ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Whose Classical Traditions?

Whose classical traditions? That is the question implicit in the Classical Traditions in Latin American History conference that took place on May 19^th and 20^th in London. We convened to investigate the ways in which classical traditions endured in a region that is rarely associated with classical antiquity. These definitions are, by and large, the product of the northern European Renaissance and were established and developed in places like the Warburg Institute. Such understandings of the classics are so narrow that they explicitly exclude all of late antiquity and the descendants of these societies, namely, the medieval Arab caliphates, the Ottomans, and the low and high European Middle Ages. Is the global south in the Americas a rightful heir to the classical traditions as defined by the Warburg Institute? Given the questions and papers of this conference, it seems, the answer still is up for grabs.

Is a region whose systems of education forced Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil down the throats of preschoolers, highschoolers, sophomores, masters, and doctors for at least four hundred years a rightful heir to the legacies of the Greek and Roman classical ages? What are those legacies? I, for one, find classical Rome reproduced with far more fidelity in current conceptions of time, space, hierarchy, labor, family, the sacred, and community in Quito, my home town, than in London, where I am visiting for six months. Every day.

Is the Christian culture of late antiquity part of the classical traditions? Do systems of education that held Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose as intellectual giants qualify as rightful heirs to the intellectual values of classical Rome and Greece? What are those values? Do the Franciscan, Augustinian, Dominican, and Jesuit inheritors of the radical Aristotelian materialism of the twelfth-century university scholasticism of Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and William Ockham qualify as rightful heirs? Do the tens of thousands of youths trained for 300 years at the universities, academies, and courts of Lima and Mexico (and at dozens of other colleges and universities throughout Spanish America) in scholastic realism and nominalism, the Justinian code, and the Decretales, that is, the Corpus Iuris Commune and the Corpus Iure Canonici, qualify? Do the Mompoxiano (Mompox, Cartagena de Indias) Juan Suarez de Mendoza and the political culture he embodied in the mid seventeenth-century Spanish Monarchy qualify?

Suarez de Mendoza was one of the most renowned publici iuris Caesarum Professoris in Salamentesi Academia. He was also the author of the most influential European text in classical Roman tort and property law, his Commentarii ad Legem Aquiliam, published in Salamanca in 1651 and reissued in Lyon and Ambers all the way into the late eighteenth century. Suarez de Mendoza dedicated his work to the Count of Castrillo, the President of the Council of the Indies. Suarez de Mendoza saw himself as a Roman Senator wearing togas in Madrid’s academies and amphitheaters, helping administer an empire larger than Rome’s. But Suarez de Mendoza was not a fluke. Andrew Laird’s paper cites the cases of the Augustinian Alfonso de la Veracruz and the Jesuit Antonio Rubio, whose commentaries on the Logic and Physics of Aristotle penned in the mid and late 16th century at the University of Mexico became textbooks for European liberal arts colleges and universities. Veracruz and Rubio, however, were originally trained in Salamanca and Alcala. Andrew therefore forgets to cite the case of those Peruvians and Nuevo Granadinos who were actually trained at local universities and whose Latin texts in logic, ontology, theology, and jurisprudence became standard textbooks all over Central and Western Europe, as well as Goa and Manila. Andrew is not alone in that forgetting.

Veracruz-dialectica aristoteles-mexico-1554

Cover of Alfonso de la Veracruz, Dialectica resolutio (Mexico, 1554)

For a moment consider some of these long forgotten figures. Gabriel Alvarez Velasco, a Nuevo Granadino from the small college-town of Tunja, whose Latin texts on the rights of widows, orphans, and the downtrodden, De Priviliegii Miserabilium, became the standard European textbook on the legal privileges of miserable (His Judex Perfectus and his Epitoma de Legis Humana were also European bestsellers for some 100 years). Or consider the case of the Riobambeño brothers Alfonso and Leonardo Peñafiel who competed with Francisco Suarez to be the most influential 17th century Jesuit logicians, philosophers, and metaphysicians in the global Jesuit order. The Peñafiel bothers’ countless texts (including the multivolume Cursus Integri Philosophici , the Disputationes Scholasticae et Morales, and the Disputationem Theologicarum) moved endlessly from the printing presses of Antwerp, Cologne, and Lyon into the Jesuits colleges of Goa, Sri Lanka, Manila, and Prague. Or take the case of Diego de Avendaño, educated in Cuzco, who became one of the most influential and original European canonists of his generation. He was also one of the most influential European scholars on Aristotle and a leading biblical exegete. His exquisite commentaries on Psalm 44 and 88 were printed in Lyon and Antwerp in 1653 and 1668 respectively under the provocative titles of Epithalatium Christi and Sancta Sponsae (the wedding of Christ and his pious wife, the church) and Aphitheatrum Misericordiae (the global manifestation of Christ’s Mercy). Avendaño’s biblical scholarship can only compete with that of another son of the University of San Marcos, Lima, the Augustinian Gaspar de Villarroel. Villarroel’s 1636 Madrid typological and literal interpretation of the Book of Judges, Ivdices Commentariis, was based on the four different versions of the text: Greek (Septuagint), Latin (Jerome’s vulgate), Hebrew (Masoretic version) and the Aramaic Targum. This was one extraordinary Limeño Jerome.

