Afrocentric Culture Versus Scientific Culture
 
Date: March 18, 2013
To: Professor Molefe Asante
From: Ozodi Osuji, PhD
Subject:  Afrocentric culture versus Scientific Culture
 
With the below synopsis of what I mean by scientific culture I conclude my initiated communication with you. I deliberately decided to communicate with you because I identified you as one of the chief proponents of the Afrocentric movement. That movement, I believe was useful in the 1960s and 1970s when black folks were trying to define themselves on their own terms and extricate their identity from how white men defined them. However, the world has moved on. Now, what pays dividends in the real world is training people in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology and their applied forms in technology. I believe that it is only a people who are at the forefront of science and technology that will dominate the world of the future. Talking about our people’s glorious past when if you go to any American first rate university, departments of science you seldom see black students are not going to help us. Boning up on African and African American culture is not going to improve our lives one bit. What we need are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of this world and, of course, the pure scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Tyco Brahe, Kepler, Thomas Young, Dalton, Boyle, Lavoisier, Laplace, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J.J. Thomson, Becquerel, Roentgen, Mendel, Pasteur, Maria and Pierre Curie, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Broglie, Max Born, Eddington, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Alexander Friedman, Lemaitre, Hubble,  James Chadwick, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Alexander Fleming, James Watson, Francis Crick, Hugh Everett, John Bell, Alan Aspect, Alan Gutt, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, Witten, De Witt and the other lords of the physical sciences (I have written short biographies of those and what they accomplished…please notice the absence of African names among these geniuses). The black race no longer need mere talkers and militants, such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela (somewhere I reviewed books on them); it is about time that we joined the world of science and technology. We have what it takes to make it in science and technology and should stop wasting our young people’s time by filling their impressionable minds with unproductive ideas on race and culture.  With this feedback I end my feedback to you. I leave it to you to make of the feedback what you want to, to feel like I did not validate your 75 books and feel angry at me or to see a breath of fresh air in the black firmament and encourage it or discourage it( what else is new, black folks are known for being destructive of their creative souls; for what it is worth, I have written 45 books and continuing). One must deal with facts and not live in the past; nostalgia is not realism. Cheers, Ozodi Osuji, PhD (UCLA)
 
Abstract:
 
The thesis of this paper is that the philosophy of multiculturalism foisted on society by liberal anthropologists is misguided. That philosophy presupposes that all cultures are at the same level and, as such, should be propagated. The paper disagrees with that view. The society that discovered much of modern science is more advanced than the society that still sees the sun as a god and worships it.  It is humiliating for one group’s culture to be presented as better than other groups’ cultures. The author is not saying that one culture is better than others. He is talking about what he calls the scientific culture. The scientific culture does not belong to any specific group although Western Europeans approximate it more than other groups of human beings. In his view, all human beings ought to be encouraged to embrace the scientific methodological approach to living and jettison their group’s ways of approaching phenomena if those are not in sync with the parameters of science. Moreover, identification with particularistic cultures makes for separation of people into ethnic enclaves and foster social divisions and conflicts; a universal scientific culture makes for the union of all people hence peace in the world.
 
REPLACEMENT OF MULTICULTURALISM WITH SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
Ozodi Osuji
 
       Teaching one specific culture as ideal insults those whose cultures are not taught; for example, teaching Eurocentric culture in America makes black folks feel like their cultures are ignored; they feel that their world view is not affirmed and they feel angry.
        The USA was originally founded by Englishmen. Those Englishmen forced all the other Europeans (Germans, Frenchmen, etc.) and, of course, African slaves who came to the USA to learn English and essentially embrace the Americanized English culture that is the lay of the land.
       Whereas this behavior seems cruel it is actually what made for the cultural cohesion of the USA, such as it is. If each ethnic group that came to the USA had been allowed to live in accord with its culture the USA would not be a country but congeries of ethnic enclaves, perhaps as in the Balkans, each fighting others and there would be no peace in the land. The enforced modified English culture on the people of the USA is thus a good thing for it unified the disparate persons and their cultures!
         If we teach a universal culture based on scientific parameters no one group’s values are foisted on others and no group would feel denigrated and angry. All children and people would be gradually socialized to this universal scientific culture.
       At present the movement to teach Americans from different ethnic backgrounds to identify with their ethnic cultures gives them particularistic mode of looking at the world, which leads to separatism and eventual ethnic conflicts in America, as in the Balkans.
        In the past English men propagated their culture at the expense of other group’s cultures hence made them angry but that is not what we are talking about here; we are not talking about English or European or African or Asian culture but a universal culture based on science, on what is known to be self-evidently true.
        That been said, it is still necessary to make English the universal language of all Americans; the current trend of allowing Spanish speakers and speakers of other languages to retain their language while calling themselves Americans is not only misguided but dangerous; it would, sooner or later, lead to ethnic wars in the USA.
         If you do not want to speak English then do not come to the USA, stay in the country where your language is spoken; it is as simple as that!
       It is really an aggressive behavior to come to the USA and retain ones language and ask Americans to learn one’s language and speak to one in that language, as we now have to do to Spanish speakers in California and elsewhere where the Latin population is increasing. The Aggressive Latinos want to convert us to their culture, a culture not known for its contribution to modern science and technology! Take a look at any textbook on physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, the core sciences and you would not encounter Spanish contributors to them! These people want to return us to their culture, a culture that essentially is at a more primitive stage of scientific evolution!
      One should not talk about how one’s culture did something  good in the past (the Spaniards, for example, were at the forefront of European civilization when America was discovered in the late 1400s but now are at its bottom); instead, one should talk about how to do something rationally and scientifically.
      One should talk about the empirically demonstrable best way of doing something instead of harp on how ones culture did something in the past. There is no evidence that people in the past knew how to do anything better than people in the present do!
       There is a loving way to raise children so that they turn out well adapted and well-functioning adults and there is a toxic way to raise children so that they turn out poorly adjusted to coping with the exigencies of living.
        We must have evidence based way of how best to do anything and not merely indulge in nostalgic yearnings for the past or talk about how beautiful the past supposedly was.
        In pre-British India, for example, Hindus burned life widows to death with their dead husbands in their funeral pyres; surely, no one wants to go back to that type of behavior. 
       As we speak, in Muslim countries female children are prevented from going to school and working; surely, no one thinks that is the right way to live.
        We cannot celebrate primitive behavior just because they are part of our inherited cultures.
 
ON SCIENCE
 
          In science you observe phenomena and verify what you observe and set up a method following which any person who so chooses can verify your observations. Science deals with empirical facts. 
       Science is predicated on the notion that the world came into being by accident and proceeds on accidental events.
       Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, do not deal with facts; they deal with how people find meaning in life.  Religion assumes that there is a higher power, God, in the universe. We cannot verify the existence of God.
      Science is a methodological approach to phenomena; science is not an end but a method; it is a way of looking at the universe so that what is seen is there (as confirmed by other observers). In science the individual  does not just spout his opinion on phenomena; instead, he observes it, sees it as he thinks that it is, and tries to make sure that his perception is correct. He posits a method for verifying what he saw so that whoever else wants to verify his conclusion can do so.
       Generally, observation and experimentation are the most reliable means of verifying a proposition.  Ideas must be verifiable and falsifiable (Karl Popper says) for them to be scientific.
       A scientific idea is not permanent truth; it is truth that has not been falsified by other observers yet. As long as most observers can verify an idea it is accepted as a workable truth subject to when it is falsified, in which case it is discarded.
        Ideas that cannot be falsified, such as the existence of God are not  scientific ideas; such ideas fall into the realm of belief and authority; you believe that there is God based on  authority, on what some religious authorities on the religion that you accept say about him but not because you have by yourself verified that there is God.
      In our age the scientific method is the accepted epistemology, the accepted way of ascertaining what is true and what is false.
 
REPLACEMENT OF FOOLISHNESS WITH OTHER FOOLISHNESS
 
          Sooner or later, African Americans and Africans discover that the Christianity that was shoved down their throats is not their people’s religion. Christianity was formed by Jews as a sect of Judaism.  Jesus Christ and Paul, the two founders of Christianity were Jews.
       Jesus, indeed, made it crystal clear that his religion is for his fellow Jews; he had nothing to do with non-Jews, gentiles. It was the idealistic hence universalizing Paul that reinterpreted Christianity to say that it is for all people, Jews and non-Jews.
         Judaism is for Jews. Christianity is a Jewish cult. Islam is for Arabs.  The philosophy carried by those three religions is Semitic and there is no two ways of going about it. 
       Europeans appear to have reinterpreted the teachings of Christianity to serve their society’s needs hence made it no longer the religion of Jews loving Jews that Jesus taught but a religion of war and punishment for those who disobey the rulers of Europe (the rulers of Europe claimed to rule by divine right; they saw themselves as the temporal Stewarts of God and as such their will represented God’s will and must be obeyed as people believed that they must obey God’s will).
        When African persons discover that these three religions represent the world view of those who oppressed Africans (Arabs enslaved Africans, Europeans who call themselves Christians enslaved Africans) their immediate urge is to throw all three religions away. Foreign religions, they believe are not for nationalist Africans.
         Unfortunately, many Africans and African Americans having discarded the religion of their oppressors believe that the solution is to replace those religions with what they call African religions.
         In their confusion as to who is African they look to ancient Egypt as African. Thus, some of these confused souls talk about what they call Kemet religion, the supposed religion of ancient Egypt and embrace it.
        Were ancient Egyptians Africans? How did they see themselves? They did not call themselves black, nor did they call themselves white. They portrayed themselves in pictures as brown people. Therefore, they are Semitic people, of the same group as Arabs and Jews (at any rate ancient Egyptians are still found in extant Egypt; they are not black; they are brown in color, pretty close to the Arab, Jewish color).  Kemet religion is a Semitic religion.    
        Aside from the fact that ancient Egyptians and their religion were Semitic there is the problem of religion in general. If Africans and African Americans were to go to West Africa where African Americans came from and embraced West African religions yet that would not be doing the rational thing.
        All religion is mythopoeic approach to phenomena. All religions, African, Jewish, Arabs, Asians, Hindu, and European were formed when mankind was not scientific in its approach to phenomena hence are irrational world views. Therefore, instead of returning to African or Egyptian religions, Africans should seek rational explanation of phenomena. 
       Africans should seek science based metaphysics and in general embrace what I call scientific culture, a culture that is neither European, nor African or any other peoples, a culture based on what Thomas Kuhn called the scientific paradigm, not as foreigners tell them that science is.
        Science does not belong to Europeans, it is a universal methodology and one does not have to wait for a European to tell one what science is; one can ascertain what science is and what it is not.
        I am not asking Africans to wait for Europeans to define what makes sense to them; they do not have to fit their views into European constructed reality or anyone else’s constructed reality (reality is unknown to us and whatever we believe that it is, is a social and or individual construct).
        Reality is not any one particular individual or group’s construction of it.  Reality is what it is and it is for each of us to work to figure out what it is through the scientific method.
        The individual should fit his self into the impersonal constructs of science but not to any one’s image of science.   The individual should accept what is self-evidently true without trying to do what mad men do: try to fit reality into their preconception of what it should be.
 
FROM CULTURAL RELATIVISM TO SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
        A patronizing behavior of white liberals towards Africans is to tell Africans that all cultures are equal. I am talking about the nonsense of cultural relativism propagated by white culture anthropologists, a nonsense swallowed by Africans hence you find Africans misbehaving and telling us that what they do is rooted in their culture and that their culture is as good as other cultures thus justifying their criminal behaviors with their so-called culture.
      African men philander, have numerous concubines and convert their political and bureaucratic offices to personal use; they give jobs to their people, not on the basis of merit but corruption. They tell us that in their culture they are required to help their people. The problem is that giving your people who are unqualified jobs means that they cannot do those jobs well hence retards the progress of Africa.
     The liberal teaching that all cultures are the same is so much load of rubbish. Some cultures are more advanced than others. There is such a thing as unscientific (primitive) culture and a scientific culture.  Africa was unscientific (primitive) in many aspects of its cultural ways.
      In scientific culture behavior is based on the findings of science.  Scientific culture is universal culture, not the particularistic cultures associated with given ethnic groups. 
       The egos of third people have been stroked long enough when they are told that their cultures are as good as the culture of physical scientists; it is now time we told them that only those who look at the world from a scientific frame of reference are civilized; at any rate, it is such people that produce advanced technologies and the products that modern technologies give to the world, such as Internet, computers, wireless telephones, television, microwave oven, cars, planes, trains, refrigerators, air conditioners and so on.
      African cultures contributed zilch to science and technology and if so how are they as good as the culture that gave us Special and General Relativity and Quantum Physics and the electronic revolution?
 
DISCUSSION
 
           It is true that Africans were told by white men that they are primitive and that their cultures are no good. Naturally, no one wants to be told that he is primitive and that his people’s ways of living is no good. Therefore, Africans try to present their people’s cultures in a positive light. 
        Thus, many African nationalists celebrate Africa and its cultures. Such Africans embrace everything African. If challenged they quickly tell one what is wrong with European and North American cultures.
      Obviously, Europeans and Americans have a lot of issues and no one is saying that they are ideal. Consider marriage. African societies allowed polygamy. The Christian West permits only monogamy. But they permit people to divorce and remarry. Thus, what ends up happening is that men have serial marriages, sometimes up to seven marriages. That is to say that they have done what the African did, have many wives.
       Thus, the African asks: why not be honest over sex:  the typical man wants to have sexual activity with more than one woman so why not go ahead and allow men to have, say, seven wives, why decry African men for having polygamy if white folks are essentially doing the same thing?  The African nationalist believes that his people are more realistic on this score and does not want hypocritical Westerners preaching to him how to live a life he himself does not live.
       The point is that the African nationalist does not see anything wrong with past Africa and resents those who talk about what is wrong with Africa.
        I understand the stance of the African nationalist. Be that as it may, there are real problematic issues in Africa.
        I am not seeking to replace African culture with European culture. I am interested in what I call scientific culture. I believe that following the scientific method we can figure out the right ways to live and live so and do so all over the world. For example, we all agree that it is wrong to kill and to steal; we can pass laws that state that and we all live accordingly.
        One is not saying that we should not study ethnic groups; we must by all means study all human groups and understand their cultures. Understanding their diverse cultures helps us to understand our own culture; cross cultural studies helps us put our culture in broad perspective and understand it relative to other cultures. 
         We can learn a lot from the way other folks do things. This does not, however, mean that we should have the delusion that all cultures are equal and the same.
        Some cultures are more advanced than others. A culture that figured out quantum mechanics is more advanced than a culture that has no idea what is meant by atoms; a culture that figured out that diseases are caused by germs is more advanced than a culture that thinks that diseases are caused by nonexistent gods (hence its people die from treatable diseases). 
        Nor is one making the assumption that Western cultures are better than African cultures. Whereas there are many useful aspects of Western cultures obviously there are awful aspects of those cultures.  Parts of American culture, for example, is as primitive as it gets and no one would consider them more civilized than many aspects of Africa’s culture.
       Nevertheless, America has pockets of scientific cultural civilization, such as at Boston, Berkeley and Westwood (California) etc.
      One is not equating the entirety of the West with scientific culture; in fact, most of the West is as unscientific as Africa is; scientific culture obtains only in small enclaves in the West, the Enclaves that give the West its science and technology.
 
CONCLUSION
 
         Multi ethnic countries like Nigeria will always live in conflict and political instability as each ethnic group strives to gain at the expense of others.  What needs to be done is to impose one language on all the constituting ethnic groups to unify them (English will do) and impose one scientific culture on all the groups to give them a rational manner of relating to their world.
          All these, of course, would not give multiethnic societies perfect unity, for the world is a place of individuation, separation, specialness and mutual attack; that conflict can be reduced but not eliminated.
        One is not a naïve political idealist who thinks that perfect peace is possible on earth; as long as people live in bodies and have egos they would seek different interests and will perceive reality differently and thus have conflicts; it is not possible to attain perfection as long as people live in flesh. Perfection, whatever it is, can only be attained in a non-physical state, in the world of spirits where folks are not limited by the exigencies of matter, energy, space and time (those limit what we living in bodies can do).
        Political realism accepts imperfect human beings and their imperfect political behavior and accepts the inevitability of social conflict and prepares to deal with it with draconian governments that posited laws and used those to protect law abiding persons and punish lawbreakers.
          Ethnic groups, like individuals see differences between them; some groups have the delusion that they are better than others (hence gratify their egos neurotic wish for superiority); these behaviors generate conflict and thus human beings are condemned to living in social conflict.
       Finding a common scientific culture that gives most people a path to living their lives rationally reduces inherent social conflicts but does not eliminate them. The earth is not going to be heaven but it can approximate it.
        Science enables us to approximate perfection more than any other instrument that I know of.
 
