Nwoke'm e jighi beke awa oji

Kilamanjaro! Just got back from an outing with mumsy. A friend of hers had a christening and party for her grandchild. I haven't been in a room with that many Nigerians in a long long time!

My mum's friend is an interesting lady. She's from a place in Nigeria called Arochukwu very close to my mother's own hometown, and the former capital of an old political alliance called the Aro Confederacy. My mother's people, my people, were part of this alliance and fought the British at the turn of the twentieth century.

My feelings on the British expedition into Igboland are captured beautifully by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart if you haven't read it yet, do so. It really is a wonderful piece of work. I was sympathetic to the protagonists' way of life, but Achebe would point out the ways in which change, at least from a contemporary perspective, improved the lot of the society's most vulnerable.

The Aro Confederacy achieved economic hegemony mainly via its control of the regional slave trade. So while I feel some kind of way about the British colonisation of Nigeria, I can't really say I'm sorry that the alliance is no more.

GSW

I woke up with a nasty headache this morning. I dreamed that I got shot in the head, right above my right eyebrow. It was quite funny not quite being able to comprehend why I still lived, blood, fluids and brain matter running down my face while I dialed 911 for the ambulance and worried about how I was going to cover the ridiculous cost of treating my injury.

The person who shot me was a young lady I knew from secondary school called Emily. My peers judged her because they considered it a bad thing for a girl to enjoy frequent sex, especially frequent sex with guys other than themselves. I went right ahead and judged her too.

I have no idea what she was doing in my head. This is the first time I've thought about her in ages. I remember very little of her. In fact the only memory I have of her is when she was being teased about having sex with me. We hadn't. Back then being linked to me in any way was just the worst thing that could happen to a girl. And they would do whatever it took to avoid the merest hint that they viewed me as anything but repulsive. 

I remember one time when one of my classmates, Khalil, was calling me ugly amongst other things, which I vociferously denied. In frustration he appealed to Angie, a relatively popular girl, to adjudicate: "which one of us is better looking, me or him?"

It was obvious that she found me more attractive, she looked into my eyes pleading for me to understand what she was about to do. The dictates of classroom hierarchy meant that her status was forfeit if she challenged the orthodoxy. She said Khalil was more attractive as if she were apologising for stealing from her mother's purse.

Poor Emily had the misfortune of arriving a little late at our home room at the same time as yours truly. Obviously we had been going at it hammer and tongs, because everybody knew that Emily likes to have sex. "How was his dick?", Ram asked her.

"Very. Very. Small."

It was only a matter of time...

I'm sure by now you've heard of Chatroulette. It's basically a site where you randomly video chat with strangers. If, like me, you are aware of all internet traditions, you'd know it goes without saying that that kind  of site just has to have plenty of men looking for some action. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to mess with them.

Behold!

Gotta say, I laughed. Is it harmless, or is does it reflect some kind of sexual shaming of young men?

How pathetic? This pathetic

Lately I've been playing a pretty old video game called Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic. Now I'm sure by now some of your alarm bells are going off. The words video game and Star Wars are in the same sentence, and not being used negatively. Stick around, it gets worse.

The plot is a classic fish out of water story. You are thrust into the game as a crew member of a ship under attack and end up having the fate of the galaxy on your shoulders. One of the main plot arcs is the development of the relationship between the main protagonist, you, and a Jedi called Bastila. Depending on how you play the game you can end up with a whole confession of love after the penultimate battle. At one point Bastila says something like, "I can't think of anything better than to be loved by you". And dephlogisticate a man if I wasn't all touched, and identifying with the characters*, and suddenly desiring to hold my ex in my arms and wanting to hear those words.

But I won't hear those words, and I'm finding it really hard to be ok with that. At least 100 percent of the time. The times that I'm not ok with it can be so damned unbearable I wish to tear my heart out, that I may not feel.


* The development of Jolee's character was very well done. All in all it's a pretty good game.

A New Beginning...

Or "Do Not Trust to Hope, It Has Forsaken These Lands."

Goodness gracious me! It's been hard to believe that I've been away from this place for a good five months. As I mentioned a little while ago, I've been struggling with thoughts that I really haven't anything to write that anyone would want to read, or would not be expressed with much more skill elsewhere. I also got it into my head that writing would distract me from the essential task of looking for a job. This blog was originally conceived of as a way of keeping people in the know about the interesting work I was doing in Japan, and it sort of evolved into a spot for some amateur political commentary, mixed in with some posts that revealed my nerd status.

I've been thinking lately that I need an outlet for my thoughts, forget worrying if they're serious enough. So I think that I'm going to excise the poor attempts at applying my professional training and get more personal. I have a new spot for the more politically oriented stuff, but I'm sure the two will occasionally overlap.

Now maybe I'm all energised and ready to post again because I'm in a kind of manic stage, where the loss and mourning and crisis feel distant and I am once again confident in my abilities to elicit woos and yays from the people I interact with. 