Cover of Diego de Avendaño, Psalm 44, (Lyon, 1653)

Villarroel was born and raised in a society entirely invested in his scholarship and that in return made him Bishop of Chile, Arequipa, and finally Charcas (the seat of the silver mines). Peru did not hesitate for one second, unlike the University of London, to channel millions to sustain institutions of humanist learning like the University of San Marcos. Authorities used treasure that came straight from the forced labor of miners in Potosi and Huancavelica. By mid-17th century, San Marcos had a roster of 150 Masters and 100 PhDs educating a community of 1,500 students in the liberal arts, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. This was the epitome of the classical world: an academy of hundreds of philosophers built on the back of a vast pool of Andean quasi slaves (and free labor too). Then again, it took an empire for the Warburg Institute to emerge.

45. villaroel-Iudices_commentariis- madrid-1636 2

Cover of Gaspar de Villarroel, Ivdices Commentariis (Madrid, 1653)

The question addressed at this conference should be not whether there were “classical traditions” in Latin America, but whether these obvious classical traditions can be questioned out of existence or ruled out as completely marginal to the concerns of the millions of the illiterate and marginalized poor. The three papers under discussion make obvious how deep the classical traditions ran in the cultures of colonial and 19th century Spanish America. Andrew Laird maintains that it was the language of Aristotle’s polity, natural slavery, and barbarism that Spanish clerics and academics used to imagine theories of colonial legitimacy and sovereignty. He argues that it was the language of Lucian’s Saturnalia that allowed the magistrate and bishop Vasco de Quiroga to articulate a vision of two separate legal republics, one Indian and one Spanish. And that it was the language of Cicero (but also of Virgil and Plutarch I might add) that local Mexican academics used to counter the condescending views on the natural forces in, and the alleged dearth of academic institutions of, the Indies, both views held in tandem by European humanists and Neo Latinists like Joseph Justus Scaliger and Manuel Marti. Andrew forgets to cite the influential views of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, whose inability to even consider institutions of learning in Spanish America caused members of the university of San Marcos like Diego de Leon Pinelo and the Franciscans brothers Salinas y Cordova to create genealogies of local academic excellence (see, for example Pinelo’s Hypomnema Apologeticum Pro Regali Academia Limensi, 1648) . These mid seventeenth-century Limeño accounts were not unlike those created by Eguiara y Eguren (see Biblotheca Mexicana sive Eruditorum Historia Virorum, 1755) in mid eighteenth-century Mexico to counter the patronizing views of Manuel Marti.

Nicola Miller, Erick Culhed, and Andrew Laird make explicit that it was the language of Roman republicanism and Greek aristocratic democracy that local learned elites deployed to endow their cities, patrias, and nations with vibrant moral genealogies. Nicola argues that it was the language of Roman republican resistance to tyranny that allowed marginalized popular black poets like Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, aka Placido, to wax lyrical against the tyranny of racism in mid-19th century Cuba. Erick maintains that it was the language of decadent imperial Byzantium that allowed late nineteenth century poets like the Puerto Rican Jose Jesus Dominguez, the Cuban Augusto de Armas, and the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario to invent a pan-Latin (Franco- and Hispanophile) culture of literary modernism. Ranging from popular to elite culture, from the Caribbean to Central America, and from the 1500s to the 1900s, the evidence is overwhelming: there were many, vibrant classical traditions all over Spanish America.

Why have these muscular traditions failed to constitute a narrative of a deep-rooted classical culture in Latin America? Weren’t these traditions in Latin America as deep and as significant as those of, say, Italy, Germany, or Britain? And yet my question for this audience goes much deeper: Why have classicists, and the Warburg Institute in particular, rarely looked at the global South to ponder whether the European humanist traditions might have been shaped by the “Latin American” learned communities I have briefly reviewed?

The scholarship on early modern humanism, recognized and celebrated by the Warburg, has painstakingly explored the impact of the indigenous peoples of the Americas on the creation of the Renaissance, itself a variety of many possible classical traditions. This scholarship has studied how Columbus and Luther brought into the glossaries, commentaries, and exegeses of ancient books the new worlds of geography and theology. In this type of scholarship, it is the Indian “savage” (demonic or noble), not the Spanish American Latinist, who is summoned as a heuristic device. It is time, however, to consider new genealogies for Europe’s early modern scholarship. In short, I am pleading, in Kant’s parlance, for a Copernican Revolution.

I have suggested that the classical tradition of seventeenth-century Spanish American academies and universities was so muscular that it shaped the classical traditions of Europe itself. We have yet to explore the impact that Nuevo Granadinos like Alvarez Velasco had on the European jurisprudence of distributive justice. We have yet to explore the role of Indianos like Suarez de Mendoza in the early modern transformation of property law. We have yet to ponder the influence of the mid-seventeenth-century professor of theology at the Royal University of Mexico, Juan Diaz de Arce, whose Opus Studioso de Sacrorum Bibliorum, book four of his massive two-volume treatise, Quaestionarii Expositvii pro clariori inteligentia Sacrorum Bibliorum (1647-48) was printed separately in Rome in 1750. Opus Studioso became influential with the Catholic curia at the height of the Catholic Enlightenment. Opus studioso was a bold argument on the epistemology of popular prophecy and the centrality of the illiterate in biblical interpretation. It is perhaps time to explore the significance of the Cuzqueno-educated Avendaño and the Limeño-educated Villarroel on biblical philology and exegesis, not only in Salamanca and Alcala but also in Antwerp and Lyon.