Ozodi Osuji
March 18, 2013
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A RASTA PLAY

(written and illustrated by Ras Jahaziel August 2010) www.rastafarivisions.com

AND THE MASSACRE IN
TIVOLI GARDENS JAMAICA
MAY 2010

PRELUDE: WHAT THE NEWS MEDIA SAID:

"Seventy-three civilians and one soldier died in last week's push into Tivoli."
Jamaica Gleaner

“Over 73 civilians Killed, 500 Jamaicans injured"
"Mounting casualties from the massive offensive by the security forces on Tivoli Gardens have put morgues on the brink of overflowing." The Gleaner

" The media reports are not telling the full story of what is actually taking place in Jamaica, they fail to address the governments involvement in the crisis and the underlining historical context”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freestylee/4636672885/

BEHIND THE SCENES
The truth that the University is not saying, the Church is not saying, the official News is not saying, and the other second-hand Mouth-pieces are not saying:

An Inter-faith Dialogue between Snow-white The Money God and The Three Dragons

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Gentlemen, welcome to this our fourth-hundred annual inter-faith dialogue where we exchange ideas for the better management of our slave-holdings in the modern colonies. Now please relax and take off your masks. Those do-gooder masks are only for the outside when we have to put on a public show. But here, if you want to say "Nigger" you can say "Nigger."

HA HA HA HA HA

CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP.

This is the forum where we can be ourselves and speak our minds without worrying about political correctness. We do not have to go around corners and pretend that PROFIT is not the only thing that matters. Every-one in here knows that the advancement of our empire has often called for ruthless action against inferior peoples. Often times it has involved moving populations from areas that we desire. Sometimes the methods may be bloody and involve lost of life amongst the inferior peoples, but everyone of you know the ropes, so to speak. So please speak your mind without worry. The press is not here. This is the place where we can discuss the dirty details that would shock the larger public outside.

Now the first thing I would like to do is to express my concerns about the stability of our modern plantation system in the Caribbean and the volatility of our Negro labor force in light of recent events.

I am sure that we all agree the image of "Paradise" must be maintained at all costs. For close to four centuries we have reaped billions of dollars in profit from the sweat of Black labor in the hot climes of these islands, and what has made our businesses so profitable is that up to this day Black labor has been for the most part free or very cheap. But now our old sugar plantations that required us to maintain thousands of slaves have been phased out, and Tourism has now become our new sugar plantation. Not only do we need fewer Negroes, but unlike in the days of sugar cane it is important to project an idyllic paradise image despite the glaring wide-spread poverty of the locals.

(The nagging truth keeps asking:Why do some people have all the luxury and some people have all the tears? Paradise and Hell all in the same place? Who keeps this system running from generation to generation? The Army, The Police, The politicians, and The Church?)

But we have a problem looming on the horizon: As a result of our recent economic adjustments the weight on the poor has been increased significantly, to the extent that they are nearing breaking-point. If we do not act preemptively and take drastic measures they are likely to rebel and spoil our paradise image. We need to crush rebellion long before it happens.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection: Pardon me for saying so, but I think your fears may be a little bit exaggerated because as you know, we have always used our police and army as a barrier of terror to protect our slave-holding properties. They have been trained to be very brutal and ruthless, and as a result of their consistent terrorism most of the slave population fears them. I don’t think we have anything to worry about, but if it would make you feel better we can increase the terror.

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Well make sure the media publishes a good excuse for doing so before giving the police the go-ahead. But no matter what it takes we must maintain the flow of profit from our human and material possessions on these islands. Even though these economic measures will affect the lives of the poor fairly harshly, such measures are necessary to maintain THE PROFIT FLOW.

But keeping the plantation from burning has always been a balancing act. On the one hand, too much hardship may cause spontaneous rebellion, and on the other hand the extra hardship that the Niggers feel also makes them desperate for money. In that state of mind it is easier to control and manipulate them, and it is never difficult to find spies and informers. Another very important advantage in keeping the Negroes in a desperate economic state was demonstrated just recently in Tivoli Gardens. If you did not understand the power of our economic grip on the Negroes you would have been surprised by the zeal that was exhibited by our police and soldiers as they went about maiming and killing other Niggers that look just like themselves.

With our power to decide who eats and who starves it was easy to enlist dozens of paid killers.

So despite all of the idealistic calls for equal rights and justice, we know from long experience that we have to keep the economic lid on the Negroes. It is a form of control that we have always used, and in any case it has never been wise to let the Nigger get too far. We just need to be prepared at all times for any eventuality.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection:  Well, in light of your concern about the possibility of these economic measures causing dire social consequences, let me assure you that we have already equipped our FORCES with the appropriate training and practice in the event of an uprising.

TO READ FULL ARTICLE SEE http://www.rastafarivisions.com/jamaicamassacre.html
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Author: David Baronov. Publisher: Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Pages 248 

For a start, African focused biomedicine and how it originated, particularly in Ghana and Nigeria is fascinating to trace; more importantly how African medicine is transforming western biomedicine is something we need to follow in the cultural context of medical globalization. Dr. David Baronov's book brings out the colonial, historical, and cultural insight, including how tropical biomedicine was invented in Western Africa, and tested for success in Ghana, during the Ashanti colonial war to enter the interior of Africa. African pundit mosquitoes served as biological weapons of mass graves resulting to the inevitable scientific breakthrough of the time to tame malaria. This book is vigorously crafted and laid out. It stands out as a go for me.

I just picked up this book The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange written by David Baronov (2008) with a view to doing some pleasure reading much like I commonly surf the internet. But this book turned out to be different to me. It held me up reading and thinking with the narratives until I finished it. I am just happy to have read the work and gained some deep critical and historical grounded insights from the ontological arguments. A book of 248 pages, the author David Baronov sets out to show that African Medicine like the Western Medicine is a cultural system steeped in different missionary and colonial platforms of conception and development.

          The book argues that African medicine and cultures served as a transformational conflict and agenda to biomedicine on the one hand, and on the other hand, biomedicine equally rendered the African medical system to face inevitable opportunity and analysis in formulating research and focused need on the development scale. The writer declares that it is important to understand the historical grounds of the colonial expansionist urges that placed the African and Western biomedicines on that pedestal for each other. In other words, African Medicine is a prodding and a provoking area of interest and more so in this age of global medical pluralism and western domination of the biomedical sphere.

          Not outlined or discerned in the book is the many Pentecostalistic rocket attack launches against anything indigenous when it comes to addressing ways of knowing and healing  – namely spiritual and oracular, magic and sorcery, divination, supernatural and naturalist fields of disease attributions, including forms of remedial approaches. Except the scathing Christian Missionary activities at the time of colonial incursions on African beliefs and values, I seem to have seen little drawn to show a glimpse to capture the Pentecostalist challenges to indigenous knowledge and its impact on the ongoing shared medical systems in the global scene. By Pentecostalism, I mean the Neo-Christian or born-again radicalism that protests against using cultural resources such as spirits and oracles as a source of meaning.

          The author highlights that at the beginning of colonialism and following the course of intercultural exchange, Western biomedicine went out when it was compelled to save lives and expand the frontiers of Europe. In the circumstances that prevailed, medical initiatives resulting from African focused needs radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. But while it was doing so to protect Europeans in Africa, Africa became engaged in using Western biomedicine and in turn, transformed the Western biomedicine in itself. The typical intercultural dynamics that flowed has enhanced the mercantilist or capitalist focus of the western medical pragmatism. Basically, the book is arguing that the African transformation of Western Medicine and the dynamics of global cultural exchange – posits the fact that contemporary African medical systems are in no way less "biomedical" than Western medicine. In fact, both "greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange."

          I found several themes within the chapters of the book fascinating such as the origins of African biomedicine, the emergence of tropical medicine and African medical campaigns, including African biomedicine as being a stream of ontology – that is, (a) as a whole medical sphere; and (b) as a consequence of Africa's incorporation into the capitalist world system.

          I enjoyed the systematic analysis brought to bear on this theme; the ontological whole, which is, moreover, outlined as a sum total of saying that African medical pluralism has become a global biomedicine that is currently inseparable from the life history of the capitalist world system. What that indicates, in the view of the author, is that African biomedicine has become enjoined in a web of interdependent and mutually conditioning relationships. Therefore, it will be an error to see or frame African medical pluralistic conjoining as if it is a single stream of knowledge. It is not. Rather, we make effort to analyze and portray African biomedicine as both an ontological whole and a multi-faceted singular historical cultural conjecture. In other words, the African biomedicine is a multilayered form of incorporated or borrowed cultural formation. That is also arguably true when we analyze and connect the dots by which African biomedicine is the source as well as a function, like the western biomedical sphere, of a healing enterprise. In addition, African biomedicine is central to symbolic-cultural expression as much as it is equally an expression of social power.

          All of this, the author notes systematically defends the argument that African medical context is relational and expansive, revivifying and re-inventing itself in the global biomedical capitalist sphere, sometimes proving it can be on the extreme spirituality, as it may seem, whereby the ontological atomism marks the western view of biomedicine – the pick-up basis of which forms the capitalistic analytical view of health and medical practice in a condensable structured relationship.          

          On the specifics of what led to the origins of African biomedicine, the author focuses on the features that heralded it in the first place. However, in his 1994 article captioned "On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems" by Robert Pool published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, it is shown that between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa were criticized for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation and neglecting natural causation and practical medical behaviour. Warren in 1974 also criticized the field by taking note that Africans traditionally recognised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness primarily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delineate discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causation and practical activity in the view of Robert Pool?

          African biomedicine, as contended by David Baronov along with the coming of the Europeans to Africa is a benevolent gift. The purpose of which is to improve the health of Africans. Biomedicine has therefore been credited with indirectly "civilizing" the African mind and spirituality by introducing modern scientific principles to supplant African superstition and rational therapeutic poverty and witchcraft. Although biomedicine is foreign to Africa and is portrayed as western on the one side, and on the other angle, it claims to embody principles that are applicable to all societies and peoples.

          Certainly, the western oriented biomedicine focuses on the physical dimensions of the human body and seeks to heal what physically troubles the physical body from functioning properly. It does not necessarily dwell on the inner mind and environmental influences such as the supernatural field. The biomedicine's transformation of Africa is essentially a partial rendering of a much larger process, argues David Baronov. Furthermore, Baronov shows that there is something that is lost or diminished in the above depictions such as the contributions of local African societies and cultures to the development of biomedicine in Africa, including being able to grasp the fact that there is a profound African transformation of biomedicine itself as a global cultural form.

          Baronov equally painted the notion that some critics of biomedicine decry its role as a typical cultural imperialism, that is controlling and domineering – one in which Europe emasculated Africa and redressed it with western beliefs and values. As a force for positive change, Baronov makes a case that by allowing Africans to enter the scientific age through biomedicine, it has thereby vivified and improved their health and general well being. As such, the introduction of biomedicine is viewed as something the Europe does to Africa. Whether resisting or responding favourably to biomedicine, ultimately it is the Africans that are transformed as they touched on the lives and societies in the western world given the missionary and colonial cultural encounter.

          Concluding the characteristics and experiences which explain biomedicine and its role, David Baronov states that the story of biomedicine in Africa has been told in three (inter)disciplinary ways. He outlines the disciplines as follows: (a), medical history; (b), medical anthropology; (c) and African political economy. Yet, as he claims, each of these disciplines fails to ask the fundamental question; namely how Africa has transformed biomedicine instead of focusing on how biomedicine transformed Africa? The problem here is the limited perspective with which each discipline conceptually frames biomedicine in Africa as a scientific, cultural or political process.   

          What turned my curiosity the more is the discussion on tropical medicine in Africa. I really enjoyed this part. Hence, of what formed the basis of tropical medicine in the province of Africa than in any other colonized part of the world? The analysis moves on and provides details around the evolution of factors that prompted its emergence. Tropical biomedicine was not born before critical incidents of diseases and afflictions which now and again devastated the crusade of sharing and exploiting Africa of what it had as resources to be used by the west to solve and sustain its develop-mentalist cause and other disruptive social challenges at home. It became obvious in the pursuit of missionization and evangelization of African cultural spheres along with colonialism, that death rates and culture shocks resulting from peculiar diseases in Africa called the shots to launch a critical medical campaign to face the challenges. The author highlightes the historical stages and activities in different colonized regions of Africa. Contending, he shows that the notion and strategy of tropical medicine came into being in the context of focusing on Africa as a source of knowledge system and with a high cultural resources potential to benefit the western expansionist drives. Literature interchangeably tends to use colonial medicine and military medicine to depict tropical medicine. The purpose of tropical medicine, the author points out, was to transform those colonies from being the "Whiteman's Grave" into becoming productive regions across Africa and India, namely to see to it that they could be where the Europeans need to thrive while developing other colonies.

            As the focus to turn things around continued, special culturally adjusted drugs and medications derived from African healing herbal resources was invented, such as quinine, to treat malaria – which was unknown in the western nature of disease list and causal factors and the treatment profiles. Not until the British assault on the Ashanti Empire in 1874 a point from where to get to the interior of Africa was a staggering task. With war on the Ashanti of Gold Coast (now Ghana), a convenient starting point for the history and modern tropical medicine in Africa was realized as has been documented by various writers such as Bynum in 1994, Curtin in 1996 and Barononv, our present writer, in 2008.

           From here, it is fascinating to learn that tropical medicine particularly paved the way for cultural globalization we have today. How, one may again ask? Drawing from our author's (David Baronov) account in African history of colonial medicine in Ghana, he reports of the insight given by C. Goods in 1991 whereby John Vanderkemp, a Dutch physician was generally credited with establishing the First Medical Missionary in Africa in 1799. From that time, medicine in the hands of the missionaries became a vital instrument for Christianizing the people involved in colonizing. With the medical feat on the cultural ground noted, moving inward Africa was the most extreme change required to challenge the restless African mosquitoes that naturally turned to be biological exercise of destruction against the white missionists and colonists. By 1805 through 1841, the book points out that Six Major Expeditions by the British took place with an average mortality rate of 50% orchestrated by malaria. In 1988, Macleod reported similar expeditions into Ghana and Nigeria of 1881 through 1887 with death rates of 5% to 8 % as significant. By and large, the expedition in 1874 whereby 2,500 British troops that received quinine to ward off malaria before being sent to the West African interior to battle the intransigent Ashanti people and the return of the troops with victory and little loss of their lives marked a new era of colonial rule, western powers and influence in Africa. From its inception, tropical medicine was recognized as an essential tool for western expansion and therefore of the globalization of the world we currently live in.                                         

           The "European medicine" and its "handmaiden", in addition to "public health" – as the author notes, served as critical "tools of Empire" with typical transformative, symbolic and practical consequences. The western powers under colonial dispensation deployed tropical medicine – first of all (a) to protect European soldiers and administrators from tropical diseases such as malaria, second (b) to protect settlers, civil servants and labourers in key economic sectors of profit earning capacity, and third (c) as an ideological weapon to foster the superiority of western culture, beliefs and values over the African patterns. I found interesting the author's depiction that other African areas un-reached by the invading and colonizing Europeans were considered like lost markets and apparently that frantic efforts were geared up to occupy them for the good of the western exchange with African raw materials and cultures. Until the later part of 19th century, tropical medicine was not formally organized. The need to structure tropical medicine as a development challenge found a voice and administrative skill in the argument that to understand the extension of biomedicine to Africans to be useful – both as a utilitarian need and as a device to introduce western norms it must be truly and scientifically regimented. The view here suggests that development we are talking about, and of any kind, must first of all be anchored on the single and complex needs and challenges of peoples and their times. For that reason, it was viewed that even the Africans that rejected the Christian culture being extended to them by the missionaries and colonists' enterprises still had interest in the white man's medical system and opportunity offered.   

