The Weekly, June 3, 2024
Hi all,
The Mere O campaign is ongoing. We are now at 64% of our goal and are really pleased with the response so far. You can read an update here.
If you would, I’d also appreciate prayer for the transition into summer vacation—June promises to be a busy month for us as Joie will be helping out with a local music and arts camp and I’ll be doing a bit more during the day to help out with the kids who won’t be at the camp with her. We’ll manage, but I have several deadlines coming up and a couple pieces that I need to finalize that are a little late at the moment and getting everything done feels a bit daunting.
Books
I realized a couple weeks ago that I wanted to reset some of my short-term reading goals. So I removed some books in the “liberalism discourse” pile and brought in some different ones that I either wanted to read again after years away or that simply would help refresh things for a me a bit intellectually after spending too much time thinking in the same circles.
So toward that end I reread Lewis’s The Last Battle, which was as good as I remembered. I also picked up Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, which has been excellent. It’s given me a greater appreciation of Tolkien’s formation and also of the joys of his childhood, despite its many tragedies, and also a greater understanding of how he could go on to produce stories like The Lord of the Rings. I’ve been able to draw on some of it as I’m drafting a forthcoming essay for Comment on Tolkien and “the long defeat.”
I have also gotten back into some of my African history interests with Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden, which has been a fascinating read so far. It pairs well both with Katongole’s Sacrifice of Africa, a foundational book for me, as well as some of the liberalism discourse happening today.
One thing Davidson highlights in the opening pages of the book is that many of the early African Christians in western Africa who also tended to be philosophically liberal and pro-British (and therefore often opposed to the power of traditional chiefs and other political authorities) tended to end up Christian, liberal, pro-British, etc. because they were either liberated slaves themselves (often freed by British ships sailing in the waters off Africa’s western coast in the 1840s-1860s) or they were children of liberated slaves. For them, “Africa” had enslaved them—it was rival tribes which often had sold them into slavery in the first place—and it was the Christian British who had emancipated them. Somewhat bizarrely, I’d never quite put that together before.
When I did my thesis on Nkrumah I spent time talking about the divide between the emerging indigenous bourgeois in the colonial Gold Coast (and later Ghana) and how they rivaled the traditional chiefs who tended to be further inland. Understanding that rivalry was key because Nkrumah was a disruptive force who shattered the entire conflict by gaining broad popular support across both groups—he was seen as less Europeanized by the traditional folks (although he had lived abroad in the UK and US for 15 years) and he was also seen as someone who understood statecraft and modern political organizing by the liberals.
Nkrumah wasn’t alone in this. Most first generation African post-colonial leaders were finding ways to split the difference, as it were, between the liberalizing Africans who tended to be more bourgeois and capitalistic and western aligned and the traditional people who were more hostile to Europe and “modernization” projects.
The way they usually did this was by seeking to articulate a pervasively “African” conception of culture and politics that, nevertheless, preserved space for modern concepts like nations and nation-states. Julius Nyerere is perhaps the best example of this. In his “Ujamaa” essays he argues for something he calls “African socialism” which he explicitly sets against “Marxist socialism” by claiming that Marxist socialism presupposes the inevitability of class conflict whereas in traditional African societies they did not have class and therefore did not have class conflict.
All that to say: I knew Nkrumah’s work very well and I’m also familiar with the work of Nyerere and the Zambian founding father Kenneth Kaunda, all of whom come from the same sort of political school. But Davidson’s book is helping me understand how the modernizer v traditionalist conflict first emerged—and understanding that is doubtless going to help me better grasp why the “post-colonial” story has played out the way it has in sub-Saharan Africa.
Anyway, Davidson is an exemplary historian whose work I highly recommend.
I also was sent a copy of the new Nellie Bowles book which I may dip into in the weeks to come.
That said, the liberalism discourse books are still on my list—John Bowlin, Samuel Moyn, and Allen Guelzo are all in my reading/to-read pile at the moment.
Articles
The Verge on the people who maintain the sub-oceanic cables that power… everything
LM Sacasas on that Apple ad
Also read Sacasas on silence
William Boyce on space
John Shelton on what Alan Jacobs got wrong about Niebuhr
Ross Douthat on the reading list at Columbia
Freddie de Boer on overoptimization
Daniel Schillinger on Anton Barba-Kay
Ryan Burge on the people dropping out of everything
Elsewhere
We recently got a Blackstone Griddle, so I’ve been breaking that in and trying out various meals. The most successful thing, I think, were some breakfast burritos I made over the weekend. I started by frying some bacon on the griddle, then threw on some sliced peppers next to the bacon and let them char a bit before mixing them in with the bacon. Once all that was cooked, I removed it and cooked a bunch of eggs in the left behind bacon grease. Mix all that together and throw it into a tortilla. I will say that having a couple nice sturdy metal spatulas is super helpful for cooking on the griddle. You could get away with one plus some tongs, but two good metal spatulas are super handy.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake