and imperialism (Chilcote 1999:80).
Here is a link to the full article by Antero Benedito Da Silva:
tlstudies.org/pdfs/chp_45.pdf
Jakaswanga, what I am essentially asking Uhuru to do is to commit comprador class hara kiri.
Can he do it?
Is that a rhetorical question?
Not necessarily.
It has been done before.
But for it be done in the Kenya of 2013, it will mean that Uhuru has to be literally Born Again.
But NOT in the Christian way of course.
It has to be a REVOLUTIONARY rebirth.
Don't you think I am being RIDICULOUS?
Only to the extent that one DOES NOT take the The Harmonised-Jubilee Coalition Manifesto seriously.
My simple argument is that for Uhuru Kenyatta to lead the implementation of the Jubilee Manifesto, he must commit comprador class suicide, hence my call for him to Declare Independence from Kenyatta to give birth to Uhuru.
Are you following my weird, convoluted train of thought my brother?
We all know that
Fidel Castro is the greatest living revolutionary from the Americas.
How many people know that he had a father like Uhuru's father?
Now Fidel's dad was NOT the President.
But Angel Castro was a very large land owner, though of very humble peasant origins:
Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz (Láncara, Lugo Province, Spain, December 5, 1875—October 21, 1956) was the father of Cuban leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro.
Ángel Castro was born in Láncara, Galicia, in a small fieldstone house typical of the poor Galician peasants of that time. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he was recruited into the Spanish military, and came to Cuba during the second War of Independence. He was stationed in the tract of land between Júcaro and Morón. Juanita Castro, Ángel's daughter, has contradicted this claim to assert that their father was merely an economic migrant to Cuba.
Following the defeat of Spain, Ángel Castro returned to Spain in 1898, but returned to Cuba through the port of Havana the following year. He ended up in the Oriente province, working as a labourer for the American United Fruit Company. At this time, American plantations were spreading throughout Cuba, and workers were being hired to cut down the hardwood forests and plant sugar cane. Castro organized a group of men and hired them out to United Fruit to perform this type of labour. According to his son Fidel, Castro once had 300 men working for him. Castro prospered and was eventually able to buy and lease a total of 11,000 hectares of land which yielded pine wood, livestock, and sugar cane in the northern part of what was then Oriente province.
This is what Fidel Castro did when he took over power in Cuba in 1959, according to Wikipedia:
Appointing himself president of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria - INRA), on 17 May 1959, Castro signed into law the First Agrarian Reform, limiting landholdings to 993 acres (4.02 km2) per owner and forbidding further foreign land-ownership. Large land-holdings were broken up and redistributed; an estimated 200,000 peasants received title deeds. To Castro, this was an important step, breaking the control of the landowning class over Cuba’s agriculture; popular among the working class, it alienated many middle-class supporters. Castro appointed himself president of the National Tourist Industry, introducing unsuccessful measures to encourage African-American tourists to visit, advertising it as a tropical paradise free of racial discrimination. Changes to state wages were implemented; judges and politicians had their pay reduced while low-level civil servants saw theirs raised. In March 1959, Castro ordered rents for those who paid less than $100 a month halved, with measures implemented to increase the Cuban people’s purchasing powers; productivity decreased and the country’s financial reserves were drained within two years.
Since you, Jakasawanga, know that Onyango Oloo KNOWS that Uhuru Muigai is no Castro, you can then do a third or fourth reading of my digital essay cutting the fourth Kenyan President some slack and see if there are any nuances, any additional layers to my entreaties to Uhuru to rebrand.
Thanks for nourishing my mind with those morsels of cerebral wisdom, peppered with your customary witticisms and withering skewerings.
Since I feature somewhat in your narrative above, let me intervene thus:
Philosophically, I am trained in the dialectical and materialist school.
That often seeps into my style of writing.
If you take another reading of my digital essay, you may observe that part of the word play, a bit of my postulations, entreaties and proposals are dialectically conditional.
What do I mean?
Just one example:
When I invite Uhuru Muigai to declare independence from Kenyatta, I am, in effect, asking the leopard to change its spots.
Is it possible?
Let us talk about the cougar or the black panther.
Is a black panther a leopard with a different design or a completely different feline?
This is what Wikipedia tells us:
Panthera, the feline genus which contains lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars
Panther (in Africa and Asia), the leopard (Panthera pardus)
Panther (in North America), the cougar or mountain lion (Puma concolor)
Florida panther, a subspecies of cougar (Puma concolor coryi or Puma concolor couguar) found in southern Florida
Panther (in South and Central America), the jaguar (Panthera onca)
Black panther, a black variant of leopard, jaguar or cougar
White panther, a white or very pale variant of leopard, jaguar or cougar
So a panther IS a leopard, believe it or not!
Let us view the two cats:
Here is your panther:
And here is your leopard:
On a more serious note, when I am telling Uhuru to rebrand himself, I am also inspired by this famous exhortation from someone I consider to be Africa's foremost revolutionary ideologue,
Amilcar Cabral
Here is an excerpt from a monograph by Antero Benedito Da Silva, a scholar who studied Cabral's ideas, including his concept of "class suicide":
In 1959, Amilcar Cabral abandoned his job as an agronomist in Lisbon and returned to Guinea Bissau to fight for independence of his country, a fight which he saw as an act of culture. The first challenge and premise which he put forward was that the peasantry was not a revolutionary force in Guinea. In saying this, he differentiated between physical and political force, as the peasantry was actually a great force in Guinea. They were almost the whole population and produced the nation‘s wealth. However, because
there was no history of peasants‘ revolts, it was difficult to build support among the peasantry for the idea of national liberation (Chabal 2003.p.175).