          Furthermore, I liked the effort of the author when he discusses the role of anthropology and other disciplines in constructing African knowledge systems and their medical inclinations and temerities or so to say some reckless attempts that offended the African values in order to position the western ones. Here he talks about using ethnography to study and understand the people to be redirected, ruled and transformed. Issues such as sorcery, magic, witchcraft, superstition compared to the level of rational knowledge system and all else are highlighted. The retention of pre-modern beliefs and practices is attributed to either a lack of resources to fully evolve biomedicine or some worth delayed, or made an inevitable geographical change.

          Other areas the book discusses which are useful and good to read include the features of biomedical system in an African domain, the pluralism of African medical system and western dualism. In the rendering, the author shows that African societies have each what is called plural worldviews or cosmologies around the issues that define and explain causation and remedy to illnesses. Each cosmology, like all cosmologies, is to construct a broad based explanatory narrative that logically incorporates varied interpretations of reality. As such, African healing systems – methods and theories – must therefore be acknowledged as efforts that have not remained frozen in a timeless ethnographic present; but will have indeed, the capacity to change and adapt with the times. This remark was also observed by Schoepf in 1992.

          To understand African therapies, philosophies, herbal and animal resources, healers and patients alike, and their health care support groups, it is vital to discard biases, ancient prejudices and stereotypes and trivialized notions and benefits, and then be able to study what practitioners conceive of medical realities to mean in their cultural context of therapy. Social, class, social networks, community level conflicts, role of supernaturalism, kinship medicine and types of healers that pertain to explaining sources of misfortune and illness, as well as healing domains are nicely outlined by the book and they really made sense in the context of a changing African and western biomedicine, realities and challenges.

          A couple of areas can be criticized in this book. For example, the analysis of the book is often arduous whereby repetitions are evident; and that alone, diminishes the concentration of the material. In certain areas where some specific examples are required the author carefully ignored them. For instance, in the west the history of biomedicine or even that of African therapeutic systems as exercised in the 1970s should have been amplified with cases. There is also a problem with grounding his discourse with a relevant theory and make effort to recognize the numerous and dynamic changing nature of African healing systems. But apparently David Baronov chose to point to some relatively modern examples steeped in African methods of treatment. In doing so, he relied on focusing on previous circumstances of African medical syncretism. The structure of the book itself organized in chapters is easy to follow. But I had expected to read in the final chapter some evidence to forge together the work's claims such that a demonstration of how African biomedicine changed Western biomedicine and vice versa will be clear.

          Other reviews of this work such as the one by Karen Flint of the University of North Carolina point out that given the author's perspective, the African plural medical cultures which made a case for incorporated biomedicine, the study can be argued to attest to or reflect any other growing regions or societies where medical cultures are not only open but also pluralistic, multiculturalistic in the natural world. Another critique offered by an African historian who writes about the history of African therapeutics is that this book might better look more critically and persuasively at the influence Africans had on Western medicine through their role in introducing African remedies and medicinal plants pharmacopeia, or perhaps, African influences on the agenda of the World Health Organization.

          Let me conclude this review by stating that apart from these shortcomings, this book is a go. It is vigorously written and well portrayed from the very historical point of view of the author who shows that biomedicine is an inevitable cultural history, a depiction of medical cultural interchange. In this case, how Africa has transformed and in turn transforms the western society by the consequences of the critical colonial encounter. In particular, the effort at initiating tropical medicine in an African context of plural health care is remarkable. The purpose of which is, namely to protect the colonial and missionary soldiers, the administrators and by extension the civil society of the time and to further penetrate the interior to engage the Africans in the emergent global capitalist community.

Whether you worship God, Satan or no deity whatsoever there is one thing which is a truism regarding human nature.And that thing is rationality.Or rationalism.It may even be realism or plain old logic.I believe that two people can always sit down and negotiate a point of agreement.The only thing which interrupts negotiation is power.Power does not always recognize external logic or need.Power only recognizes power.This is simple but then again, isn’t that always the best and surest route through any equation?

I’m full of sadness over the execution of Muammar Gadhafi.  I’m also full of sadness over Miss Eunice and Charlie James.  All three in possession of a type of power and all three without the good sense God gave shit.  See, you’re supposed to know or at least have the ability to be made to know when your sun is setting.  Gadhafi had lead a nation before he was 30 years old and during a forty year reign he could look out over millions of people and know that their lives were in his two, pitiful, human hands.  The same is true of Eunice and Charlie.  How many times did each one step into a bar and have nearly every person alternately greet them with desire or envy?  That’s the most seductive power.  The power of youth and attraction.  We are led to believe or get drunk on the belief that it is a thing of always.  It isn’t.  I’ve been cute for a long time but I’ve also been rational for a long time and I can tell you the absolute truth on this subject.  It takes longer and longer for me to become presentable.  It takes longer and longer to recover from a night of free stuff – none of which is usable under any situation except the social.  I know that the power I have – pretty power – means nothing in ten years, twenty years, when only the vestiges of my attraction remains.  Just like anyone else I’ll have to review my glorious past in the frames of photographs (frozen images of what I once was).  Miss Eunice and Mr. Charlie, both of them, never got the benefit of my grandmother’s wit:  “chile, pick one and stick to it.”  I heard.  I obeyed.  No one has to tell me that the five minutes have begun.  I’ve picked one.

Muammar’s five minutes more than likely came when an African president came to see him offering asylum.  Offering a chance for him to keep his millions.  Offering a chance for him to keep his family intact.  Muammar didn’t listen and now all of his money and his children are refugees to banks and nations.  His refusal to hear the ticking led to the end of his son’s life.  He could have saved everything but drunk with forty years of power he had lost all reason.  Maybe, I like to think, that after the African president left him, Muammar laughed it off.  One minute past.  Maybe he talked to his sons.  Two minutes past.  Maybe he kissed his wives.  Three minutes past.  Maybe he surveyed all that he would continue to hold.  Four minutes past.  And then he continued to give orders to fight the rebels.  Five minutes past and his life was at an end.  The real ugly would begin.

Ugly isn’t an adjective which denotes a lack of physical attraction.  Ugly is not the healed burn.  It is not the scars of a warrior.  It isn’t even a broken heart.  Ugly is a sight which bestializes man.  Ugly is a state lacking all beauty.  There is beauty in the healed skin of a person who has experienced a burn.  It is the mark of one who has been honed, a human sword, in the pursuit of survival.  And your scars, internal and external, only mean that you have been through some things and yet you live another minute, hour, day, year.  Ugly is not a scar or a defect of birth.  Ugly is a group of people who pile into a meat locker to take cheap camera photos of an aged corpse, sans shirt, shoes, and covering for the head.  Ugly is when we use power where there is no ability to answer in kind.  Muammar let those five minutes pass and let himself, his son, and his country be set upon by the ugly.  Libya has no defense for the coming power, greater than any it can imagine, which will relentlessly relieve it of its wealth.  Why else would a rebel army be given guns, tanks, and missiles?  Power rarely engages in altruism.

Muammar’s body, bereft of power and spirit, spent four days on this earth.  The same way that the once beautiful woman and once handsome man spends their last moments (really years) – alone and walking soundless rooms.  There is a price to be paid for ignoring that final call through darkness and that hand extended through the mist of pride, vanity and ego.  The price is a type of death or absolute death.  Muammar, Eunice and Charlie all rest within the Earth and this is where they would have rested anyway.  But if the situation had gone different.  If the three of them and all of us had given respect to those five minutes between when goodness comes to call and when the scales are being weighed between keeping a hand on power and going forward to the next phase of life – what would they have given to the universe?

Muammar could have bounced more grandchildren.  Miss Eunice could have been the hand which guided her (would-be) spouse into the winter of life, and Charlie could have used his position to help some mother’s son.  All of that and more are possibilities.

They’re gone.  We’re here.  And our task within our circles of power is to respect that space where there is an opportunity for beauty and the likelihood of ugly.  One minute.  Two minutes.  Three….

It might seem strange to solicit praises for an individual saddled with a job title fraught with negativity.  We have come to think of “hustle” in the pejorative sense.  That’s so unfortunate.  Unfortunate indeed.  Hustle is an adverb and hustler is a noun.  You hustle in the morning when you get yourself ready for work and the kids out of the door and on the bus stop.  You hustle when someone is coming over, with 15 minutes notice, and your front room could use some sprucing.  You hustle when you’re working in a restaurant desperately trying to optimize your tips.  In none of those examples do we see any elements of criminal activity.  All are necessary to simply undertake this job called life.

Going further.  When one is employed one has a hustle.  And although you may not know it the doctor who works in private practice and the plumber who is on call 24 hours a day – they are one and the same.  How so?  Nothing comes to them.  They have to go out and seek their daily bread.  So, one who has a hustle is a state of being where there is a job to be done autonomously – without directions from any other individual.  A man or woman who has a hustle is the boss.  They are the captains of the fleet and truly, on a daily basis, determine destiny.

Let’s go to examples of hustlers.  These examples do not include criminals or evildoers.  A pimp or a dope dealer or a corner clocker – these beings are parasites.  They can’t make a dime unless someone is sick, misguided, left alone in the world, or in pain.  They take and give nothing in return and for that matter they don’t give anything to themselves because everything they do is situational.  They have no end game, no set point, and no goals.  An example of a hustler comes in the form of James Evans (the father on “Good Times”).  He was working on the docks when he could get work in the cold Chicago climate.  He was beating pavement with Smitty and if memory serves me he might have done odd jobs for Bookman.  James Evans had the weight of the world on his shoulders.  His world which consisted of Thelma, J. J., and Florida.  It was his sole responsibility and there was no dispute in that fact.  All of his outrage and his outbursts went towards that aim.

The entire history of Black men in America should bear witness that a hustler is a very good thing.  There are people who wouldn’t have eaten, lived in a warm home, or even gone to the best schools in the land if it hadn’t been for a hustler.  This individual for whom no work is to low.  The hustler’s anthem is as follows:  A check beats a blank.  They are not of the fabric of these New Negroes who will let folks starve, bills go unpaid, because they didn’t feel comfortable with available means of employment.  The hustler will shovel shit in a torrent of snow and sleet to make sure his child has shoes to wear to the prom.  That’s the essence of a hustler, he’s the tough talking angel who hardly ever says he loves you, and more than likely never will.  He shows you.  He shows you with the sweat on his brow and the stoop of his back.  She’s also the woman who works three jobs and magically leaves fifty cents under your pillow when your tooth comes out.

A hustler is not the sole property of Black America or America itself.  The hustler is a universal occupation.  If it wasn’t for hustlers so many of us would not be the “firsts” of our families and too many of us forget the calloused hands and feet which led us to our seats in towers of ivory and steel.  But not today.  Today we should take a moment in quiet reflection on hustlers and when our minds recognize the calamities which would have befallen us had we not been the recipient of such hard fought largesse – let’s praise him.  And we also praise her.  Praises due to the hustlers of this world and the love they bear which cannot be put into some sad, sorry, tired and tawdry words.  Just feel it.  Look around and see it.  It abounds and resounds in our everywhere.  We are blessed with the presence of a hustler.  Amen.

Afrocentric Culture Versus Scientific Culture
 
Date: March 18, 2013
To: Professor Molefe Asante
From: Ozodi Osuji, PhD
Subject:  Afrocentric culture versus Scientific Culture
 
With the below synopsis of what I mean by scientific culture I conclude my initiated communication with you. I deliberately decided to communicate with you because I identified you as one of the chief proponents of the Afrocentric movement. That movement, I believe was useful in the 1960s and 1970s when black folks were trying to define themselves on their own terms and extricate their identity from how white men defined them. However, the world has moved on. Now, what pays dividends in the real world is training people in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology and their applied forms in technology. I believe that it is only a people who are at the forefront of science and technology that will dominate the world of the future. Talking about our people’s glorious past when if you go to any American first rate university, departments of science you seldom see black students are not going to help us. Boning up on African and African American culture is not going to improve our lives one bit. What we need are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of this world and, of course, the pure scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Tyco Brahe, Kepler, Thomas Young, Dalton, Boyle, Lavoisier, Laplace, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J.J. Thomson, Becquerel, Roentgen, Mendel, Pasteur, Maria and Pierre Curie, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Broglie, Max Born, Eddington, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Alexander Friedman, Lemaitre, Hubble,  James Chadwick, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Alexander Fleming, James Watson, Francis Crick, Hugh Everett, John Bell, Alan Aspect, Alan Gutt, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, Witten, De Witt and the other lords of the physical sciences (I have written short biographies of those and what they accomplished…please notice the absence of African names among these geniuses). The black race no longer need mere talkers and militants, such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela (somewhere I reviewed books on them); it is about time that we joined the world of science and technology. We have what it takes to make it in science and technology and should stop wasting our young people’s time by filling their impressionable minds with unproductive ideas on race and culture.  With this feedback I end my feedback to you. I leave it to you to make of the feedback what you want to, to feel like I did not validate your 75 books and feel angry at me or to see a breath of fresh air in the black firmament and encourage it or discourage it( what else is new, black folks are known for being destructive of their creative souls; for what it is worth, I have written 45 books and continuing). One must deal with facts and not live in the past; nostalgia is not realism. Cheers, Ozodi Osuji, PhD (UCLA)
 
Abstract:
 
The thesis of this paper is that the philosophy of multiculturalism foisted on society by liberal anthropologists is misguided. That philosophy presupposes that all cultures are at the same level and, as such, should be propagated. The paper disagrees with that view. The society that discovered much of modern science is more advanced than the society that still sees the sun as a god and worships it.  It is humiliating for one group’s culture to be presented as better than other groups’ cultures. The author is not saying that one culture is better than others. He is talking about what he calls the scientific culture. The scientific culture does not belong to any specific group although Western Europeans approximate it more than other groups of human beings. In his view, all human beings ought to be encouraged to embrace the scientific methodological approach to living and jettison their group’s ways of approaching phenomena if those are not in sync with the parameters of science. Moreover, identification with particularistic cultures makes for separation of people into ethnic enclaves and foster social divisions and conflicts; a universal scientific culture makes for the union of all people hence peace in the world.
 
REPLACEMENT OF MULTICULTURALISM WITH SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
Ozodi Osuji
 
       Teaching one specific culture as ideal insults those whose cultures are not taught; for example, teaching Eurocentric culture in America makes black folks feel like their cultures are ignored; they feel that their world view is not affirmed and they feel angry.
        The USA was originally founded by Englishmen. Those Englishmen forced all the other Europeans (Germans, Frenchmen, etc.) and, of course, African slaves who came to the USA to learn English and essentially embrace the Americanized English culture that is the lay of the land.
       Whereas this behavior seems cruel it is actually what made for the cultural cohesion of the USA, such as it is. If each ethnic group that came to the USA had been allowed to live in accord with its culture the USA would not be a country but congeries of ethnic enclaves, perhaps as in the Balkans, each fighting others and there would be no peace in the land. The enforced modified English culture on the people of the USA is thus a good thing for it unified the disparate persons and their cultures!
         If we teach a universal culture based on scientific parameters no one group’s values are foisted on others and no group would feel denigrated and angry. All children and people would be gradually socialized to this universal scientific culture.
       At present the movement to teach Americans from different ethnic backgrounds to identify with their ethnic cultures gives them particularistic mode of looking at the world, which leads to separatism and eventual ethnic conflicts in America, as in the Balkans.
        In the past English men propagated their culture at the expense of other group’s cultures hence made them angry but that is not what we are talking about here; we are not talking about English or European or African or Asian culture but a universal culture based on science, on what is known to be self-evidently true.
        That been said, it is still necessary to make English the universal language of all Americans; the current trend of allowing Spanish speakers and speakers of other languages to retain their language while calling themselves Americans is not only misguided but dangerous; it would, sooner or later, lead to ethnic wars in the USA.
         If you do not want to speak English then do not come to the USA, stay in the country where your language is spoken; it is as simple as that!
       It is really an aggressive behavior to come to the USA and retain ones language and ask Americans to learn one’s language and speak to one in that language, as we now have to do to Spanish speakers in California and elsewhere where the Latin population is increasing. The Aggressive Latinos want to convert us to their culture, a culture not known for its contribution to modern science and technology! Take a look at any textbook on physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, the core sciences and you would not encounter Spanish contributors to them! These people want to return us to their culture, a culture that essentially is at a more primitive stage of scientific evolution!
      One should not talk about how one’s culture did something  good in the past (the Spaniards, for example, were at the forefront of European civilization when America was discovered in the late 1400s but now are at its bottom); instead, one should talk about how to do something rationally and scientifically.
      One should talk about the empirically demonstrable best way of doing something instead of harp on how ones culture did something in the past. There is no evidence that people in the past knew how to do anything better than people in the present do!
       There is a loving way to raise children so that they turn out well adapted and well-functioning adults and there is a toxic way to raise children so that they turn out poorly adjusted to coping with the exigencies of living.
        We must have evidence based way of how best to do anything and not merely indulge in nostalgic yearnings for the past or talk about how beautiful the past supposedly was.
        In pre-British India, for example, Hindus burned life widows to death with their dead husbands in their funeral pyres; surely, no one wants to go back to that type of behavior. 
       As we speak, in Muslim countries female children are prevented from going to school and working; surely, no one thinks that is the right way to live.
        We cannot celebrate primitive behavior just because they are part of our inherited cultures.
 