Image taken from avednano, Psalm 88 (Lyon, 1666)

Image taken from the cover of Diego de Avendaño, Psalm 88 (Lyon, 1666)

In a world of changing demographics and globalization, I suggest the Warburg Institute would greatly benefit from becoming curious about how Peruvian and Mexican traditions of classical scholarship transformed Italian, French, and German ones. For all the richness and oddities of the Warburg’s holdings, there is not a single copy in the library’s stacks of the works of Diego de Avendaño, Gaspar de Villarroel, Juan Suarez de Mendoza, Adolfo and Leopoldo Peñafiel, Gabriel Alvarez Velasco, and Juan Diaz de Arce. In fact, the Warburg holds not a single copy of the hundreds of texts penned by dozens of Spanish American Latinists that were printed in the presses of Rome, Cologne, Antwerp, Lyon, Prague, and Mainz throughout the long seventeenth century. The Warburg does not even have the token of all libraries with humanist and neo-scholastic collections, namely, the many commentaries on Aristotle by Antonio Rubio, the great “Mexican” metaphysician whose views Rene Descartes sought to slay. It is time to summon back the iconoclastic rebellious spirit of Aby Warburg. I am sure he would have enjoyed the work of Juan Diaz de Arce, that Mexican Latinist who like Warburg revered the epistemological authority of the illiterate.

Watching Soccer for the Very First Time in the American West

By Mark Sheaves

In the summer of 2014, when the World Cup was played in Brazil, around 3.2 billion (not million!) people watched at least one game of football, or as we like to call it here in the US, soccer. That’s nearly half the world’s population. The final between Germany and Argentina played at the Maracana, the so-called “Cathedral of Football,” drew an audience of about one billion people, probably representing the largest simultaneous experience in the history of humanity. That’s nearly ten times the viewers of this year’s Superbowl. And viewing numbers are just one way of judging the global reach of a sport played in parks, streets, and beaches almost everywhere in the world. Today, it is hard to imagine meeting someone anywhere in the world who has not watched or played the global game. With the European Championships kicking off in France this June, I was wondering: What would the sport look like to someone who had never seen it played?

I found an answer while conducting research on an entirely different topic. Trawling the digitalized local newspapers from early twentieth-century Kansas, I stumbled on an article titled “A Sunday with the Scotch at Maple Hill” published in The Topeka Daily State Journal on November 16, 1912. Reading the headline I hoped that the article might be about a rowdy party involving kilts, whisky, and bagpipes. But instead it was an account by an unnamed Topeka-based journalist describing his first ever soccer game.

In the Kansas countryside, a short drive west of Topeka, two teams lined up on a patchy field of grass in late-fall sunshine. Wheat swayed in the background, cattle wondered freely, and “the fruit trees and cabbage plants and fat pasture land mocked the poor, lean newspaper men from the city.” On one side stood the Topeka team composed of descendants of “the English shires and the Scotch Glens.” Their opponents were a Maple Hill team of “eleven husky Highlanders” who worked on the farms in rural Kansas. Bigger and stronger than their urban counterparts, the Maple Hill players are described as built like bears, with jaws made of cement, and faces weather-worn by the Scotch glens and the Kansas sun. This was a game between slender, quick urbanites and a team of strong, rugged farm workers. Skill and speed took on physical power that day, which is still a recognizable dynamic in the soccer world.

And then the game kicked off and the newspapermen watched on, trying to make sense of a game with “no hidden details or smothered intricacies.” Without a sporting lexicon to draw from, the journalist relied on animal metaphors and contemporary references to describe what he saw. Some of these create wonderful images of a game played between a zoo of hybrid animals. A Maple Hill player has “a face like a hawk, hair grey as a badger and standing up like a shock. He was a bearcat to follow the ball.” At another moment, the author explains that the Topeka goalkeeper “had more troubles in the game than a bear in a bee yard.” But he reserves his best descriptions for the Maple Hill defense:

“The three Maple Hill Scots guarded the goal like a bulldog watching a baby buggy. Jackson stood like a tree. Reid had the displacement of a battleship. Warren covered the ground like a crop of wheat.”

Living now in an era where sports commentators usually draw on a set of clichés, it is refreshing to read this journalist describe the game in such original language.

At some points the game is almost entirely unrecognizable to a current soccer fan. A section titled “Kicking a ‘Human’ Goal” describes the brutal events that led to Maple Hill’s fourth goal. Moments after the Topeka goalkeeper successfully caught the ball, five of the Maple Hill “clan” bundle him to the floor and then kick the ball and man through the posts. Amazingly, the goal stood while the fans on the sidelines “swore joyously in the Gaelic tongue”. The Topeka goalkeeper “got up with the worst grouch this side of the Balkan war zone.” A picture depicts this moment, which was one of the highlights for the journalist. Such play now would probably result in a lengthy ban for the offending players, but the game played that day at Maple Hill appears to have been largely lawless.

Back in 1912, the violent nature of this game should not come as a massive surprise. During the nineteenth century, Americans played a diverse range of sports involving kicking, running, and outright fighting. These games derived from ill-defined versions of rugby, football, and the medieval game of mob football, the latter being a ferocious chaotic event pitting neighboring European communities against each other as they fought to drag an inflated pigs bladder to a designated point. And of course, it was from this mosaic of sporting activities that some kind of standardized rules for American football came into being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the game at Maple Hill was primarily about kicking a leather ball, and no animal innards were involved, the violence of Highlanders certainly echoes elements drawn from other sports including the recently developed American football.

This one-off game also sheds light on a largely forgotten history of soccer in the US. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, businesses, churches, schools, and ethnic community organizations established teams, leagues and associations in the hope that soccer would become the nation’s favored sport. While mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans is thought to be the first home of soccer in America, the game really took off in the northeast under the stewardship of the American Football Association, founded in 1884. By the second decade of the twentieth-century when the Maple Hill game took place, soccer matches drew large crowds in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and increasingly in cities further west such as St. Louis. The game at Maple Hill is part of this westward expansion of soccer. It was just one example of a series of matches organized by Tom Powell, a Topeka businessman, who devoted his energy to bringing the game to the Kansas area in the 1910s. However, as with most other parts of the country, these soccer initiatives declined with the increasing popularity and professionalization of American football and baseball. Yet, these early twentieth century games point to a richer history of soccer in the US than is usually recognized.