Cabral‘s second premise was that some elements of the petite bourgeoisie were revolutionary. By petite bourgeoisie, he meant people working in the colonial state apparatus, the people Abilio Araujo called ‘the colonial elites’, that is, people who benefited from colonialism but were never fully integrated
into the colonial system. According to Cabral, these people were the colonial culture and the colonized culture, with no clear interests in carrying out a revolution. (Chilcote 1999.p.174-6). Acknowledging this weakness, Cabral wrote:
"But however high the degree of revolutionary consciousness of the sector of the petite bourgeoisie called to fulfill its historical function, it can not free itself from one objective : the petite bourgeoisie, as a service class (that is to say a class not directly involved in the process of production), does not possess the economic base to guarantee the taking over of power. In fact, history has shown that whatever the role—sometimes important—played by the individuals coming from the petite bourgeoisie in the process of a revolution, this class has possessed political control. And it could never possesses it, since political control (the state) is based on the economic capacity of ruling class, and in the conditions of colonial and neocolonial society this capacity is retained by two entities: imperialist capital and the native working class" (Chabal 2003:176).
The petite bourgeoisie, according to Cabral, was a new class created by foreign domination and indispensable to the operation of colonial exploitation. But the petite bourgeoisie could never integrate itself into the foreign minority in Guinea and remained prisoner of the cultural and social contradictions imposed on it by the colonial reality, which defines it as a marginal or marginalized class. But it is on them, the petite bourgeoisie, which the PAIGC revolution should rely (Chilcote 1999:80). Cabral delivered another speech in Havana in 1966, stating that:
"..the alternative -to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class -constitutes the dilemma of the petite bourgeoise in the general framework of the national liberation struggle…"
(cited Chabal 2003:179).
To carry out their historical function for national liberation, the petite bourgeoise needed to undergo a process of déclassé or class suicide, in order to organize and build alliances with the farmers to fight against colonialism and imperialism (Chilcote 1999:80).
Here is a link to the full article by Antero Benedito Da Silva:
tlstudies.org/pdfs/chp_45.pdf
Jakaswanga, what I am essentially asking Uhuru to do is to commit comprador class hara kiri.
Can he do it?
Is that a rhetorical question?
Not necessarily.
It has been done before.
But for it be done in the Kenya of 2013, it will mean that Uhuru has to be literally Born Again.
But NOT in the Christian way of course.
It has to be a REVOLUTIONARY rebirth.
Don't you think I am being RIDICULOUS?
Only to the extent that one DOES NOT take the The Harmonised-Jubilee Coalition Manifesto seriously.
My simple argument is that for Uhuru Kenyatta to lead the implementation of the Jubilee Manifesto, he must commit comprador class suicide, hence my call for him to Declare Independence from Kenyatta to give birth to Uhuru.
Are you following my weird, convoluted train of thought my brother?
We all know that
Fidel Castro is the greatest living revolutionary from the Americas.
How many people know that he had a father like Uhuru's father?
Now Fidel's dad was NOT the President.
But Angel Castro was a very large land owner, though of very humble peasant origins:
Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz (Láncara, Lugo Province, Spain, December 5, 1875—October 21, 1956) was the father of Cuban leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro.
Ángel Castro was born in Láncara, Galicia, in a small fieldstone house typical of the poor Galician peasants of that time. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he was recruited into the Spanish military, and came to Cuba during the second War of Independence. He was stationed in the tract of land between Júcaro and Morón. Juanita Castro, Ángel's daughter, has contradicted this claim to assert that their father was merely an economic migrant to Cuba.
Following the defeat of Spain, Ángel Castro returned to Spain in 1898, but returned to Cuba through the port of Havana the following year. He ended up in the Oriente province, working as a labourer for the American United Fruit Company. At this time, American plantations were spreading throughout Cuba, and workers were being hired to cut down the hardwood forests and plant sugar cane. Castro organized a group of men and hired them out to United Fruit to perform this type of labour. According to his son Fidel, Castro once had 300 men working for him. Castro prospered and was eventually able to buy and lease a total of 11,000 hectares of land which yielded pine wood, livestock, and sugar cane in the northern part of what was then Oriente province.
This is what Fidel Castro did when he took over power in Cuba in 1959, according to Wikipedia:
Appointing himself president of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria - INRA), on 17 May 1959, Castro signed into law the First Agrarian Reform, limiting landholdings to 993 acres (4.02 km2) per owner and forbidding further foreign land-ownership. Large land-holdings were broken up and redistributed; an estimated 200,000 peasants received title deeds. To Castro, this was an important step, breaking the control of the landowning class over Cuba’s agriculture; popular among the working class, it alienated many middle-class supporters. Castro appointed himself president of the National Tourist Industry, introducing unsuccessful measures to encourage African-American tourists to visit, advertising it as a tropical paradise free of racial discrimination. Changes to state wages were implemented; judges and politicians had their pay reduced while low-level civil servants saw theirs raised. In March 1959, Castro ordered rents for those who paid less than $100 a month halved, with measures implemented to increase the Cuban people’s purchasing powers; productivity decreased and the country’s financial reserves were drained within two years.
Since you, Jakasawanga, know that Onyango Oloo KNOWS that Uhuru Muigai is no Castro, you can then do a third or fourth reading of my digital essay cutting the fourth Kenyan President some slack and see if there are any nuances, any additional layers to my entreaties to Uhuru to rebrand.