ON SCIENCE
 
          In science you observe phenomena and verify what you observe and set up a method following which any person who so chooses can verify your observations. Science deals with empirical facts. 
       Science is predicated on the notion that the world came into being by accident and proceeds on accidental events.
       Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, do not deal with facts; they deal with how people find meaning in life.  Religion assumes that there is a higher power, God, in the universe. We cannot verify the existence of God.
      Science is a methodological approach to phenomena; science is not an end but a method; it is a way of looking at the universe so that what is seen is there (as confirmed by other observers). In science the individual  does not just spout his opinion on phenomena; instead, he observes it, sees it as he thinks that it is, and tries to make sure that his perception is correct. He posits a method for verifying what he saw so that whoever else wants to verify his conclusion can do so.
       Generally, observation and experimentation are the most reliable means of verifying a proposition.  Ideas must be verifiable and falsifiable (Karl Popper says) for them to be scientific.
       A scientific idea is not permanent truth; it is truth that has not been falsified by other observers yet. As long as most observers can verify an idea it is accepted as a workable truth subject to when it is falsified, in which case it is discarded.
        Ideas that cannot be falsified, such as the existence of God are not  scientific ideas; such ideas fall into the realm of belief and authority; you believe that there is God based on  authority, on what some religious authorities on the religion that you accept say about him but not because you have by yourself verified that there is God.
      In our age the scientific method is the accepted epistemology, the accepted way of ascertaining what is true and what is false.
 
REPLACEMENT OF FOOLISHNESS WITH OTHER FOOLISHNESS
 
          Sooner or later, African Americans and Africans discover that the Christianity that was shoved down their throats is not their people’s religion. Christianity was formed by Jews as a sect of Judaism.  Jesus Christ and Paul, the two founders of Christianity were Jews.
       Jesus, indeed, made it crystal clear that his religion is for his fellow Jews; he had nothing to do with non-Jews, gentiles. It was the idealistic hence universalizing Paul that reinterpreted Christianity to say that it is for all people, Jews and non-Jews.
         Judaism is for Jews. Christianity is a Jewish cult. Islam is for Arabs.  The philosophy carried by those three religions is Semitic and there is no two ways of going about it. 
       Europeans appear to have reinterpreted the teachings of Christianity to serve their society’s needs hence made it no longer the religion of Jews loving Jews that Jesus taught but a religion of war and punishment for those who disobey the rulers of Europe (the rulers of Europe claimed to rule by divine right; they saw themselves as the temporal Stewarts of God and as such their will represented God’s will and must be obeyed as people believed that they must obey God’s will).
        When African persons discover that these three religions represent the world view of those who oppressed Africans (Arabs enslaved Africans, Europeans who call themselves Christians enslaved Africans) their immediate urge is to throw all three religions away. Foreign religions, they believe are not for nationalist Africans.
         Unfortunately, many Africans and African Americans having discarded the religion of their oppressors believe that the solution is to replace those religions with what they call African religions.
         In their confusion as to who is African they look to ancient Egypt as African. Thus, some of these confused souls talk about what they call Kemet religion, the supposed religion of ancient Egypt and embrace it.
        Were ancient Egyptians Africans? How did they see themselves? They did not call themselves black, nor did they call themselves white. They portrayed themselves in pictures as brown people. Therefore, they are Semitic people, of the same group as Arabs and Jews (at any rate ancient Egyptians are still found in extant Egypt; they are not black; they are brown in color, pretty close to the Arab, Jewish color).  Kemet religion is a Semitic religion.    
        Aside from the fact that ancient Egyptians and their religion were Semitic there is the problem of religion in general. If Africans and African Americans were to go to West Africa where African Americans came from and embraced West African religions yet that would not be doing the rational thing.
        All religion is mythopoeic approach to phenomena. All religions, African, Jewish, Arabs, Asians, Hindu, and European were formed when mankind was not scientific in its approach to phenomena hence are irrational world views. Therefore, instead of returning to African or Egyptian religions, Africans should seek rational explanation of phenomena. 
       Africans should seek science based metaphysics and in general embrace what I call scientific culture, a culture that is neither European, nor African or any other peoples, a culture based on what Thomas Kuhn called the scientific paradigm, not as foreigners tell them that science is.
        Science does not belong to Europeans, it is a universal methodology and one does not have to wait for a European to tell one what science is; one can ascertain what science is and what it is not.
        I am not asking Africans to wait for Europeans to define what makes sense to them; they do not have to fit their views into European constructed reality or anyone else’s constructed reality (reality is unknown to us and whatever we believe that it is, is a social and or individual construct).
        Reality is not any one particular individual or group’s construction of it.  Reality is what it is and it is for each of us to work to figure out what it is through the scientific method.
        The individual should fit his self into the impersonal constructs of science but not to any one’s image of science.   The individual should accept what is self-evidently true without trying to do what mad men do: try to fit reality into their preconception of what it should be.
 
FROM CULTURAL RELATIVISM TO SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
        A patronizing behavior of white liberals towards Africans is to tell Africans that all cultures are equal. I am talking about the nonsense of cultural relativism propagated by white culture anthropologists, a nonsense swallowed by Africans hence you find Africans misbehaving and telling us that what they do is rooted in their culture and that their culture is as good as other cultures thus justifying their criminal behaviors with their so-called culture.
      African men philander, have numerous concubines and convert their political and bureaucratic offices to personal use; they give jobs to their people, not on the basis of merit but corruption. They tell us that in their culture they are required to help their people. The problem is that giving your people who are unqualified jobs means that they cannot do those jobs well hence retards the progress of Africa.
     The liberal teaching that all cultures are the same is so much load of rubbish. Some cultures are more advanced than others. There is such a thing as unscientific (primitive) culture and a scientific culture.  Africa was unscientific (primitive) in many aspects of its cultural ways.
      In scientific culture behavior is based on the findings of science.  Scientific culture is universal culture, not the particularistic cultures associated with given ethnic groups. 
       The egos of third people have been stroked long enough when they are told that their cultures are as good as the culture of physical scientists; it is now time we told them that only those who look at the world from a scientific frame of reference are civilized; at any rate, it is such people that produce advanced technologies and the products that modern technologies give to the world, such as Internet, computers, wireless telephones, television, microwave oven, cars, planes, trains, refrigerators, air conditioners and so on.
      African cultures contributed zilch to science and technology and if so how are they as good as the culture that gave us Special and General Relativity and Quantum Physics and the electronic revolution?
 
DISCUSSION
 
           It is true that Africans were told by white men that they are primitive and that their cultures are no good. Naturally, no one wants to be told that he is primitive and that his people’s ways of living is no good. Therefore, Africans try to present their people’s cultures in a positive light. 
        Thus, many African nationalists celebrate Africa and its cultures. Such Africans embrace everything African. If challenged they quickly tell one what is wrong with European and North American cultures.
      Obviously, Europeans and Americans have a lot of issues and no one is saying that they are ideal. Consider marriage. African societies allowed polygamy. The Christian West permits only monogamy. But they permit people to divorce and remarry. Thus, what ends up happening is that men have serial marriages, sometimes up to seven marriages. That is to say that they have done what the African did, have many wives.
       Thus, the African asks: why not be honest over sex:  the typical man wants to have sexual activity with more than one woman so why not go ahead and allow men to have, say, seven wives, why decry African men for having polygamy if white folks are essentially doing the same thing?  The African nationalist believes that his people are more realistic on this score and does not want hypocritical Westerners preaching to him how to live a life he himself does not live.
       The point is that the African nationalist does not see anything wrong with past Africa and resents those who talk about what is wrong with Africa.
        I understand the stance of the African nationalist. Be that as it may, there are real problematic issues in Africa.
        I am not seeking to replace African culture with European culture. I am interested in what I call scientific culture. I believe that following the scientific method we can figure out the right ways to live and live so and do so all over the world. For example, we all agree that it is wrong to kill and to steal; we can pass laws that state that and we all live accordingly.
        One is not saying that we should not study ethnic groups; we must by all means study all human groups and understand their cultures. Understanding their diverse cultures helps us to understand our own culture; cross cultural studies helps us put our culture in broad perspective and understand it relative to other cultures. 
         We can learn a lot from the way other folks do things. This does not, however, mean that we should have the delusion that all cultures are equal and the same.
        Some cultures are more advanced than others. A culture that figured out quantum mechanics is more advanced than a culture that has no idea what is meant by atoms; a culture that figured out that diseases are caused by germs is more advanced than a culture that thinks that diseases are caused by nonexistent gods (hence its people die from treatable diseases). 
        Nor is one making the assumption that Western cultures are better than African cultures. Whereas there are many useful aspects of Western cultures obviously there are awful aspects of those cultures.  Parts of American culture, for example, is as primitive as it gets and no one would consider them more civilized than many aspects of Africa’s culture.
       Nevertheless, America has pockets of scientific cultural civilization, such as at Boston, Berkeley and Westwood (California) etc.
      One is not equating the entirety of the West with scientific culture; in fact, most of the West is as unscientific as Africa is; scientific culture obtains only in small enclaves in the West, the Enclaves that give the West its science and technology.
 
CONCLUSION
 
         Multi ethnic countries like Nigeria will always live in conflict and political instability as each ethnic group strives to gain at the expense of others.  What needs to be done is to impose one language on all the constituting ethnic groups to unify them (English will do) and impose one scientific culture on all the groups to give them a rational manner of relating to their world.
          All these, of course, would not give multiethnic societies perfect unity, for the world is a place of individuation, separation, specialness and mutual attack; that conflict can be reduced but not eliminated.
        One is not a naïve political idealist who thinks that perfect peace is possible on earth; as long as people live in bodies and have egos they would seek different interests and will perceive reality differently and thus have conflicts; it is not possible to attain perfection as long as people live in flesh. Perfection, whatever it is, can only be attained in a non-physical state, in the world of spirits where folks are not limited by the exigencies of matter, energy, space and time (those limit what we living in bodies can do).
        Political realism accepts imperfect human beings and their imperfect political behavior and accepts the inevitability of social conflict and prepares to deal with it with draconian governments that posited laws and used those to protect law abiding persons and punish lawbreakers.
          Ethnic groups, like individuals see differences between them; some groups have the delusion that they are better than others (hence gratify their egos neurotic wish for superiority); these behaviors generate conflict and thus human beings are condemned to living in social conflict.
       Finding a common scientific culture that gives most people a path to living their lives rationally reduces inherent social conflicts but does not eliminate them. The earth is not going to be heaven but it can approximate it.
        Science enables us to approximate perfection more than any other instrument that I know of.
 
Ozodi Osuji
March 18, 2013
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A RASTA PLAY

(written and illustrated by Ras Jahaziel August 2010) www.rastafarivisions.com

AND THE MASSACRE IN
TIVOLI GARDENS JAMAICA
MAY 2010

PRELUDE: WHAT THE NEWS MEDIA SAID:

"Seventy-three civilians and one soldier died in last week's push into Tivoli."
Jamaica Gleaner

“Over 73 civilians Killed, 500 Jamaicans injured"
"Mounting casualties from the massive offensive by the security forces on Tivoli Gardens have put morgues on the brink of overflowing." The Gleaner

" The media reports are not telling the full story of what is actually taking place in Jamaica, they fail to address the governments involvement in the crisis and the underlining historical context”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freestylee/4636672885/

BEHIND THE SCENES
The truth that the University is not saying, the Church is not saying, the official News is not saying, and the other second-hand Mouth-pieces are not saying:

An Inter-faith Dialogue between Snow-white The Money God and The Three Dragons

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Gentlemen, welcome to this our fourth-hundred annual inter-faith dialogue where we exchange ideas for the better management of our slave-holdings in the modern colonies. Now please relax and take off your masks. Those do-gooder masks are only for the outside when we have to put on a public show. But here, if you want to say "Nigger" you can say "Nigger."

HA HA HA HA HA

CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP.

This is the forum where we can be ourselves and speak our minds without worrying about political correctness. We do not have to go around corners and pretend that PROFIT is not the only thing that matters. Every-one in here knows that the advancement of our empire has often called for ruthless action against inferior peoples. Often times it has involved moving populations from areas that we desire. Sometimes the methods may be bloody and involve lost of life amongst the inferior peoples, but everyone of you know the ropes, so to speak. So please speak your mind without worry. The press is not here. This is the place where we can discuss the dirty details that would shock the larger public outside.

Now the first thing I would like to do is to express my concerns about the stability of our modern plantation system in the Caribbean and the volatility of our Negro labor force in light of recent events.

I am sure that we all agree the image of "Paradise" must be maintained at all costs. For close to four centuries we have reaped billions of dollars in profit from the sweat of Black labor in the hot climes of these islands, and what has made our businesses so profitable is that up to this day Black labor has been for the most part free or very cheap. But now our old sugar plantations that required us to maintain thousands of slaves have been phased out, and Tourism has now become our new sugar plantation. Not only do we need fewer Negroes, but unlike in the days of sugar cane it is important to project an idyllic paradise image despite the glaring wide-spread poverty of the locals.

(The nagging truth keeps asking:Why do some people have all the luxury and some people have all the tears? Paradise and Hell all in the same place? Who keeps this system running from generation to generation? The Army, The Police, The politicians, and The Church?)

But we have a problem looming on the horizon: As a result of our recent economic adjustments the weight on the poor has been increased significantly, to the extent that they are nearing breaking-point. If we do not act preemptively and take drastic measures they are likely to rebel and spoil our paradise image. We need to crush rebellion long before it happens.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection: Pardon me for saying so, but I think your fears may be a little bit exaggerated because as you know, we have always used our police and army as a barrier of terror to protect our slave-holding properties. They have been trained to be very brutal and ruthless, and as a result of their consistent terrorism most of the slave population fears them. I don’t think we have anything to worry about, but if it would make you feel better we can increase the terror.

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Well make sure the media publishes a good excuse for doing so before giving the police the go-ahead. But no matter what it takes we must maintain the flow of profit from our human and material possessions on these islands. Even though these economic measures will affect the lives of the poor fairly harshly, such measures are necessary to maintain THE PROFIT FLOW.

But keeping the plantation from burning has always been a balancing act. On the one hand, too much hardship may cause spontaneous rebellion, and on the other hand the extra hardship that the Niggers feel also makes them desperate for money. In that state of mind it is easier to control and manipulate them, and it is never difficult to find spies and informers. Another very important advantage in keeping the Negroes in a desperate economic state was demonstrated just recently in Tivoli Gardens. If you did not understand the power of our economic grip on the Negroes you would have been surprised by the zeal that was exhibited by our police and soldiers as they went about maiming and killing other Niggers that look just like themselves.

With our power to decide who eats and who starves it was easy to enlist dozens of paid killers.

So despite all of the idealistic calls for equal rights and justice, we know from long experience that we have to keep the economic lid on the Negroes. It is a form of control that we have always used, and in any case it has never been wise to let the Nigger get too far. We just need to be prepared at all times for any eventuality.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection:  Well, in light of your concern about the possibility of these economic measures causing dire social consequences, let me assure you that we have already equipped our FORCES with the appropriate training and practice in the event of an uprising.

TO READ FULL ARTICLE SEE http://www.rastafarivisions.com/jamaicamassacre.html
 TO SEE VIDEO             http://www.rastafarivisions.com/arastaplay

Author: David Baronov. Publisher: Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Pages 248 

For a start, African focused biomedicine and how it originated, particularly in Ghana and Nigeria is fascinating to trace; more importantly how African medicine is transforming western biomedicine is something we need to follow in the cultural context of medical globalization. Dr. David Baronov's book brings out the colonial, historical, and cultural insight, including how tropical biomedicine was invented in Western Africa, and tested for success in Ghana, during the Ashanti colonial war to enter the interior of Africa. African pundit mosquitoes served as biological weapons of mass graves resulting to the inevitable scientific breakthrough of the time to tame malaria. This book is vigorously crafted and laid out. It stands out as a go for me.