I'll hedge and say that my posting will be intermittent. I'm on a motivation rollercoaster these days.

For the longest time I just been way unmotivated to put my fingers to the keyboard to hammer out anything but a cover letter. And believe me, some days I don't feel very much like typing those either. So it is slightly amusing that I'm coming back to my spot now, because it could be argued that I'm actually in a worse place than I was in March.

In March I had a gig, a modest evaluation of some peacebuilding training, and I was in a relationship. I now have neither. The loss of the latter has been pretty hard to take. I wasn't able to find a long(er)-term job in the States and had to leave. Not knowing when we'd ever be able to be in proximity again, a break-up was pretty much inevitable. Trés くやしい.

Yep. Since my return to mumsy's place I've been pretty miserable and pathetic some days.

Anyway, whichever of my vanity projects you peruse (both would be nice), I hope you'll find the content interesting and meaningful.

Mandrake!

I always loved the soft hiss of "defenders" that followed the titular phrase.

But, I thought you loved your country

Liz Cheney's group, Keep America Safe,  has released an ad questioning the loyalty of US Justice Department lawyers who advocated for terrorism suspects detained by the Bush administration.

Never mind that in the U.S everyone is supposed to entitled to legal representation. Even people alleged to have commited acts of terrorism. That's right, alleged. A key principle of the US justice system is that the government presents evidence that demonstrates the guilt of the accused. The quality of that evidence must be tested, ergo the requirement for a good legal defense. It isn't about "sharing the values" of the accused, or condoning the crime for which your client has been accused, It's about the very integrity of the justice system.

Jaysis wept.

Conflict in the South Atlantic

Great Britain, Argentina, and the Falkland/Malvinas Islands: The saga continues.

Geological surveys have indicated a possible motherlode of oil in the vicinity of the Islands that could make Falklanders very rich indeed. Inevitably the The U.K awarded licenses for oil exploration, and the Argentine government are not happy bunnies.

It's a complex emotive issue. One that's has been unresolved since James Onslow evicted pre-Argentine settlers from the islands in the 1830's. The Argentines have been continuously frustrated in their attempts to negotiate a settlement, and it must kill the Kirchner administration -who apparently made recovery of the islands a part of their platform- that the British could be in for a bonanza, of what they must see as filthy lucre gained by robbing Argentina.

My feeling is that the Argentine government needs to feel that they're respected, and their interests treated as legitimate enough for discussion. Given the history of the dispute I'm more than a little sympathetic to this position. But in order to counter this kind of emotional appeal, the British are likely to impute Argentine calls for serious negotiations to the possible revenues involved. Unless the Argentine government is able to seriously disrupt surveying/extraction operations, I don't see the British government becoming more open to changing its policies any time soon.

Discussions in Black History Month: On being the "bigger person"

I was bullied from about my 4th year in primary school until my last year in secondary school. Mostly I was just ostracized, but there were times when it got physical. It got so bad at one point that I had to spend my lunch-hours in a classroom to prevent the fights from starting. 

Discussions in Black History Month: Do we need a Black Agenda?

A fellow named Tavis Smiley is looking to hold Obama and numerous other black elites' feet to the fire for not pushing for a black agenda. LINK

As far as responses go, I can't really do better than Ta-Nehisi Coates. He writes:

I don't know what a "black agenda" is. I can think of very few policies which I would say are good for black people, but aren't good for most of America. I think Tavis would agree. (His site says "a black agenda is an American agenda." But that only raises another question: why would we calling it (sic) a "black agenda?" Surely changing the way we approach incarceration would help black men, but were there no black men in this country, we still would do well to think about how we incarcerate people.

I'm at a loss to see what we gain by simplistically racializing problems that may well have a racial component, but aren't wholly, and in many cases even mainly, racial problems. To be clear that component should be called out. But it seems you implicitly alienate allies when you claim that broad problems are the property of specific communities.

Moreover, you do the work of your adversaries. Nothing would please them more than for America to think of incarceration as a "black problem" to be addressed by a "black agenda." People hear "black issue" and they feel relieved--"Oh well, it ain't my problem." Except that it is. And we should make them aware that it is.

Yes, it definitely strikes me as poor strategy. Similar to my point in this post you're more likely to achieve your policy goals if you align the interests of a broad coalition, or at the very least do not mobilise significant opposition.  Emotionally it can be a tough sell, for example my girl N said "Why do we have to be the bigger people?" "Why isn't it enough to just talk about American history and outline the legitimate reasons for policies that benefit black people? Why can't we point to past wrongs and say that we are working for policies of corrective justice?"

Again, I get it. Doing things like avoiding the word "welfare" is not a direct challenge to the prejudiced thinking that changes the meaning of "welfare" to something like "taking money from hard working whites and giving it to shiftless blacks". However I would argue that if the goal is policy that benefits ordinary black people, being mindful of the biases, fears and interests of potential opponents and acting accordingly is not weakness.