A mob football match played at London’s Crowe Street in 1721. Via Wikipedia.

Oh, and the score between Maple Hill and Topeka? The reporter does not give it. Maple Hill certainly won, and scored at least four goals. No mention is made of a Topeka goal. This was a friendly match, in the sense that the score mattered only for pride, and for the journalist the final result mattered less than the enjoyment he derived from watching his first ever game. Perhaps this emphasis on play and community rather than results is one we might hope to return in the face of the ever-increasing monetization and business oriented approach of the sport.

All Images and quotes are from: The Topeka state journal. (Topeka, Kan.), 16 Nov. 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

From Postcard to Picasso: Nakedness on Display

By Philippa Levine

Francois Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) made a very good living working as a photographer in the French West African colony of Senegal. Fortier grew up in eastern France, close to the German border, and by 1899 was living in Senegal where he set up a photographic studio. In the early 1900s he travelled extensively in French Africa, taking pictures wherever he went. In 1908 he was appointed official photographer to French officials touring colonies in the region.

The new and hugely popular postcard industry was thriving at the time Fortier was active and his photographs were mostly transferred to postcards, a business in which he became very active by about 1905. He was an enormously prolific photographer and somewhere between 3000 and 4000 of his images survive. There is even a website devoted to him!

One of the early staples of the new postcard industry was a category often known as the ethnographic postcard. These were pictures of indigenous peoples, taken largely by European and American photographers, and mostly in Asia and Africa. Sometimes they had captions intended to be humorous and pointing to the differences between the viewer at home in the west and the subjects of the card. Sometimes they purported simply to offer an informative and realistic example of a particular people. Such cards often bore the legend “anthropological type” or indicated that the image typified a certain racial or social group.

‘Sénégal. Les circoncis’, photo by Edmond Fortier c. 1910. Via Wikipedia.

Among these postcards there was another enormously successful sub-set that depicted people, mostly women, either scantily clad or with no clothes at all. These cards are historically interesting for many reasons. This was, after all, an era in which obscenity laws were on the rise across the west and regulations forbidding the distribution of obscene items (from pornography to contraceptive devices) was a prosecutable offense. The US Congress passed the Comstock Law in 1873 to control the “Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Booksellers who sold risqué photographs as well as literature were vulnerable under Britain’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857, as they were in France after 1811 when Napoleon introduced his Laws against Public Vice. In Germany a new country wide criminal code made the dissemination of obscenity illegal in 1872. Yet despite the crackdown on erotic images that was so common a feature of nineteenth-century law, postcards with nude or semi-nude images of indigenous peoples not only avoided the ban, but could be sent through the mail without fear of prosecution. This was because they marketed themselves as educational, demonstrating different varieties of the human form across the globe, and thus could avoid the taint of pornography that would have attached to them if their subjects were white and European. These cards echoed the displays of “natives” that became so popular at the world’s fairs to which people flocked late in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Edmond Fortier photographs of Malinké Women taken in West Africa, 1906. The images are held in the Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.

Edmond Fortier’s photographs of Malinké Women taken in West Africa, 1906. The images are held in the Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.

Cards of this sort were enormously profitable for Fortier and many others in Africa, in India, in the Pacific and elsewhere. Fortier’s business was among the most voluminous and his work found its way into the collections of none other than the celebrated modernist artist, Pablo Picasso. Some forty Fortier postcards, mostly of bare-breasted women, are among the many ethnographic cards Picasso seems to have amassed in the early years of the twentieth century. His extensive Fortier collection dates from the time when he was painting what would become his most ambitious canvas to date, one that would rock the art world, and remains to this day among his most controversial and also his most emblematic paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It’s a huge painting, almost 8’ by 8’, depicting five naked Spanish brothel workers. The two on the far right are wearing African masks. The picture was completed in 1907 and the postcards date from 1906. The painting signaled where his art was headed with its break from traditional representation and perspective. Most art historians associate the painting with the beginning of what became known as Primitivism, western art that included what were regarded as non-western art forms from societies that, at the time, would have been considered less advanced than colonial western powers.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Courtesy of Art Resource, NY.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

French art historian and former director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari, claims that Picasso used his collection of Fortier postcards to produce these startling and striking images. The exhibition where she made this claim debuted to great acclaim at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art in 1997 under the title Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror. In the exhibition, she traces Picasso’s use of photographic images to model his paintings, as well as his own enthusiasm for photography, both good examples of the changes new visual technologies augured in the art world. In the poses and the demeanor of the women in Picasso’s canvas she sees a reflection of the bold stares of the women in the postcards, expressing attitudes that at the time would have been unthinkable for European women.

Postcards depicting white women without their clothes on would not so easily have avoided the censorship that the new obscenity laws were busily imposing in western nations. But images of non-western women, and especially women from areas considered primitive and sexually bold, were, it would seem, available not only to the purveyors of smutty postcards dressed up as educational materials but to the priests of high art. Picasso’s painting is a magnificent and an important work but if Baldasseri’s hunch is right, it’s also the product of a world that profited from maintaining a huge divide between a civilized west and a primitive and sexualized other.