I just picked up this book The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange written by David Baronov (2008) with a view to doing some pleasure reading much like I commonly surf the internet. But this book turned out to be different to me. It held me up reading and thinking with the narratives until I finished it. I am just happy to have read the work and gained some deep critical and historical grounded insights from the ontological arguments. A book of 248 pages, the author David Baronov sets out to show that African Medicine like the Western Medicine is a cultural system steeped in different missionary and colonial platforms of conception and development.

          The book argues that African medicine and cultures served as a transformational conflict and agenda to biomedicine on the one hand, and on the other hand, biomedicine equally rendered the African medical system to face inevitable opportunity and analysis in formulating research and focused need on the development scale. The writer declares that it is important to understand the historical grounds of the colonial expansionist urges that placed the African and Western biomedicines on that pedestal for each other. In other words, African Medicine is a prodding and a provoking area of interest and more so in this age of global medical pluralism and western domination of the biomedical sphere.

          Not outlined or discerned in the book is the many Pentecostalistic rocket attack launches against anything indigenous when it comes to addressing ways of knowing and healing  – namely spiritual and oracular, magic and sorcery, divination, supernatural and naturalist fields of disease attributions, including forms of remedial approaches. Except the scathing Christian Missionary activities at the time of colonial incursions on African beliefs and values, I seem to have seen little drawn to show a glimpse to capture the Pentecostalist challenges to indigenous knowledge and its impact on the ongoing shared medical systems in the global scene. By Pentecostalism, I mean the Neo-Christian or born-again radicalism that protests against using cultural resources such as spirits and oracles as a source of meaning.

          The author highlights that at the beginning of colonialism and following the course of intercultural exchange, Western biomedicine went out when it was compelled to save lives and expand the frontiers of Europe. In the circumstances that prevailed, medical initiatives resulting from African focused needs radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. But while it was doing so to protect Europeans in Africa, Africa became engaged in using Western biomedicine and in turn, transformed the Western biomedicine in itself. The typical intercultural dynamics that flowed has enhanced the mercantilist or capitalist focus of the western medical pragmatism. Basically, the book is arguing that the African transformation of Western Medicine and the dynamics of global cultural exchange – posits the fact that contemporary African medical systems are in no way less "biomedical" than Western medicine. In fact, both "greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange."

          I found several themes within the chapters of the book fascinating such as the origins of African biomedicine, the emergence of tropical medicine and African medical campaigns, including African biomedicine as being a stream of ontology – that is, (a) as a whole medical sphere; and (b) as a consequence of Africa's incorporation into the capitalist world system.

          I enjoyed the systematic analysis brought to bear on this theme; the ontological whole, which is, moreover, outlined as a sum total of saying that African medical pluralism has become a global biomedicine that is currently inseparable from the life history of the capitalist world system. What that indicates, in the view of the author, is that African biomedicine has become enjoined in a web of interdependent and mutually conditioning relationships. Therefore, it will be an error to see or frame African medical pluralistic conjoining as if it is a single stream of knowledge. It is not. Rather, we make effort to analyze and portray African biomedicine as both an ontological whole and a multi-faceted singular historical cultural conjecture. In other words, the African biomedicine is a multilayered form of incorporated or borrowed cultural formation. That is also arguably true when we analyze and connect the dots by which African biomedicine is the source as well as a function, like the western biomedical sphere, of a healing enterprise. In addition, African biomedicine is central to symbolic-cultural expression as much as it is equally an expression of social power.

          All of this, the author notes systematically defends the argument that African medical context is relational and expansive, revivifying and re-inventing itself in the global biomedical capitalist sphere, sometimes proving it can be on the extreme spirituality, as it may seem, whereby the ontological atomism marks the western view of biomedicine – the pick-up basis of which forms the capitalistic analytical view of health and medical practice in a condensable structured relationship.          

          On the specifics of what led to the origins of African biomedicine, the author focuses on the features that heralded it in the first place. However, in his 1994 article captioned "On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems" by Robert Pool published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, it is shown that between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa were criticized for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation and neglecting natural causation and practical medical behaviour. Warren in 1974 also criticized the field by taking note that Africans traditionally recognised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness primarily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delineate discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causation and practical activity in the view of Robert Pool?

          African biomedicine, as contended by David Baronov along with the coming of the Europeans to Africa is a benevolent gift. The purpose of which is to improve the health of Africans. Biomedicine has therefore been credited with indirectly "civilizing" the African mind and spirituality by introducing modern scientific principles to supplant African superstition and rational therapeutic poverty and witchcraft. Although biomedicine is foreign to Africa and is portrayed as western on the one side, and on the other angle, it claims to embody principles that are applicable to all societies and peoples.

          Certainly, the western oriented biomedicine focuses on the physical dimensions of the human body and seeks to heal what physically troubles the physical body from functioning properly. It does not necessarily dwell on the inner mind and environmental influences such as the supernatural field. The biomedicine's transformation of Africa is essentially a partial rendering of a much larger process, argues David Baronov. Furthermore, Baronov shows that there is something that is lost or diminished in the above depictions such as the contributions of local African societies and cultures to the development of biomedicine in Africa, including being able to grasp the fact that there is a profound African transformation of biomedicine itself as a global cultural form.

          Baronov equally painted the notion that some critics of biomedicine decry its role as a typical cultural imperialism, that is controlling and domineering – one in which Europe emasculated Africa and redressed it with western beliefs and values. As a force for positive change, Baronov makes a case that by allowing Africans to enter the scientific age through biomedicine, it has thereby vivified and improved their health and general well being. As such, the introduction of biomedicine is viewed as something the Europe does to Africa. Whether resisting or responding favourably to biomedicine, ultimately it is the Africans that are transformed as they touched on the lives and societies in the western world given the missionary and colonial cultural encounter.

          Concluding the characteristics and experiences which explain biomedicine and its role, David Baronov states that the story of biomedicine in Africa has been told in three (inter)disciplinary ways. He outlines the disciplines as follows: (a), medical history; (b), medical anthropology; (c) and African political economy. Yet, as he claims, each of these disciplines fails to ask the fundamental question; namely how Africa has transformed biomedicine instead of focusing on how biomedicine transformed Africa? The problem here is the limited perspective with which each discipline conceptually frames biomedicine in Africa as a scientific, cultural or political process.   

          What turned my curiosity the more is the discussion on tropical medicine in Africa. I really enjoyed this part. Hence, of what formed the basis of tropical medicine in the province of Africa than in any other colonized part of the world? The analysis moves on and provides details around the evolution of factors that prompted its emergence. Tropical biomedicine was not born before critical incidents of diseases and afflictions which now and again devastated the crusade of sharing and exploiting Africa of what it had as resources to be used by the west to solve and sustain its develop-mentalist cause and other disruptive social challenges at home. It became obvious in the pursuit of missionization and evangelization of African cultural spheres along with colonialism, that death rates and culture shocks resulting from peculiar diseases in Africa called the shots to launch a critical medical campaign to face the challenges. The author highlightes the historical stages and activities in different colonized regions of Africa. Contending, he shows that the notion and strategy of tropical medicine came into being in the context of focusing on Africa as a source of knowledge system and with a high cultural resources potential to benefit the western expansionist drives. Literature interchangeably tends to use colonial medicine and military medicine to depict tropical medicine. The purpose of tropical medicine, the author points out, was to transform those colonies from being the "Whiteman's Grave" into becoming productive regions across Africa and India, namely to see to it that they could be where the Europeans need to thrive while developing other colonies.

            As the focus to turn things around continued, special culturally adjusted drugs and medications derived from African healing herbal resources was invented, such as quinine, to treat malaria – which was unknown in the western nature of disease list and causal factors and the treatment profiles. Not until the British assault on the Ashanti Empire in 1874 a point from where to get to the interior of Africa was a staggering task. With war on the Ashanti of Gold Coast (now Ghana), a convenient starting point for the history and modern tropical medicine in Africa was realized as has been documented by various writers such as Bynum in 1994, Curtin in 1996 and Barononv, our present writer, in 2008.

           From here, it is fascinating to learn that tropical medicine particularly paved the way for cultural globalization we have today. How, one may again ask? Drawing from our author's (David Baronov) account in African history of colonial medicine in Ghana, he reports of the insight given by C. Goods in 1991 whereby John Vanderkemp, a Dutch physician was generally credited with establishing the First Medical Missionary in Africa in 1799. From that time, medicine in the hands of the missionaries became a vital instrument for Christianizing the people involved in colonizing. With the medical feat on the cultural ground noted, moving inward Africa was the most extreme change required to challenge the restless African mosquitoes that naturally turned to be biological exercise of destruction against the white missionists and colonists. By 1805 through 1841, the book points out that Six Major Expeditions by the British took place with an average mortality rate of 50% orchestrated by malaria. In 1988, Macleod reported similar expeditions into Ghana and Nigeria of 1881 through 1887 with death rates of 5% to 8 % as significant. By and large, the expedition in 1874 whereby 2,500 British troops that received quinine to ward off malaria before being sent to the West African interior to battle the intransigent Ashanti people and the return of the troops with victory and little loss of their lives marked a new era of colonial rule, western powers and influence in Africa. From its inception, tropical medicine was recognized as an essential tool for western expansion and therefore of the globalization of the world we currently live in.                                         

           The "European medicine" and its "handmaiden", in addition to "public health" – as the author notes, served as critical "tools of Empire" with typical transformative, symbolic and practical consequences. The western powers under colonial dispensation deployed tropical medicine – first of all (a) to protect European soldiers and administrators from tropical diseases such as malaria, second (b) to protect settlers, civil servants and labourers in key economic sectors of profit earning capacity, and third (c) as an ideological weapon to foster the superiority of western culture, beliefs and values over the African patterns. I found interesting the author's depiction that other African areas un-reached by the invading and colonizing Europeans were considered like lost markets and apparently that frantic efforts were geared up to occupy them for the good of the western exchange with African raw materials and cultures. Until the later part of 19th century, tropical medicine was not formally organized. The need to structure tropical medicine as a development challenge found a voice and administrative skill in the argument that to understand the extension of biomedicine to Africans to be useful – both as a utilitarian need and as a device to introduce western norms it must be truly and scientifically regimented. The view here suggests that development we are talking about, and of any kind, must first of all be anchored on the single and complex needs and challenges of peoples and their times. For that reason, it was viewed that even the Africans that rejected the Christian culture being extended to them by the missionaries and colonists' enterprises still had interest in the white man's medical system and opportunity offered.   

          Furthermore, I liked the effort of the author when he discusses the role of anthropology and other disciplines in constructing African knowledge systems and their medical inclinations and temerities or so to say some reckless attempts that offended the African values in order to position the western ones. Here he talks about using ethnography to study and understand the people to be redirected, ruled and transformed. Issues such as sorcery, magic, witchcraft, superstition compared to the level of rational knowledge system and all else are highlighted. The retention of pre-modern beliefs and practices is attributed to either a lack of resources to fully evolve biomedicine or some worth delayed, or made an inevitable geographical change.

          Other areas the book discusses which are useful and good to read include the features of biomedical system in an African domain, the pluralism of African medical system and western dualism. In the rendering, the author shows that African societies have each what is called plural worldviews or cosmologies around the issues that define and explain causation and remedy to illnesses. Each cosmology, like all cosmologies, is to construct a broad based explanatory narrative that logically incorporates varied interpretations of reality. As such, African healing systems – methods and theories – must therefore be acknowledged as efforts that have not remained frozen in a timeless ethnographic present; but will have indeed, the capacity to change and adapt with the times. This remark was also observed by Schoepf in 1992.

          To understand African therapies, philosophies, herbal and animal resources, healers and patients alike, and their health care support groups, it is vital to discard biases, ancient prejudices and stereotypes and trivialized notions and benefits, and then be able to study what practitioners conceive of medical realities to mean in their cultural context of therapy. Social, class, social networks, community level conflicts, role of supernaturalism, kinship medicine and types of healers that pertain to explaining sources of misfortune and illness, as well as healing domains are nicely outlined by the book and they really made sense in the context of a changing African and western biomedicine, realities and challenges.

          A couple of areas can be criticized in this book. For example, the analysis of the book is often arduous whereby repetitions are evident; and that alone, diminishes the concentration of the material. In certain areas where some specific examples are required the author carefully ignored them. For instance, in the west the history of biomedicine or even that of African therapeutic systems as exercised in the 1970s should have been amplified with cases. There is also a problem with grounding his discourse with a relevant theory and make effort to recognize the numerous and dynamic changing nature of African healing systems. But apparently David Baronov chose to point to some relatively modern examples steeped in African methods of treatment. In doing so, he relied on focusing on previous circumstances of African medical syncretism. The structure of the book itself organized in chapters is easy to follow. But I had expected to read in the final chapter some evidence to forge together the work's claims such that a demonstration of how African biomedicine changed Western biomedicine and vice versa will be clear.

          Other reviews of this work such as the one by Karen Flint of the University of North Carolina point out that given the author's perspective, the African plural medical cultures which made a case for incorporated biomedicine, the study can be argued to attest to or reflect any other growing regions or societies where medical cultures are not only open but also pluralistic, multiculturalistic in the natural world. Another critique offered by an African historian who writes about the history of African therapeutics is that this book might better look more critically and persuasively at the influence Africans had on Western medicine through their role in introducing African remedies and medicinal plants pharmacopeia, or perhaps, African influences on the agenda of the World Health Organization.

          Let me conclude this review by stating that apart from these shortcomings, this book is a go. It is vigorously written and well portrayed from the very historical point of view of the author who shows that biomedicine is an inevitable cultural history, a depiction of medical cultural interchange. In this case, how Africa has transformed and in turn transforms the western society by the consequences of the critical colonial encounter. In particular, the effort at initiating tropical medicine in an African context of plural health care is remarkable. The purpose of which is, namely to protect the colonial and missionary soldiers, the administrators and by extension the civil society of the time and to further penetrate the interior to engage the Africans in the emergent global capitalist community.

Whether you worship God, Satan or no deity whatsoever there is one thing which is a truism regarding human nature.And that thing is rationality.Or rationalism.It may even be realism or plain old logic.I believe that two people can always sit down and negotiate a point of agreement.The only thing which interrupts negotiation is power.Power does not always recognize external logic or need.Power only recognizes power.This is simple but then again, isn’t that always the best and surest route through any equation?

I’m full of sadness over the execution of Muammar Gadhafi.  I’m also full of sadness over Miss Eunice and Charlie James.  All three in possession of a type of power and all three without the good sense God gave shit.  See, you’re supposed to know or at least have the ability to be made to know when your sun is setting.  Gadhafi had lead a nation before he was 30 years old and during a forty year reign he could look out over millions of people and know that their lives were in his two, pitiful, human hands.  The same is true of Eunice and Charlie.  How many times did each one step into a bar and have nearly every person alternately greet them with desire or envy?  That’s the most seductive power.  The power of youth and attraction.  We are led to believe or get drunk on the belief that it is a thing of always.  It isn’t.  I’ve been cute for a long time but I’ve also been rational for a long time and I can tell you the absolute truth on this subject.  It takes longer and longer for me to become presentable.  It takes longer and longer to recover from a night of free stuff – none of which is usable under any situation except the social.  I know that the power I have – pretty power – means nothing in ten years, twenty years, when only the vestiges of my attraction remains.  Just like anyone else I’ll have to review my glorious past in the frames of photographs (frozen images of what I once was).  Miss Eunice and Mr. Charlie, both of them, never got the benefit of my grandmother’s wit:  “chile, pick one and stick to it.”  I heard.  I obeyed.  No one has to tell me that the five minutes have begun.  I’ve picked one.

Muammar’s five minutes more than likely came when an African president came to see him offering asylum.  Offering a chance for him to keep his millions.  Offering a chance for him to keep his family intact.  Muammar didn’t listen and now all of his money and his children are refugees to banks and nations.  His refusal to hear the ticking led to the end of his son’s life.  He could have saved everything but drunk with forty years of power he had lost all reason.  Maybe, I like to think, that after the African president left him, Muammar laughed it off.  One minute past.  Maybe he talked to his sons.  Two minutes past.  Maybe he kissed his wives.  Three minutes past.  Maybe he surveyed all that he would continue to hold.  Four minutes past.  And then he continued to give orders to fight the rebels.  Five minutes past and his life was at an end.  The real ugly would begin.

