Rant about February

Not a good month. For me or for us all.

First let me bitch about my class. Let's call 'em as we see 'em. I have offered two intersecting lectures in which I situate Frederick Lugard, the author of Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, and no, don't let me know if I've misquoted the title, I'm writing purely off the cuff here, and the introduction of Indirect Rule, capitalized, as a concept, follows from this. Lugard accompanied a "Company" militia into Buganda to "stabilize" a complex situation involving Muslims and Christians and a Kingship. Later on, he ruled as governor over the Sokoto Caliphate established by Usuman ("Fulani Jihad" etc.), which had produced the "Hausa-Fulani" aristocracy.

Through Lugard's experiences we look at what Lugard says and does theoretically, i.e. first, "rule through emirs," second, his understanding of naturally-entitled races, and third, the ahistorical and anti-hierarchical idea of ethnicity. (It derived from the necessity of naturalizing the rule of chiefs, creating natural domains of uncontested underlings locked into place. See Martin Chanock.) One effect: permitting and tolerating the perpetuation of slavery in N. Nigeria (Sokoto Caliphate etc.)

So on the exam, after having delivered these lectures, which included another lecture devoted to the history of the Great Lakes kingdoms up to the end of the nineteenth century, including Buganda/Uganda, and after having projected these words on the screen in the dark in giant POWER POINT LETTERS,

I gave an exam with the following question or something like it, amid other "short answers," viz., Frederick Lugard author of Indirect Rule went from a stint militarily in B________ or U__________ (4 letters.)

That's right. I made a mistake: GANDA is five letters. Anyway, here's the end of my little complaint for February re this question on the midterm exam in a class in which every single reading is a computer click away from appearing on their screens.

Not a single student in the sitting class of 75 raised their hand to say, "Professor Landau, I noticed that the answer to the question seems to be five letters, not four."

Not a single person. Not one person in the class both a. knew this enough to do so, and / or b. got this right, and c. were willing to point it out to me in either case.

Only twenty more years of teaching to go.

All right, about this month. Look, there is nothing nice about sliding down into a smaller, more "realistic" economy. The GOP keeps saying Obama will make us into France or Sweden, but that's a BEST CASE SCENARIO. Why can't we see that in the end, Americans are going to have to be driving small, light-weight, perhaps inflatable electric and gas/electric vehicles, if not now, then in the next ten twenty years? With portable engines but top speeds of fifty miles per hour and slow acceleration?

Okay, enough about my love for my car. But the sinking ship that is the economic boom subsiding . . . the money that inflated the market until '99, then went into real estate; the tail end of those buyers were those who couldn't afford to pay off their mortgages unless their properties continued to accelerate to higher and higher values.

Next up is my landlord parking-space rear neighbors, who own three or four parking spaces on this side of the alley. They did not like my telephoning five times over two weeks checking up on why the promised cleaning crew had not come, the crew that they'd called after I reported that another homeless person's SHIT with TOILET PAPER had not been cleaned up in the parking lot DIRECTLY BEHIND my house. Well, the response of this neighborly company, Potomac Development Corporation, has been to send me a Boist diagram of our and the surrounding properties in the block, showing that they own the property up to the very rear of our easement rear yard / deck, and so, they can put up hedges or even a WALL if I persist in . . .

Swinging my gate out over their property, it appears.

In other words, they want no access, or at least alley-access, to my property from the rear. At the least, they've cancelled my ability to enter my own property from their -- "their" -- parking space properties. If they choose they could shut me in further even as an emergency egress. At the very least, the message is: Lay off, and change your f * ing gate. Thank you. I'm glad I called you on your missing cleaning crew not cleaning up the homeless persons' faeces, and that you allow me usually to deal with the cast-aside used condoms, to report the rats caught in the waste bin in the rain, to report the sofa and construction off-scouring left in the alley off "their" parking spaces. My reward: "You can't have free access in the alley anymore."

Because they can. Just like companies can dump thousands of employees and then say they are "investing in their people."

The rear opening onto the alley predates their purchase of those easements (if a landlord friend is right) or property, because it goes back at least fifty years. I remember the rundown but nonethless discernible shape of the rear yards before my neighbor's property was sold, and my neighbor grew up there. The rear yards opened up at their backs onto the alley from her childhood. That was the understanding we had of the property when we bought it, and it remains mine now.

Anyway let me end now after two I am sure irritating premature PUBLISH POSTS. Today I introduced the third point I take away from Lugard: his understanding that successful rulers in Africa as elsewhere in the world had to take something away from their citizens. They had to tax them.

If they did not take regularly and predictably from their citizens, their citizens would have no stake in the direction of the state. They would resist further attempts to tie them therein. One whole part of the Dual Mandate was to mentor native peoples (races), so they might develop their better sons into small aristocracies leading the way forward for their tribes and peoples . . . and ultimately those men demanded to control the state, Nasser's and Nkrumah's and P'Bitek's and Armah's and Dangor's and Achebe's generation. Indirect Rule contained the seeds of its own destruction.

One key element of these four (yes, 4) Lugardian postulates, was the squashing of hierarchies in fact relied upon, into pancakes of ethnic groups.