Further Reading

Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Paris and Houston: Flammarion, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1997)

Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, ed. Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998)

Full image credit for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso: ‘Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973) ARS, NY. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8′ X 7’ 8″ (243.9 x 233.7 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The Web of Empire, By Alison Games (2008)

By Mark Sheaves

Between 1560 and 1660, English and Scottish merchants, ministers, travellers, and statesmen traversed the globe in search of adventure and economic opportunities. Frustrated by England’s weak economy, religious and political turmoil, and social conflict, these entrepreneurial individuals settled all over the world. But how did they integrate into those diverse societies?

In The Web of Empire, Alison Games argues that these private adventurers cultivated an ability to “go native” by adapting to local cultures. This cosmopolitan sensibility, Games contends, developed in the early sixteenth century as English merchants navigated the religiously divided and violent world of the Mediterranean. British people of all persuasions shared this ability to both read and mimic the customs they found in Madagascar, Japan, Tangier and elsewhere. Tracing their movements through published travel accounts, diplomatic reports, letters, and business papers, Games illustrates how they wove a web across the globe, facilitating the circulation of ideas, products, and people.

The English cosmopolitans examined by Games show how the mercantile activities of a coterie of adventurous individuals and the knowledge they disseminated formed the foundation for the first global English Empire based on trade. These individuals’ experiences explain how England developed as a major global power by 1660 despite the weakness of the English state throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The English Empire first emerged through a mixture of pragmatic interactions and forms of governance, and without state support.

'A New and Accvrat Map of the World' by John Speed 1626. The map was included in George Humble's the Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, printed by John Dawson in 1627. Via Wikipedia. — ‘A New and Accvrat Map of the World’ by John Speed, 1626. The map was included in George Humble’s the Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, printed by John Dawson in 1627. Via Wikipedia.

Games also shows that this network of English people brought global knowledge back to the metropole, opening the horizons of the governing classes to the economic opportunities available in the world and fueling the imperial ambitions of the English monarchy. The rise of state interest in overseas expansion shifted English activity from a focus on private trade to an empire based on settlement from the 1650s onwards. Settlements in Ireland and then Virginia demonstrate that, with the rise of the state interests, an attitude of domination and coercion towards native people supplanted the cosmopolitanism of the earlier autonomous travelers.

Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660, (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

Kissinger’s Shadow, by Greg Grandin (2015)

By Clay Katsky

Tickets to “An Evening with the Honorable Henry Kissinger” at the LBJ Library’s Vietnam War Summit sold out in less than one minute. The attention that Kissinger continues to command in 2016 could be linked to the premise of Greg Grandin’s new book. Grandin, a history professor at NYU, portrays the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State as extraordinarily influential on U.S. foreign policy before, during, and after leaving office. But from the author’s unambiguously leftist point of view, Kissinger’s legacy is anything but honorable. While Grandin cites his most positive achievements, opening China and stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union, the book’s main contention is that Kissinger’s worldview and access to power led him to create a new imperial presidency “based on even more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarization for political advantage.” Kissinger brought the old national security state into the post-Vietnam War era.

Kissinger relaxes at the LBJ Presidential Library before his public appearance on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at The Vietnam War Summit. Courtesy of the LBJ Library : photo by David Hume Kennerly.

Starting with Kissinger’s legendarily long Harvard undergraduate thesis, Grandin seeks to uncover the ideas, insights, and assumptions that influenced his theories on diplomacy and drove his desire to fashion a new world order based on a balance of power. In focusing on Kissinger’s own writings, the book combines intellectual and diplomatic history. And it offers something new by examining Kissinger’s unique mixture of realism and idealism, which Grandin labels a kind of “imperial existentialism” in which conjecture is more preferable for action than fact because hard facts can be polarizing. Most historians have labeled Kissinger an arch-realist, yet Grandin insists that his more philosophical writings stressed the importance of conjecture in decision-making. In tribute to Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kissinger exalted decisiveness above all else: “In reaching a decision, he must inevitably act on the basis of an intuition that is inherently unproveable. If he insists on certainty he runs the danger of becoming prisoner to events.” But Grandin’s link to Cheney’s 1% Doctrine, which he describes as the United States taking action as if mere threats are forgone conclusions, seems tentative and is based on little evidence. Kissinger had hoped that showing strength in Cuba would lead to bolder foreign polices and legitimize American power, but in office his agenda shifted to preventing a decline in American prestige stemming from the pull out of Vietnam.

Kissinger being sworn in as Secretary of State by Chief Justice Warren Burger, September 22, 1973. Kissinger’s mother, Paula, holds the Bible upon which he was sworn in while President Nixon looks on. Via Wikipedia.

According to Grandin, power and prestige were crucial elements in Kissinger’s perception of American security interests. Consciousness of power comes from a willingness to act, and he believed the best way to produce willingness was to act. But nuclear weapons complicated Cold War power dynamics because leaders were afraid to use them. Taking stock of Kissinger’s early academic career at Harvard, Grandin points out that in 1956 he wrote that the more powerful the weapons “the greater becomes the reluctance to user them.” Strength turned to weakness. But Grandin’s emphasis on the future statesman’s earliest writings freezes his worldviews in the 1950s. This in spite of the fact that Kissinger’s early musings on limited nuclear warfare later evolved into his belief that action in small wars in marginal areas could produce enough awareness of power to break the impasse of nuclear power. In this regard, Kissinger saw Southeast Asia as more of an opportunity than a burden. But Grandin doubts his escalation in Vietnam was based on any geostrategic reasoning. Like détente it served a more domestic purpose and, therefore, he brands the extensive bombing of Cambodia as both Kissinger’s most heinous crime and his most enduring contribution to U.S. foreign policy.