Ugly isn’t an adjective which denotes a lack of physical attraction.  Ugly is not the healed burn.  It is not the scars of a warrior.  It isn’t even a broken heart.  Ugly is a sight which bestializes man.  Ugly is a state lacking all beauty.  There is beauty in the healed skin of a person who has experienced a burn.  It is the mark of one who has been honed, a human sword, in the pursuit of survival.  And your scars, internal and external, only mean that you have been through some things and yet you live another minute, hour, day, year.  Ugly is not a scar or a defect of birth.  Ugly is a group of people who pile into a meat locker to take cheap camera photos of an aged corpse, sans shirt, shoes, and covering for the head.  Ugly is when we use power where there is no ability to answer in kind.  Muammar let those five minutes pass and let himself, his son, and his country be set upon by the ugly.  Libya has no defense for the coming power, greater than any it can imagine, which will relentlessly relieve it of its wealth.  Why else would a rebel army be given guns, tanks, and missiles?  Power rarely engages in altruism.

Muammar’s body, bereft of power and spirit, spent four days on this earth.  The same way that the once beautiful woman and once handsome man spends their last moments (really years) – alone and walking soundless rooms.  There is a price to be paid for ignoring that final call through darkness and that hand extended through the mist of pride, vanity and ego.  The price is a type of death or absolute death.  Muammar, Eunice and Charlie all rest within the Earth and this is where they would have rested anyway.  But if the situation had gone different.  If the three of them and all of us had given respect to those five minutes between when goodness comes to call and when the scales are being weighed between keeping a hand on power and going forward to the next phase of life – what would they have given to the universe?

Muammar could have bounced more grandchildren.  Miss Eunice could have been the hand which guided her (would-be) spouse into the winter of life, and Charlie could have used his position to help some mother’s son.  All of that and more are possibilities.

They’re gone.  We’re here.  And our task within our circles of power is to respect that space where there is an opportunity for beauty and the likelihood of ugly.  One minute.  Two minutes.  Three….

It might seem strange to solicit praises for an individual saddled with a job title fraught with negativity.  We have come to think of “hustle” in the pejorative sense.  That’s so unfortunate.  Unfortunate indeed.  Hustle is an adverb and hustler is a noun.  You hustle in the morning when you get yourself ready for work and the kids out of the door and on the bus stop.  You hustle when someone is coming over, with 15 minutes notice, and your front room could use some sprucing.  You hustle when you’re working in a restaurant desperately trying to optimize your tips.  In none of those examples do we see any elements of criminal activity.  All are necessary to simply undertake this job called life.

Going further.  When one is employed one has a hustle.  And although you may not know it the doctor who works in private practice and the plumber who is on call 24 hours a day – they are one and the same.  How so?  Nothing comes to them.  They have to go out and seek their daily bread.  So, one who has a hustle is a state of being where there is a job to be done autonomously – without directions from any other individual.  A man or woman who has a hustle is the boss.  They are the captains of the fleet and truly, on a daily basis, determine destiny.

Let’s go to examples of hustlers.  These examples do not include criminals or evildoers.  A pimp or a dope dealer or a corner clocker – these beings are parasites.  They can’t make a dime unless someone is sick, misguided, left alone in the world, or in pain.  They take and give nothing in return and for that matter they don’t give anything to themselves because everything they do is situational.  They have no end game, no set point, and no goals.  An example of a hustler comes in the form of James Evans (the father on “Good Times”).  He was working on the docks when he could get work in the cold Chicago climate.  He was beating pavement with Smitty and if memory serves me he might have done odd jobs for Bookman.  James Evans had the weight of the world on his shoulders.  His world which consisted of Thelma, J. J., and Florida.  It was his sole responsibility and there was no dispute in that fact.  All of his outrage and his outbursts went towards that aim.

The entire history of Black men in America should bear witness that a hustler is a very good thing.  There are people who wouldn’t have eaten, lived in a warm home, or even gone to the best schools in the land if it hadn’t been for a hustler.  This individual for whom no work is to low.  The hustler’s anthem is as follows:  A check beats a blank.  They are not of the fabric of these New Negroes who will let folks starve, bills go unpaid, because they didn’t feel comfortable with available means of employment.  The hustler will shovel shit in a torrent of snow and sleet to make sure his child has shoes to wear to the prom.  That’s the essence of a hustler, he’s the tough talking angel who hardly ever says he loves you, and more than likely never will.  He shows you.  He shows you with the sweat on his brow and the stoop of his back.  She’s also the woman who works three jobs and magically leaves fifty cents under your pillow when your tooth comes out.

A hustler is not the sole property of Black America or America itself.  The hustler is a universal occupation.  If it wasn’t for hustlers so many of us would not be the “firsts” of our families and too many of us forget the calloused hands and feet which led us to our seats in towers of ivory and steel.  But not today.  Today we should take a moment in quiet reflection on hustlers and when our minds recognize the calamities which would have befallen us had we not been the recipient of such hard fought largesse – let’s praise him.  And we also praise her.  Praises due to the hustlers of this world and the love they bear which cannot be put into some sad, sorry, tired and tawdry words.  Just feel it.  Look around and see it.  It abounds and resounds in our everywhere.  We are blessed with the presence of a hustler.  Amen.

Afrocentric Culture Versus Scientific Culture
 
Date: March 18, 2013
To: Professor Molefe Asante
From: Ozodi Osuji, PhD
Subject:  Afrocentric culture versus Scientific Culture
 
With the below synopsis of what I mean by scientific culture I conclude my initiated communication with you. I deliberately decided to communicate with you because I identified you as one of the chief proponents of the Afrocentric movement. That movement, I believe was useful in the 1960s and 1970s when black folks were trying to define themselves on their own terms and extricate their identity from how white men defined them. However, the world has moved on. Now, what pays dividends in the real world is training people in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology and their applied forms in technology. I believe that it is only a people who are at the forefront of science and technology that will dominate the world of the future. Talking about our people’s glorious past when if you go to any American first rate university, departments of science you seldom see black students are not going to help us. Boning up on African and African American culture is not going to improve our lives one bit. What we need are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of this world and, of course, the pure scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Tyco Brahe, Kepler, Thomas Young, Dalton, Boyle, Lavoisier, Laplace, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J.J. Thomson, Becquerel, Roentgen, Mendel, Pasteur, Maria and Pierre Curie, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Broglie, Max Born, Eddington, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Alexander Friedman, Lemaitre, Hubble,  James Chadwick, Strassman, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Alexander Fleming, James Watson, Francis Crick, Hugh Everett, John Bell, Alan Aspect, Alan Gutt, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, Witten, De Witt and the other lords of the physical sciences (I have written short biographies of those and what they accomplished…please notice the absence of African names among these geniuses). The black race no longer need mere talkers and militants, such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela (somewhere I reviewed books on them); it is about time that we joined the world of science and technology. We have what it takes to make it in science and technology and should stop wasting our young people’s time by filling their impressionable minds with unproductive ideas on race and culture.  With this feedback I end my feedback to you. I leave it to you to make of the feedback what you want to, to feel like I did not validate your 75 books and feel angry at me or to see a breath of fresh air in the black firmament and encourage it or discourage it( what else is new, black folks are known for being destructive of their creative souls; for what it is worth, I have written 45 books and continuing). One must deal with facts and not live in the past; nostalgia is not realism. Cheers, Ozodi Osuji, PhD (UCLA)
 
Abstract:
 
The thesis of this paper is that the philosophy of multiculturalism foisted on society by liberal anthropologists is misguided. That philosophy presupposes that all cultures are at the same level and, as such, should be propagated. The paper disagrees with that view. The society that discovered much of modern science is more advanced than the society that still sees the sun as a god and worships it.  It is humiliating for one group’s culture to be presented as better than other groups’ cultures. The author is not saying that one culture is better than others. He is talking about what he calls the scientific culture. The scientific culture does not belong to any specific group although Western Europeans approximate it more than other groups of human beings. In his view, all human beings ought to be encouraged to embrace the scientific methodological approach to living and jettison their group’s ways of approaching phenomena if those are not in sync with the parameters of science. Moreover, identification with particularistic cultures makes for separation of people into ethnic enclaves and foster social divisions and conflicts; a universal scientific culture makes for the union of all people hence peace in the world.
 
REPLACEMENT OF MULTICULTURALISM WITH SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
Ozodi Osuji
 
       Teaching one specific culture as ideal insults those whose cultures are not taught; for example, teaching Eurocentric culture in America makes black folks feel like their cultures are ignored; they feel that their world view is not affirmed and they feel angry.
        The USA was originally founded by Englishmen. Those Englishmen forced all the other Europeans (Germans, Frenchmen, etc.) and, of course, African slaves who came to the USA to learn English and essentially embrace the Americanized English culture that is the lay of the land.
       Whereas this behavior seems cruel it is actually what made for the cultural cohesion of the USA, such as it is. If each ethnic group that came to the USA had been allowed to live in accord with its culture the USA would not be a country but congeries of ethnic enclaves, perhaps as in the Balkans, each fighting others and there would be no peace in the land. The enforced modified English culture on the people of the USA is thus a good thing for it unified the disparate persons and their cultures!
         If we teach a universal culture based on scientific parameters no one group’s values are foisted on others and no group would feel denigrated and angry. All children and people would be gradually socialized to this universal scientific culture.
       At present the movement to teach Americans from different ethnic backgrounds to identify with their ethnic cultures gives them particularistic mode of looking at the world, which leads to separatism and eventual ethnic conflicts in America, as in the Balkans.
        In the past English men propagated their culture at the expense of other group’s cultures hence made them angry but that is not what we are talking about here; we are not talking about English or European or African or Asian culture but a universal culture based on science, on what is known to be self-evidently true.
        That been said, it is still necessary to make English the universal language of all Americans; the current trend of allowing Spanish speakers and speakers of other languages to retain their language while calling themselves Americans is not only misguided but dangerous; it would, sooner or later, lead to ethnic wars in the USA.
         If you do not want to speak English then do not come to the USA, stay in the country where your language is spoken; it is as simple as that!
       It is really an aggressive behavior to come to the USA and retain ones language and ask Americans to learn one’s language and speak to one in that language, as we now have to do to Spanish speakers in California and elsewhere where the Latin population is increasing. The Aggressive Latinos want to convert us to their culture, a culture not known for its contribution to modern science and technology! Take a look at any textbook on physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, the core sciences and you would not encounter Spanish contributors to them! These people want to return us to their culture, a culture that essentially is at a more primitive stage of scientific evolution!
      One should not talk about how one’s culture did something  good in the past (the Spaniards, for example, were at the forefront of European civilization when America was discovered in the late 1400s but now are at its bottom); instead, one should talk about how to do something rationally and scientifically.
      One should talk about the empirically demonstrable best way of doing something instead of harp on how ones culture did something in the past. There is no evidence that people in the past knew how to do anything better than people in the present do!
       There is a loving way to raise children so that they turn out well adapted and well-functioning adults and there is a toxic way to raise children so that they turn out poorly adjusted to coping with the exigencies of living.
        We must have evidence based way of how best to do anything and not merely indulge in nostalgic yearnings for the past or talk about how beautiful the past supposedly was.
        In pre-British India, for example, Hindus burned life widows to death with their dead husbands in their funeral pyres; surely, no one wants to go back to that type of behavior. 
       As we speak, in Muslim countries female children are prevented from going to school and working; surely, no one thinks that is the right way to live.
        We cannot celebrate primitive behavior just because they are part of our inherited cultures.
 
ON SCIENCE
 
          In science you observe phenomena and verify what you observe and set up a method following which any person who so chooses can verify your observations. Science deals with empirical facts. 
       Science is predicated on the notion that the world came into being by accident and proceeds on accidental events.
       Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, do not deal with facts; they deal with how people find meaning in life.  Religion assumes that there is a higher power, God, in the universe. We cannot verify the existence of God.
      Science is a methodological approach to phenomena; science is not an end but a method; it is a way of looking at the universe so that what is seen is there (as confirmed by other observers). In science the individual  does not just spout his opinion on phenomena; instead, he observes it, sees it as he thinks that it is, and tries to make sure that his perception is correct. He posits a method for verifying what he saw so that whoever else wants to verify his conclusion can do so.
       Generally, observation and experimentation are the most reliable means of verifying a proposition.  Ideas must be verifiable and falsifiable (Karl Popper says) for them to be scientific.
       A scientific idea is not permanent truth; it is truth that has not been falsified by other observers yet. As long as most observers can verify an idea it is accepted as a workable truth subject to when it is falsified, in which case it is discarded.
        Ideas that cannot be falsified, such as the existence of God are not  scientific ideas; such ideas fall into the realm of belief and authority; you believe that there is God based on  authority, on what some religious authorities on the religion that you accept say about him but not because you have by yourself verified that there is God.
      In our age the scientific method is the accepted epistemology, the accepted way of ascertaining what is true and what is false.
 
REPLACEMENT OF FOOLISHNESS WITH OTHER FOOLISHNESS
 
          Sooner or later, African Americans and Africans discover that the Christianity that was shoved down their throats is not their people’s religion. Christianity was formed by Jews as a sect of Judaism.  Jesus Christ and Paul, the two founders of Christianity were Jews.
       Jesus, indeed, made it crystal clear that his religion is for his fellow Jews; he had nothing to do with non-Jews, gentiles. It was the idealistic hence universalizing Paul that reinterpreted Christianity to say that it is for all people, Jews and non-Jews.
         Judaism is for Jews. Christianity is a Jewish cult. Islam is for Arabs.  The philosophy carried by those three religions is Semitic and there is no two ways of going about it. 
       Europeans appear to have reinterpreted the teachings of Christianity to serve their society’s needs hence made it no longer the religion of Jews loving Jews that Jesus taught but a religion of war and punishment for those who disobey the rulers of Europe (the rulers of Europe claimed to rule by divine right; they saw themselves as the temporal Stewarts of God and as such their will represented God’s will and must be obeyed as people believed that they must obey God’s will).
        When African persons discover that these three religions represent the world view of those who oppressed Africans (Arabs enslaved Africans, Europeans who call themselves Christians enslaved Africans) their immediate urge is to throw all three religions away. Foreign religions, they believe are not for nationalist Africans.
         Unfortunately, many Africans and African Americans having discarded the religion of their oppressors believe that the solution is to replace those religions with what they call African religions.
         In their confusion as to who is African they look to ancient Egypt as African. Thus, some of these confused souls talk about what they call Kemet religion, the supposed religion of ancient Egypt and embrace it.
        Were ancient Egyptians Africans? How did they see themselves? They did not call themselves black, nor did they call themselves white. They portrayed themselves in pictures as brown people. Therefore, they are Semitic people, of the same group as Arabs and Jews (at any rate ancient Egyptians are still found in extant Egypt; they are not black; they are brown in color, pretty close to the Arab, Jewish color).  Kemet religion is a Semitic religion.    
        Aside from the fact that ancient Egyptians and their religion were Semitic there is the problem of religion in general. If Africans and African Americans were to go to West Africa where African Americans came from and embraced West African religions yet that would not be doing the rational thing.
        All religion is mythopoeic approach to phenomena. All religions, African, Jewish, Arabs, Asians, Hindu, and European were formed when mankind was not scientific in its approach to phenomena hence are irrational world views. Therefore, instead of returning to African or Egyptian religions, Africans should seek rational explanation of phenomena. 
       Africans should seek science based metaphysics and in general embrace what I call scientific culture, a culture that is neither European, nor African or any other peoples, a culture based on what Thomas Kuhn called the scientific paradigm, not as foreigners tell them that science is.
        Science does not belong to Europeans, it is a universal methodology and one does not have to wait for a European to tell one what science is; one can ascertain what science is and what it is not.
        I am not asking Africans to wait for Europeans to define what makes sense to them; they do not have to fit their views into European constructed reality or anyone else’s constructed reality (reality is unknown to us and whatever we believe that it is, is a social and or individual construct).
        Reality is not any one particular individual or group’s construction of it.  Reality is what it is and it is for each of us to work to figure out what it is through the scientific method.
        The individual should fit his self into the impersonal constructs of science but not to any one’s image of science.   The individual should accept what is self-evidently true without trying to do what mad men do: try to fit reality into their preconception of what it should be.
 
