Word: africanizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...another airlift-this one from Mozambique, whose Portuguese rulers may sympathize with Prime Minister Ian Smith and his white rebels but who long ago learned to cover their bets. Said an official of the last major colonialist power in Africa: "Portugal will pursue her policy of cooperation with her African neighbors as long as those countries refrain from adopting a policy hostile to Portugal...
...martyr but still seems no more than a fierce embodiment of divine purpose, as stiff and one-dimensional as those who have gone before. The movie sags at the center, weighed down by interminable closeups and sermons. The sound track swells with passages from Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, Webern, an African Mass and-as an odd counterpoint to the Nativity-Odetta's recording of Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child. The strength of Pasolini's Gospel rests on those moments when he forgoes static, calendar-art conventions to fill the screen with direct, provocative and eloquent glimpses...
Armah indulges in an over-simplified historical approach to describe the ideology of the "White Man's Burden." An unequal conflict is depicted between the Britisher, "arrogant, triumphant, an industrial success," who attributes his prosperity to "biological and moral superiority," and the African, who from 1828-1875 was "not only weak, but throughly demoralized and degraded by the slave trade...
Development towards Pan-Africanism is then split up into four stages. In the first stage Armah describes how the African intelligentsia lost its influence when local priests and chiefs were defeated by Christian Imperialists. In the second stage the intelligentsia was deeply influenced by a recognition of its own impotence and only acted in humble obedience to British superiority...
What is most striking about Armah's article is his ability to verbalize the subtle shift of power from the Colonial to the Pan-African. He demonstrates how the British were caught in a logical inconsistency whereby they accepted infinite perfectability for themselves, but denied that it applied to Africans. There had been a total reversal of roles: the British, once optimistic about their own capabilities, were forced to take a pessimistic view towards African potential, while the Africans outgrew their sense of inferiority and were now optimistic about the possibilities of Pan-African growth. For all his vague historical...