In terms of its legality, the bombing set an important precedent for U.S. warfare because it targeted a neutral country. Kissinger justified violating Cambodian sovereignty by citing the need to destroy Communist “sanctuaries” along its border with Vietnam. Grandin links such logic to more recent attacks on terrorist “safe havens,” from George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 to Barack Obama’s extensive use of drone attacks in Pakistan and Syria. Although Kissinger fell out of favor with the conservative establishment when Reagan began hammering him on détente, this connection is based on good evidence. Desperate to distance itself from talk of power balances and American decline, the New Right began to show Kissinger the door in the late 1970s. But Grandin explains that Kissinger’s defense of the Vietnam War and his arguments for escalation into Cambodia had already become deeply embedded in the ideology of Republican establishment. While Reagan distanced himself from the Secretary of State during his 1976 presidential primary campaign, by 1980 Kissinger was back speaking at the Republican National Convention.

Kissinger’s legacy in the realm of diplomacy is the focus of the book’s second half. Looking at other parts of Asia, Grandin examines his encouragement of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and his ambivalence towards selective genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Turning to Africa, he exposes in great detail Kissinger’s support for apartheid governments, and in terms of the Middle East, he blames him for locking the United States into a perpetual crisis by vehemently pursuing American hegemony in the region. Kissinger’s impact was global, spanning “from the jungles of Vietnam to the sands of the Persian Gulf.”

Meeting in the Oval Office between Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi, 31 October 1931. Via Wikipedia.

Grandin’s most interesting chapter is domestically focused and intellectually based. The Church Committee inaugurated a new era of foreign policy oversight that Kissinger described as “a merciless congressional onslaught.” Congress’ season of inquiry into matters of national security during the 1970s produced a new relationship between secrecy and spectacle. According to Grandin, the spectacle of continuous congressional hearings nullified the need for secrecy partly because oversaturation leads to public indifference. And when important controversies become mere visual entertainment, public attention fades as crimes are turned into procedural questions or differences of opinion between political parties. Further confusing the issue, arguments over whether the ends justify the means usually leave the hawks in Congress in agreement, and so for the general public such inquiries often act to justify both sides. For his contribution, Kissinger is described as a master at reframing controversial policies into technical matters. But Grandin’s conclusion that Kissinger decided to go covert with the coup against Allende in Chile because Congress was breathing down his neck over Vietnam seems circumstantial. Still, his insight into the parallel nature of secrecy and spectacle fits well anecdotally – in the following decade, Reagan’s full-scale invasion of Grenada smacks as a distraction from the covert wars being carried out in Central America.

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Kissinger in 1976. Via Wikipedia.

Kissinger’s Shadow connects the sustained American militarism and the increased political polarization that followed the end of the Cold War. Grandin convincingly argues that Kissinger’s influence on U.S. foreign policy has reverberated into the twenty-first century. While he might rely too heavily on a career’s worth of Kissinger’s writing as ammunition to attack him with, the author’s bias against the now elder statesman does not nullify the facts that he presents and most of his interpretation of those facts. The support that many Americans continue to give to a broad policy of intervention and perpetual war may have started out as a product of the superpower rivalry, but Kissinger’s enduring popularity has allowed such machinations to transcend the Cold War.

Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Enduring Statesman (Metropolitan Books, 2015).

You may also like our collection of essays on US Presidents and Mark Battjes’ recent review of David Milne’s Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (2015)

Digital Teaching: Behind the Scenes in the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio

The Liberal Arts Development Studio has served as the production force behind the development of live-streaming and other online courses at The University of Texas at Austin since 2012. The Development Studio is an integrated team of professional and student staff assembled to work with faculty to create rich and effective online courses. Software development professionals create tools to support student/professor interaction online. Audio, video and graphic design experts recruit top-notch UT student staff to create high-quality multi-media experiences for students. Project management professionals work with faculty and technical staff to coordinate the production and delivery of multiple courses each semester, including the summer terms.

Credits:

Interviews conducted by Teaching Assistant Shery Chanis.

Musical intro prepared and performed by Natalie Suri and Zachary Suri.

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

By Michael Dorman

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

Digital Teaching: Prioritizing Public Speaking

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his teaching assistants, Cali Slair, Carl Forsberg, Shery Chanis, and Emily Whalen will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Emily Whalen

A good presentation, like a good lecture, should look effortless. Whether it’s a Youtube tutorial, a formal debate, or an academic job talk, practiced presenters know that seamless public speaking requires planning and practice. History courses focus mostly on reading and writing skills–vitally important in a world where remedial writing classes cost businesses an estimated $3.1 billion a year. Because of time restraints and high enrollment in general survey courses, some undergraduates won’t ever need to craft a formal presentation for a grade. In a world where presentation is a critical element of success, why don’t we prioritize public speaking?

When we began planning for our new online course, we were looking for ways that the online format could not only meet the standards of a traditional class, but exceed them. We wanted to raise the bar for what we expected of our students, all while preparing them in tangible ways for life beyond college. That was when Dr. Suri came up with the idea of having students record a short verbal presentation based on one of the class’s assigned essays. Students would have already done the intellectual work–analyzing a primary document–but would need to use time management and organization skills to turn the essay into a 2-minute speech. They would get a sense of the work that goes into the lectures they see every week, and gain important insights into how to present themselves in a formal manner. And, given the online format, we could download and view the presentations on our own time for grading – without sacrificing valuable lecture time.

We had already written this exciting idea into the syllabus when we learned about the Sanger Learning Center’s new Public Speaking Center. There, students could schedule one-on-one appointments with student speech consultants to hone and polish their presentations. The Public Speaking Center even reserved a block of time specifically for our students to come in and take advantage of this wonderful service. It was also a fantastic way to showcase for students some of the fantastic supplemental resources available to them as members of the UT community! We had 89 students sign up for the Public Speaking Center’s appointments. This participation shows how an online class can encourage students to use on-campus resources.