FROM CULTURAL RELATIVISM TO SCIENTIFIC CULTURE
 
        A patronizing behavior of white liberals towards Africans is to tell Africans that all cultures are equal. I am talking about the nonsense of cultural relativism propagated by white culture anthropologists, a nonsense swallowed by Africans hence you find Africans misbehaving and telling us that what they do is rooted in their culture and that their culture is as good as other cultures thus justifying their criminal behaviors with their so-called culture.
      African men philander, have numerous concubines and convert their political and bureaucratic offices to personal use; they give jobs to their people, not on the basis of merit but corruption. They tell us that in their culture they are required to help their people. The problem is that giving your people who are unqualified jobs means that they cannot do those jobs well hence retards the progress of Africa.
     The liberal teaching that all cultures are the same is so much load of rubbish. Some cultures are more advanced than others. There is such a thing as unscientific (primitive) culture and a scientific culture.  Africa was unscientific (primitive) in many aspects of its cultural ways.
      In scientific culture behavior is based on the findings of science.  Scientific culture is universal culture, not the particularistic cultures associated with given ethnic groups. 
       The egos of third people have been stroked long enough when they are told that their cultures are as good as the culture of physical scientists; it is now time we told them that only those who look at the world from a scientific frame of reference are civilized; at any rate, it is such people that produce advanced technologies and the products that modern technologies give to the world, such as Internet, computers, wireless telephones, television, microwave oven, cars, planes, trains, refrigerators, air conditioners and so on.
      African cultures contributed zilch to science and technology and if so how are they as good as the culture that gave us Special and General Relativity and Quantum Physics and the electronic revolution?
 
DISCUSSION
 
           It is true that Africans were told by white men that they are primitive and that their cultures are no good. Naturally, no one wants to be told that he is primitive and that his people’s ways of living is no good. Therefore, Africans try to present their people’s cultures in a positive light. 
        Thus, many African nationalists celebrate Africa and its cultures. Such Africans embrace everything African. If challenged they quickly tell one what is wrong with European and North American cultures.
      Obviously, Europeans and Americans have a lot of issues and no one is saying that they are ideal. Consider marriage. African societies allowed polygamy. The Christian West permits only monogamy. But they permit people to divorce and remarry. Thus, what ends up happening is that men have serial marriages, sometimes up to seven marriages. That is to say that they have done what the African did, have many wives.
       Thus, the African asks: why not be honest over sex:  the typical man wants to have sexual activity with more than one woman so why not go ahead and allow men to have, say, seven wives, why decry African men for having polygamy if white folks are essentially doing the same thing?  The African nationalist believes that his people are more realistic on this score and does not want hypocritical Westerners preaching to him how to live a life he himself does not live.
       The point is that the African nationalist does not see anything wrong with past Africa and resents those who talk about what is wrong with Africa.
        I understand the stance of the African nationalist. Be that as it may, there are real problematic issues in Africa.
        I am not seeking to replace African culture with European culture. I am interested in what I call scientific culture. I believe that following the scientific method we can figure out the right ways to live and live so and do so all over the world. For example, we all agree that it is wrong to kill and to steal; we can pass laws that state that and we all live accordingly.
        One is not saying that we should not study ethnic groups; we must by all means study all human groups and understand their cultures. Understanding their diverse cultures helps us to understand our own culture; cross cultural studies helps us put our culture in broad perspective and understand it relative to other cultures. 
         We can learn a lot from the way other folks do things. This does not, however, mean that we should have the delusion that all cultures are equal and the same.
        Some cultures are more advanced than others. A culture that figured out quantum mechanics is more advanced than a culture that has no idea what is meant by atoms; a culture that figured out that diseases are caused by germs is more advanced than a culture that thinks that diseases are caused by nonexistent gods (hence its people die from treatable diseases). 
        Nor is one making the assumption that Western cultures are better than African cultures. Whereas there are many useful aspects of Western cultures obviously there are awful aspects of those cultures.  Parts of American culture, for example, is as primitive as it gets and no one would consider them more civilized than many aspects of Africa’s culture.
       Nevertheless, America has pockets of scientific cultural civilization, such as at Boston, Berkeley and Westwood (California) etc.
      One is not equating the entirety of the West with scientific culture; in fact, most of the West is as unscientific as Africa is; scientific culture obtains only in small enclaves in the West, the Enclaves that give the West its science and technology.
 
CONCLUSION
 
         Multi ethnic countries like Nigeria will always live in conflict and political instability as each ethnic group strives to gain at the expense of others.  What needs to be done is to impose one language on all the constituting ethnic groups to unify them (English will do) and impose one scientific culture on all the groups to give them a rational manner of relating to their world.
          All these, of course, would not give multiethnic societies perfect unity, for the world is a place of individuation, separation, specialness and mutual attack; that conflict can be reduced but not eliminated.
        One is not a naïve political idealist who thinks that perfect peace is possible on earth; as long as people live in bodies and have egos they would seek different interests and will perceive reality differently and thus have conflicts; it is not possible to attain perfection as long as people live in flesh. Perfection, whatever it is, can only be attained in a non-physical state, in the world of spirits where folks are not limited by the exigencies of matter, energy, space and time (those limit what we living in bodies can do).
        Political realism accepts imperfect human beings and their imperfect political behavior and accepts the inevitability of social conflict and prepares to deal with it with draconian governments that posited laws and used those to protect law abiding persons and punish lawbreakers.
          Ethnic groups, like individuals see differences between them; some groups have the delusion that they are better than others (hence gratify their egos neurotic wish for superiority); these behaviors generate conflict and thus human beings are condemned to living in social conflict.
       Finding a common scientific culture that gives most people a path to living their lives rationally reduces inherent social conflicts but does not eliminate them. The earth is not going to be heaven but it can approximate it.
        Science enables us to approximate perfection more than any other instrument that I know of.
 
Ozodi Osuji
March 18, 2013
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(907) 440-4317

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A RASTA PLAY

(written and illustrated by Ras Jahaziel August 2010) www.rastafarivisions.com

AND THE MASSACRE IN
TIVOLI GARDENS JAMAICA
MAY 2010

PRELUDE: WHAT THE NEWS MEDIA SAID:

"Seventy-three civilians and one soldier died in last week's push into Tivoli."
Jamaica Gleaner

“Over 73 civilians Killed, 500 Jamaicans injured"
"Mounting casualties from the massive offensive by the security forces on Tivoli Gardens have put morgues on the brink of overflowing." The Gleaner

" The media reports are not telling the full story of what is actually taking place in Jamaica, they fail to address the governments involvement in the crisis and the underlining historical context”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freestylee/4636672885/

BEHIND THE SCENES
The truth that the University is not saying, the Church is not saying, the official News is not saying, and the other second-hand Mouth-pieces are not saying:

An Inter-faith Dialogue between Snow-white The Money God and The Three Dragons

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Gentlemen, welcome to this our fourth-hundred annual inter-faith dialogue where we exchange ideas for the better management of our slave-holdings in the modern colonies. Now please relax and take off your masks. Those do-gooder masks are only for the outside when we have to put on a public show. But here, if you want to say "Nigger" you can say "Nigger."

HA HA HA HA HA

CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP.

This is the forum where we can be ourselves and speak our minds without worrying about political correctness. We do not have to go around corners and pretend that PROFIT is not the only thing that matters. Every-one in here knows that the advancement of our empire has often called for ruthless action against inferior peoples. Often times it has involved moving populations from areas that we desire. Sometimes the methods may be bloody and involve lost of life amongst the inferior peoples, but everyone of you know the ropes, so to speak. So please speak your mind without worry. The press is not here. This is the place where we can discuss the dirty details that would shock the larger public outside.

Now the first thing I would like to do is to express my concerns about the stability of our modern plantation system in the Caribbean and the volatility of our Negro labor force in light of recent events.

I am sure that we all agree the image of "Paradise" must be maintained at all costs. For close to four centuries we have reaped billions of dollars in profit from the sweat of Black labor in the hot climes of these islands, and what has made our businesses so profitable is that up to this day Black labor has been for the most part free or very cheap. But now our old sugar plantations that required us to maintain thousands of slaves have been phased out, and Tourism has now become our new sugar plantation. Not only do we need fewer Negroes, but unlike in the days of sugar cane it is important to project an idyllic paradise image despite the glaring wide-spread poverty of the locals.

(The nagging truth keeps asking:Why do some people have all the luxury and some people have all the tears? Paradise and Hell all in the same place? Who keeps this system running from generation to generation? The Army, The Police, The politicians, and The Church?)

But we have a problem looming on the horizon: As a result of our recent economic adjustments the weight on the poor has been increased significantly, to the extent that they are nearing breaking-point. If we do not act preemptively and take drastic measures they are likely to rebel and spoil our paradise image. We need to crush rebellion long before it happens.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection: Pardon me for saying so, but I think your fears may be a little bit exaggerated because as you know, we have always used our police and army as a barrier of terror to protect our slave-holding properties. They have been trained to be very brutal and ruthless, and as a result of their consistent terrorism most of the slave population fears them. I don’t think we have anything to worry about, but if it would make you feel better we can increase the terror.

SNOW WHITE-The Money God: Well make sure the media publishes a good excuse for doing so before giving the police the go-ahead. But no matter what it takes we must maintain the flow of profit from our human and material possessions on these islands. Even though these economic measures will affect the lives of the poor fairly harshly, such measures are necessary to maintain THE PROFIT FLOW.

But keeping the plantation from burning has always been a balancing act. On the one hand, too much hardship may cause spontaneous rebellion, and on the other hand the extra hardship that the Niggers feel also makes them desperate for money. In that state of mind it is easier to control and manipulate them, and it is never difficult to find spies and informers. Another very important advantage in keeping the Negroes in a desperate economic state was demonstrated just recently in Tivoli Gardens. If you did not understand the power of our economic grip on the Negroes you would have been surprised by the zeal that was exhibited by our police and soldiers as they went about maiming and killing other Niggers that look just like themselves.

With our power to decide who eats and who starves it was easy to enlist dozens of paid killers.

So despite all of the idealistic calls for equal rights and justice, we know from long experience that we have to keep the economic lid on the Negroes. It is a form of control that we have always used, and in any case it has never been wise to let the Nigger get too far. We just need to be prepared at all times for any eventuality.

FIRST DRAGON, The Minister of Legal Terrorism and Plantation Protection:  Well, in light of your concern about the possibility of these economic measures causing dire social consequences, let me assure you that we have already equipped our FORCES with the appropriate training and practice in the event of an uprising.

TO READ FULL ARTICLE SEE http://www.rastafarivisions.com/jamaicamassacre.html
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Author: David Baronov. Publisher: Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Pages 248 

For a start, African focused biomedicine and how it originated, particularly in Ghana and Nigeria is fascinating to trace; more importantly how African medicine is transforming western biomedicine is something we need to follow in the cultural context of medical globalization. Dr. David Baronov's book brings out the colonial, historical, and cultural insight, including how tropical biomedicine was invented in Western Africa, and tested for success in Ghana, during the Ashanti colonial war to enter the interior of Africa. African pundit mosquitoes served as biological weapons of mass graves resulting to the inevitable scientific breakthrough of the time to tame malaria. This book is vigorously crafted and laid out. It stands out as a go for me.

I just picked up this book The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange written by David Baronov (2008) with a view to doing some pleasure reading much like I commonly surf the internet. But this book turned out to be different to me. It held me up reading and thinking with the narratives until I finished it. I am just happy to have read the work and gained some deep critical and historical grounded insights from the ontological arguments. A book of 248 pages, the author David Baronov sets out to show that African Medicine like the Western Medicine is a cultural system steeped in different missionary and colonial platforms of conception and development.

          The book argues that African medicine and cultures served as a transformational conflict and agenda to biomedicine on the one hand, and on the other hand, biomedicine equally rendered the African medical system to face inevitable opportunity and analysis in formulating research and focused need on the development scale. The writer declares that it is important to understand the historical grounds of the colonial expansionist urges that placed the African and Western biomedicines on that pedestal for each other. In other words, African Medicine is a prodding and a provoking area of interest and more so in this age of global medical pluralism and western domination of the biomedical sphere.

          Not outlined or discerned in the book is the many Pentecostalistic rocket attack launches against anything indigenous when it comes to addressing ways of knowing and healing  – namely spiritual and oracular, magic and sorcery, divination, supernatural and naturalist fields of disease attributions, including forms of remedial approaches. Except the scathing Christian Missionary activities at the time of colonial incursions on African beliefs and values, I seem to have seen little drawn to show a glimpse to capture the Pentecostalist challenges to indigenous knowledge and its impact on the ongoing shared medical systems in the global scene. By Pentecostalism, I mean the Neo-Christian or born-again radicalism that protests against using cultural resources such as spirits and oracles as a source of meaning.

          The author highlights that at the beginning of colonialism and following the course of intercultural exchange, Western biomedicine went out when it was compelled to save lives and expand the frontiers of Europe. In the circumstances that prevailed, medical initiatives resulting from African focused needs radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. But while it was doing so to protect Europeans in Africa, Africa became engaged in using Western biomedicine and in turn, transformed the Western biomedicine in itself. The typical intercultural dynamics that flowed has enhanced the mercantilist or capitalist focus of the western medical pragmatism. Basically, the book is arguing that the African transformation of Western Medicine and the dynamics of global cultural exchange – posits the fact that contemporary African medical systems are in no way less "biomedical" than Western medicine. In fact, both "greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange."

          I found several themes within the chapters of the book fascinating such as the origins of African biomedicine, the emergence of tropical medicine and African medical campaigns, including African biomedicine as being a stream of ontology – that is, (a) as a whole medical sphere; and (b) as a consequence of Africa's incorporation into the capitalist world system.

          I enjoyed the systematic analysis brought to bear on this theme; the ontological whole, which is, moreover, outlined as a sum total of saying that African medical pluralism has become a global biomedicine that is currently inseparable from the life history of the capitalist world system. What that indicates, in the view of the author, is that African biomedicine has become enjoined in a web of interdependent and mutually conditioning relationships. Therefore, it will be an error to see or frame African medical pluralistic conjoining as if it is a single stream of knowledge. It is not. Rather, we make effort to analyze and portray African biomedicine as both an ontological whole and a multi-faceted singular historical cultural conjecture. In other words, the African biomedicine is a multilayered form of incorporated or borrowed cultural formation. That is also arguably true when we analyze and connect the dots by which African biomedicine is the source as well as a function, like the western biomedical sphere, of a healing enterprise. In addition, African biomedicine is central to symbolic-cultural expression as much as it is equally an expression of social power.

          All of this, the author notes systematically defends the argument that African medical context is relational and expansive, revivifying and re-inventing itself in the global biomedical capitalist sphere, sometimes proving it can be on the extreme spirituality, as it may seem, whereby the ontological atomism marks the western view of biomedicine – the pick-up basis of which forms the capitalistic analytical view of health and medical practice in a condensable structured relationship.          

          On the specifics of what led to the origins of African biomedicine, the author focuses on the features that heralded it in the first place. However, in his 1994 article captioned "On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems" by Robert Pool published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, it is shown that between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa were criticized for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation and neglecting natural causation and practical medical behaviour. Warren in 1974 also criticized the field by taking note that Africans traditionally recognised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness primarily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delineate discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causation and practical activity in the view of Robert Pool?

          African biomedicine, as contended by David Baronov along with the coming of the Europeans to Africa is a benevolent gift. The purpose of which is to improve the health of Africans. Biomedicine has therefore been credited with indirectly "civilizing" the African mind and spirituality by introducing modern scientific principles to supplant African superstition and rational therapeutic poverty and witchcraft. Although biomedicine is foreign to Africa and is portrayed as western on the one side, and on the other angle, it claims to embody principles that are applicable to all societies and peoples.

          Certainly, the western oriented biomedicine focuses on the physical dimensions of the human body and seeks to heal what physically troubles the physical body from functioning properly. It does not necessarily dwell on the inner mind and environmental influences such as the supernatural field. The biomedicine's transformation of Africa is essentially a partial rendering of a much larger process, argues David Baronov. Furthermore, Baronov shows that there is something that is lost or diminished in the above depictions such as the contributions of local African societies and cultures to the development of biomedicine in Africa, including being able to grasp the fact that there is a profound African transformation of biomedicine itself as a global cultural form.

          Baronov equally painted the notion that some critics of biomedicine decry its role as a typical cultural imperialism, that is controlling and domineering – one in which Europe emasculated Africa and redressed it with western beliefs and values. As a force for positive change, Baronov makes a case that by allowing Africans to enter the scientific age through biomedicine, it has thereby vivified and improved their health and general well being. As such, the introduction of biomedicine is viewed as something the Europe does to Africa. Whether resisting or responding favourably to biomedicine, ultimately it is the Africans that are transformed as they touched on the lives and societies in the western world given the missionary and colonial cultural encounter.

          Concluding the characteristics and experiences which explain biomedicine and its role, David Baronov states that the story of biomedicine in Africa has been told in three (inter)disciplinary ways. He outlines the disciplines as follows: (a), medical history; (b), medical anthropology; (c) and African political economy. Yet, as he claims, each of these disciplines fails to ask the fundamental question; namely how Africa has transformed biomedicine instead of focusing on how biomedicine transformed Africa? The problem here is the limited perspective with which each discipline conceptually frames biomedicine in Africa as a scientific, cultural or political process.   

          What turned my curiosity the more is the discussion on tropical medicine in Africa. I really enjoyed this part. Hence, of what formed the basis of tropical medicine in the province of Africa than in any other colonized part of the world? The analysis moves on and provides details around the evolution of factors that prompted its emergence. Tropical biomedicine was not born before critical incidents of diseases and afflictions which now and again devastated the crusade of sharing and exploiting Africa of what it had as resources to be used by the west to solve and sustain its develop-mentalist cause and other disruptive social challenges at home. It became obvious in the pursuit of missionization and evangelization of African cultural spheres along with colonialism, that death rates and culture shocks resulting from peculiar diseases in Africa called the shots to launch a critical medical campaign to face the challenges. The author highlightes the historical stages and activities in different colonized regions of Africa. Contending, he shows that the notion and strategy of tropical medicine came into being in the context of focusing on Africa as a source of knowledge system and with a high cultural resources potential to benefit the western expansionist drives. Literature interchangeably tends to use colonial medicine and military medicine to depict tropical medicine. The purpose of tropical medicine, the author points out, was to transform those colonies from being the "Whiteman's Grave" into becoming productive regions across Africa and India, namely to see to it that they could be where the Europeans need to thrive while developing other colonies.

            As the focus to turn things around continued, special culturally adjusted drugs and medications derived from African healing herbal resources was invented, such as quinine, to treat malaria – which was unknown in the western nature of disease list and causal factors and the treatment profiles. Not until the British assault on the Ashanti Empire in 1874 a point from where to get to the interior of Africa was a staggering task. With war on the Ashanti of Gold Coast (now Ghana), a convenient starting point for the history and modern tropical medicine in Africa was realized as has been documented by various writers such as Bynum in 1994, Curtin in 1996 and Barononv, our present writer, in 2008.

           From here, it is fascinating to learn that tropical medicine particularly paved the way for cultural globalization we have today. How, one may again ask? Drawing from our author's (David Baronov) account in African history of colonial medicine in Ghana, he reports of the insight given by C. Goods in 1991 whereby John Vanderkemp, a Dutch physician was generally credited with establishing the First Medical Missionary in Africa in 1799. From that time, medicine in the hands of the missionaries became a vital instrument for Christianizing the people involved in colonizing. With the medical feat on the cultural ground noted, moving inward Africa was the most extreme change required to challenge the restless African mosquitoes that naturally turned to be biological exercise of destruction against the white missionists and colonists. By 1805 through 1841, the book points out that Six Major Expeditions by the British took place with an average mortality rate of 50% orchestrated by malaria. In 1988, Macleod reported similar expeditions into Ghana and Nigeria of 1881 through 1887 with death rates of 5% to 8 % as significant. By and large, the expedition in 1874 whereby 2,500 British troops that received quinine to ward off malaria before being sent to the West African interior to battle the intransigent Ashanti people and the return of the troops with victory and little loss of their lives marked a new era of colonial rule, western powers and influence in Africa. From its inception, tropical medicine was recognized as an essential tool for western expansion and therefore of the globalization of the world we currently live in.                                         

           The "European medicine" and its "handmaiden", in addition to "public health" – as the author notes, served as critical "tools of Empire" with typical transformative, symbolic and practical consequences. The western powers under colonial dispensation deployed tropical medicine – first of all (a) to protect European soldiers and administrators from tropical diseases such as malaria, second (b) to protect settlers, civil servants and labourers in key economic sectors of profit earning capacity, and third (c) as an ideological weapon to foster the superiority of western culture, beliefs and values over the African patterns. I found interesting the author's depiction that other African areas un-reached by the invading and colonizing Europeans were considered like lost markets and apparently that frantic efforts were geared up to occupy them for the good of the western exchange with African raw materials and cultures. Until the later part of 19th century, tropical medicine was not formally organized. The need to structure tropical medicine as a development challenge found a voice and administrative skill in the argument that to understand the extension of biomedicine to Africans to be useful – both as a utilitarian need and as a device to introduce western norms it must be truly and scientifically regimented. The view here suggests that development we are talking about, and of any kind, must first of all be anchored on the single and complex needs and challenges of peoples and their times. For that reason, it was viewed that even the Africans that rejected the Christian culture being extended to them by the missionaries and colonists' enterprises still had interest in the white man's medical system and opportunity offered.   

          Furthermore, I liked the effort of the author when he discusses the role of anthropology and other disciplines in constructing African knowledge systems and their medical inclinations and temerities or so to say some reckless attempts that offended the African values in order to position the western ones. Here he talks about using ethnography to study and understand the people to be redirected, ruled and transformed. Issues such as sorcery, magic, witchcraft, superstition compared to the level of rational knowledge system and all else are highlighted. The retention of pre-modern beliefs and practices is attributed to either a lack of resources to fully evolve biomedicine or some worth delayed, or made an inevitable geographical change.

          Other areas the book discusses which are useful and good to read include the features of biomedical system in an African domain, the pluralism of African medical system and western dualism. In the rendering, the author shows that African societies have each what is called plural worldviews or cosmologies around the issues that define and explain causation and remedy to illnesses. Each cosmology, like all cosmologies, is to construct a broad based explanatory narrative that logically incorporates varied interpretations of reality. As such, African healing systems – methods and theories – must therefore be acknowledged as efforts that have not remained frozen in a timeless ethnographic present; but will have indeed, the capacity to change and adapt with the times. This remark was also observed by Schoepf in 1992.

          To understand African therapies, philosophies, herbal and animal resources, healers and patients alike, and their health care support groups, it is vital to discard biases, ancient prejudices and stereotypes and trivialized notions and benefits, and then be able to study what practitioners conceive of medical realities to mean in their cultural context of therapy. Social, class, social networks, community level conflicts, role of supernaturalism, kinship medicine and types of healers that pertain to explaining sources of misfortune and illness, as well as healing domains are nicely outlined by the book and they really made sense in the context of a changing African and western biomedicine, realities and challenges.

          A couple of areas can be criticized in this book. For example, the analysis of the book is often arduous whereby repetitions are evident; and that alone, diminishes the concentration of the material. In certain areas where some specific examples are required the author carefully ignored them. For instance, in the west the history of biomedicine or even that of African therapeutic systems as exercised in the 1970s should have been amplified with cases. There is also a problem with grounding his discourse with a relevant theory and make effort to recognize the numerous and dynamic changing nature of African healing systems. But apparently David Baronov chose to point to some relatively modern examples steeped in African methods of treatment. In doing so, he relied on focusing on previous circumstances of African medical syncretism. The structure of the book itself organized in chapters is easy to follow. But I had expected to read in the final chapter some evidence to forge together the work's claims such that a demonstration of how African biomedicine changed Western biomedicine and vice versa will be clear.

          Other reviews of this work such as the one by Karen Flint of the University of North Carolina point out that given the author's perspective, the African plural medical cultures which made a case for incorporated biomedicine, the study can be argued to attest to or reflect any other growing regions or societies where medical cultures are not only open but also pluralistic, multiculturalistic in the natural world. Another critique offered by an African historian who writes about the history of African therapeutics is that this book might better look more critically and persuasively at the influence Africans had on Western medicine through their role in introducing African remedies and medicinal plants pharmacopeia, or perhaps, African influences on the agenda of the World Health Organization.

          Let me conclude this review by stating that apart from these shortcomings, this book is a go. It is vigorously written and well portrayed from the very historical point of view of the author who shows that biomedicine is an inevitable cultural history, a depiction of medical cultural interchange. In this case, how Africa has transformed and in turn transforms the western society by the consequences of the critical colonial encounter. In particular, the effort at initiating tropical medicine in an African context of plural health care is remarkable. The purpose of which is, namely to protect the colonial and missionary soldiers, the administrators and by extension the civil society of the time and to further penetrate the interior to engage the Africans in the emergent global capitalist community.

Whether you worship God, Satan or no deity whatsoever there is one thing which is a truism regarding human nature.And that thing is rationality.Or rationalism.It may even be realism or plain old logic.I believe that two people can always sit down and negotiate a point of agreement.The only thing which interrupts negotiation is power.Power does not always recognize external logic or need.Power only recognizes power.This is simple but then again, isn’t that always the best and surest route through any equation?

I’m full of sadness over the execution of Muammar Gadhafi.  I’m also full of sadness over Miss Eunice and Charlie James.  All three in possession of a type of power and all three without the good sense God gave shit.  See, you’re supposed to know or at least have the ability to be made to know when your sun is setting.  Gadhafi had lead a nation before he was 30 years old and during a forty year reign he could look out over millions of people and know that their lives were in his two, pitiful, human hands.  The same is true of Eunice and Charlie.  How many times did each one step into a bar and have nearly every person alternately greet them with desire or envy?  That’s the most seductive power.  The power of youth and attraction.  We are led to believe or get drunk on the belief that it is a thing of always.  It isn’t.  I’ve been cute for a long time but I’ve also been rational for a long time and I can tell you the absolute truth on this subject.  It takes longer and longer for me to become presentable.  It takes longer and longer to recover from a night of free stuff – none of which is usable under any situation except the social.  I know that the power I have – pretty power – means nothing in ten years, twenty years, when only the vestiges of my attraction remains.  Just like anyone else I’ll have to review my glorious past in the frames of photographs (frozen images of what I once was).  Miss Eunice and Mr. Charlie, both of them, never got the benefit of my grandmother’s wit:  “chile, pick one and stick to it.”  I heard.  I obeyed.  No one has to tell me that the five minutes have begun.  I’ve picked one.

Muammar’s five minutes more than likely came when an African president came to see him offering asylum.  Offering a chance for him to keep his millions.  Offering a chance for him to keep his family intact.  Muammar didn’t listen and now all of his money and his children are refugees to banks and nations.  His refusal to hear the ticking led to the end of his son’s life.  He could have saved everything but drunk with forty years of power he had lost all reason.  Maybe, I like to think, that after the African president left him, Muammar laughed it off.  One minute past.  Maybe he talked to his sons.  Two minutes past.  Maybe he kissed his wives.  Three minutes past.  Maybe he surveyed all that he would continue to hold.  Four minutes past.  And then he continued to give orders to fight the rebels.  Five minutes past and his life was at an end.  The real ugly would begin.

Ugly isn’t an adjective which denotes a lack of physical attraction.  Ugly is not the healed burn.  It is not the scars of a warrior.  It isn’t even a broken heart.  Ugly is a sight which bestializes man.  Ugly is a state lacking all beauty.  There is beauty in the healed skin of a person who has experienced a burn.  It is the mark of one who has been honed, a human sword, in the pursuit of survival.  And your scars, internal and external, only mean that you have been through some things and yet you live another minute, hour, day, year.  Ugly is not a scar or a defect of birth.  Ugly is a group of people who pile into a meat locker to take cheap camera photos of an aged corpse, sans shirt, shoes, and covering for the head.  Ugly is when we use power where there is no ability to answer in kind.  Muammar let those five minutes pass and let himself, his son, and his country be set upon by the ugly.  Libya has no defense for the coming power, greater than any it can imagine, which will relentlessly relieve it of its wealth.  Why else would a rebel army be given guns, tanks, and missiles?  Power rarely engages in altruism.

Muammar’s body, bereft of power and spirit, spent four days on this earth.  The same way that the once beautiful woman and once handsome man spends their last moments (really years) – alone and walking soundless rooms.  There is a price to be paid for ignoring that final call through darkness and that hand extended through the mist of pride, vanity and ego.  The price is a type of death or absolute death.  Muammar, Eunice and Charlie all rest within the Earth and this is where they would have rested anyway.  But if the situation had gone different.  If the three of them and all of us had given respect to those five minutes between when goodness comes to call and when the scales are being weighed between keeping a hand on power and going forward to the next phase of life – what would they have given to the universe?

Muammar could have bounced more grandchildren.  Miss Eunice could have been the hand which guided her (would-be) spouse into the winter of life, and Charlie could have used his position to help some mother’s son.  All of that and more are possibilities.

They’re gone.  We’re here.  And our task within our circles of power is to respect that space where there is an opportunity for beauty and the likelihood of ugly.  One minute.  Two minutes.  Three….

It might seem strange to solicit praises for an individual saddled with a job title fraught with negativity.  We have come to think of “hustle” in the pejorative sense.  That’s so unfortunate.  Unfortunate indeed.  Hustle is an adverb and hustler is a noun.  You hustle in the morning when you get yourself ready for work and the kids out of the door and on the bus stop.  You hustle when someone is coming over, with 15 minutes notice, and your front room could use some sprucing.  You hustle when you’re working in a restaurant desperately trying to optimize your tips.  In none of those examples do we see any elements of criminal activity.  All are necessary to simply undertake this job called life.

Going further.  When one is employed one has a hustle.  And although you may not know it the doctor who works in private practice and the plumber who is on call 24 hours a day – they are one and the same.  How so?  Nothing comes to them.  They have to go out and seek their daily bread.  So, one who has a hustle is a state of being where there is a job to be done autonomously – without directions from any other individual.  A man or woman who has a hustle is the boss.  They are the captains of the fleet and truly, on a daily basis, determine destiny.

Let’s go to examples of hustlers.  These examples do not include criminals or evildoers.  A pimp or a dope dealer or a corner clocker – these beings are parasites.  They can’t make a dime unless someone is sick, misguided, left alone in the world, or in pain.  They take and give nothing in return and for that matter they don’t give anything to themselves because everything they do is situational.  They have no end game, no set point, and no goals.  An example of a hustler comes in the form of James Evans (the father on “Good Times”).  He was working on the docks when he could get work in the cold Chicago climate.  He was beating pavement with Smitty and if memory serves me he might have done odd jobs for Bookman.  James Evans had the weight of the world on his shoulders.  His world which consisted of Thelma, J. J., and Florida.  It was his sole responsibility and there was no dispute in that fact.  All of his outrage and his outbursts went towards that aim.

The entire history of Black men in America should bear witness that a hustler is a very good thing.  There are people who wouldn’t have eaten, lived in a warm home, or even gone to the best schools in the land if it hadn’t been for a hustler.  This individual for whom no work is to low.  The hustler’s anthem is as follows:  A check beats a blank.  They are not of the fabric of these New Negroes who will let folks starve, bills go unpaid, because they didn’t feel comfortable with available means of employment.  The hustler will shovel shit in a torrent of snow and sleet to make sure his child has shoes to wear to the prom.  That’s the essence of a hustler, he’s the tough talking angel who hardly ever says he loves you, and more than likely never will.  He shows you.  He shows you with the sweat on his brow and the stoop of his back.  She’s also the woman who works three jobs and magically leaves fifty cents under your pillow when your tooth comes out.

A hustler is not the sole property of Black America or America itself.  The hustler is a universal occupation.  If it wasn’t for hustlers so many of us would not be the “firsts” of our families and too many of us forget the calloused hands and feet which led us to our seats in towers of ivory and steel.  But not today.  Today we should take a moment in quiet reflection on hustlers and when our minds recognize the calamities which would have befallen us had we not been the recipient of such hard fought largesse – let’s praise him.  And we also praise her.  Praises due to the hustlers of this world and the love they bear which cannot be put into some sad, sorry, tired and tawdry words.  Just feel it.  Look around and see it.  It abounds and resounds in our everywhere.  We are blessed with the presence of a hustler.  Amen.