The positive effects are clear. We’ve enjoyed watching and grading some truly outstanding presentations, like this creative submission from freshman Janessa Lynch.

Response to the assignment has been generally positive, and the videos have been a great way for us to see a different side of our students–and for them to participate in our historical-technological experiment.

Remembering Chernobyl

By Michael Dorman

In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions that resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster to date. The local population did not believe that a nuclear accident could happen in the Soviet Union, so no one living or working in the affected areas had been properly prepared or trained to respond to a nuclear accident. Soviet authorities at all levels of government were largely uninformed as to the procedures and precautionary measures that should have taken place. Local officials in Kiev waited a full 40 hours to receive orders from their superiors in Moscow. It took another two days for them to publicly acknowledge that the accident had occurred. On the Saturday morning following the explosion children went to school, men went fishing in the reactor’s cooling ponds, and, with the exception of those called to help at the reactor, the daily lives of those in the contaminated areas continued as usual. The reactions of party members and plant workers in the hours and days following the accident were characterized by fear, confusion, and an overall lack of understanding of the severity of the accident. Outside of the circles of upper level Soviet officials, no one would know that Belarus had received an amount of radioactive fallout equivalent to 350 nuclear bombs until 1989.

Map of Soviet Union - Administrative Divisions, 1989. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

Map of Soviet Union Administrative Divisions, 1989. Belarus is colored green in the top left corner. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

The Chernobyl nuclear energy facility in Ukraine was located just 16 km from the Belarusian border. As a result the radioactive rain (or “back rain”) that followed in the wake of the accident dispersed 70% of the total fallout on Belarus. This left 23% of the republic’s territory contaminated with cesium-137 and 80% contaminated by radioactive iodine. It is thought that many of the thyroid diseases that occurred immediately following the accident were caused by iodine 131, as the effects of the other forms of radiation that fell on Belarus would have taken much longer to manifest.

Since the catastrophe, 2.3 million Belarusians, including 700,000 children, have been affected by Chernobyl. In Gomel, Belarus’s second largest city, congenital deformities have increased 250 percent and birth defects have increased by 200 percent. The incidents of thyroid cancer in the Gomel region are 10,000 times higher than prior to the accident. With 2.1 million people currently living on contaminated land (just over one fifth of the population), it has been in the governments interest to downplay the effects of Chernobyl whenever possible. According to the NGO “Hope To Children In Trouble,” since the accident the deaths of 160 children in Belarus have been “black listed” in order to hide their causes of death and to deflate statistics regarding the birth defects and congenital diseases in republic. In Voices From Chernobyl, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich includes an interview from the mother of (at the time) “the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies.” The mother describes the body of her newborn daughter as being without an anus, vagina, and left kidney. This family was from a village that had initially been marked for evacuation but due to lack of government funds was left in place. Additionally, many birth defects that are life threatening in Belarus would require mere outpatient operations in most western countries. Cleft pallets, tonsillectomies, minor heart defects, and the likes can be fatal in Belarus due to the lack of advancements in the Belarusian medical system. Thus the seriousness of Chernobyl-related birth defects are greatly heightened due to the poor state of Belarusian health care.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union Belarus already had over 100 non-government organizations (NGOs) working within the republic to aid in the Chernobyl clean up and minimize the impact of the fallout on the children born in the contaminated areas. The idea of large scale problems being solved by non-government organizations rather than government agencies was a foreign concept in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. This skepticism of NGOs has largely carried over into independent Belarus. The tendency among government officials has been to treat NGOs with suspicion while looking to Moscow to provide funding (even after 1991), as accepting help from western organizations contradicts decades of deeply engrained Soviet values. Since the mid 1990’s, many of the NGOs operating in the Republic of Belarus have either left or found themselves operating under hostile regulatory conditions. Currently in Belarus, 114 NGOs continue to operate; however, their projects must stay apolitical in nature, avoiding the temptation to encourage a more democratic civil society in the republic. Additionally, while many of these NGOs have spent millions of U.S. dollars renovating and building facilities to provide various forms of care for those affected by Chernobyl, their stories are completely absent from Belarusian media.

Nearly 25 years after the collapse of communism, the debate over the scope of the devastation Chernobyl caused in Belarus continues, with many western organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization dismissing the effects of the accident and attributing the rise of all health problems, with the exception of those related to thyroid diseases, to “radiophobia.” Since the accident, Chernobyl’s visibility in Belarusian media has steadily declined, finally reaching its present state of virtual nonexistence. As Olga Kuchinskaya points out in The Politics of Invisibility, “those who should worry most, or at least more, often appear to be the least concerned; the experience of living with increased radiation danger does not necessarily bring out more anxiety.” This observation not only disputes the idea that radiophobia is a legitimate issue in Belarus, but most importantly points to the fact that the dangers of radiation and the gravity of Chernobyl’s effects have been extirpated from the national consciousness of Belarusians.

Sources and Further Reading

Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl. Cambridge, Massachusettes: MIT, 2014. Print.

Cliodhna Russell, “Column: How My Trip to a Children’s Mental Asylum in Belarus Made Me Proud to Be Irish.” TheJournalie. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 30, 2015.

Vladimir Tsalko, “Mineral Resources.” Brill’s New Pauly (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Dec. 5, 2015.

David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

David R. Marples, “Chapter 8.” The Long Road to Recovery: Community Responses to Industrial Disaster. Tokyo: United Nations UP, 1996. 183-230. Print.

Chernobyl Heart: The Dark Side of Nuclear Power. Dir. Maryann DeLeo. 2003. Youtube.

“STRANGLING THE NGO COMMUNITY.” Human Rights Watch. N.p., 1997. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

Valentina Pokhomova, “Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble.” Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble. N.p., 2015. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

“Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by.” Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by. N.p., n.d. Web. Dec. 7, 2015.

“Map of Chernobyl Fallout.” Http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/, n.d. Web. Dec. 4, 2015.

Between Traditions: A Nigerian Writer’s Funeral

By Chukwuemeka Agbo

Amos Tutuola Odegbami was a Nigerian amateur novelist interested in promoting Yoruba culture to the outside world. Tutuola was born in 1920 at Wasimi, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. The young Amos had limited western education, stopping at high school level before moving to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1939 to learn smithing. He later joined the services of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (now Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria) where he retired in 1976.

Tutuola’s prominence is tied to his writing career. Though with limited western education, he became a celebrated author both within and outside Nigeria. Some of the works to his credit include: The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952); My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954); and Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (1955). Amos Tutuola’s fame began with his first novel, The Palm Wine Drinkard. He was a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and had an extensive network of relationships with friends and colleagues, which extended to the United States. One such friend was Dr. Ben Lindfors of the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Amos Tutuola Odegbami died on Saturday, June 7, 1997. He was buried three months later on October 4, 1997 at his hometown Odo-Ona, Ibadan, Oyo State.

African burial ceremonies highlight the importance of valor, selflessness, and diligence (as well as other celebrated values) as everlasting motifs and prerequisites for good living. Indirectly, these values serve to emphasize the importance of traditional nobility and preservation of good name, honor, and service, which are fundamental for good leadership. It was only the good and the noble that were usually celebrated in burials. The cowardly and selfish were discarded in the ‘evil forest’ or buried without such fanfare. These burial practices were rooted in the past and were underpinned by the peoples’ indigenous religious beliefs. Although African traditional burial practices have been modified in the course of time, many still survive to date.

Examining the documents surrounding Tutuola’s burial (held at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center), one familiar with burial practices in Africa will be quick to notice that Tutuola was not accorded the kind of funeral one would expect a person with his popularity would be given. The inability to give the late Tutuola a deserving burial could be traced to financial constraints. The quality of Tutuola’s funeral brochure is very poor compared to what one would expect to see at the funeral of a person as famous as he was. The tributes, offered seem like afterthoughts. In addition, a newspaper report published the day after his funeral ceremony noted that Tutuola’s family had no support from the government or the publishers of his works in planning his funeral.

Fame and intellectual accomplishments in Nigeria in the 1990s did not equal wealth and power. During the period that Tutuola lived, Nigerian authors and academics were mostly poor. It was one thing to belong to a well-to-do class and another thing to be a known writer. Although he was a prolific and popular novelist, Tutuola was a poor author. So in death as in life, his funeral reflected his placement on the social ladder.

Tutuola’s funeral brochure emphasizes his interest in promoting Yoruba Studies but with significant limitations. Tutuola’s photo showing him adorned in traditional Yoruba attire was used as the front cover of the brochure. His biography and the tributes from his associates refer to his unrelenting commitment to the Yoruba. Even more striking is the language used in publishing the brochure. In Nigeria, depending on the social status of the deceased or his survivors, burial ceremonies could attract people from diverse ethnic groups. Therefore, funeral documents in post-colonial Nigeria were usually published in English if the family planned to give the deceased a Christian burial in a service conducted only in English or a combination of English and the indigenous language of the deceased. Although Tutuola’s biography, tributes, and the appreciation by the family were in English, the rest of the brochure was published in Yoruba.

Even more striking is the kind of funeral accorded Tutuola. The invitation card, newspaper reports on the proceedings of the burial, and the brochure show that Tutuola was given a Christian burial. Neither the funeral activities on the invitation card nor the brochure mentioned any Yoruba traditional burial practice for the late Tutuola. The absence of traditional Yoruba burial practices and other documents suggest that Tutuola was more of a Christian than a Yoruba traditionalist. In his autobiography, Tutuola ends the short history of his life by saying that he was a member of the African Church. But he says nothing about his commitment to Yoruba traditional religion.

A copy of the invitation to Tutuola’s funeral.

Nothing in the funeral documents suggests they were fulfilling the will of the deceased. Africans give careful attention to fulfilling the wishes (especially last wishes before death) of a deceased. Family members do everything in their power to fulfill wishes left by their deceased loved ones. They believe that failure to meet those demands would hinder the deceased from having a smooth journey to the spirit world or possibly stop them from entirely joining their ancestors. It is also believed that not meeting the desires of the deceased could cause misfortune or even death for family members. Tutuola’s family would not have overlooked his wishes if he had any that related to the kind of burial he wanted to be given. One would have expected that Tutuola’s activism in promoting Yoruba culture would have made him want a traditional Yoruba burial.

Amos Tutuola’s activism in promoting Yoruba studies seems to have been more of an intellectual exercise than a desire for personally practicing traditional Yoruba culture. Neither his funeral brochure nor any other documents suggest that he took active part in the very culture he sought to promote.

All sources consulted and images used are courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They are held in the following collections:

1. African Studies Collection, Tutuola, Amos. Articles and booklet re: Tutuola’s funeral 10.L.

2. African Studies Collection, folder 3.3, Lindfore, Tutuola’s Correspondence with BL, primarily, 1968-1997.

Recent Posts