Sharing a link to an interview of mine posted at the African Book Review earlier this week. We covered a lot: decolonisation, African feminism, blogging, sexuality, poetry and more. I hope you like it, I put a lot into it.
Minna Salami: An Interview with the Creator of Ms. Afropolitan
Let me know if you have any thoughts on some of the issues raised.
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Mina I’ve learned quite a bit about your thinking from the interview. Thanks for sharing. Could you please though elaborate and/or explain this response you provided a bit more? “We need to unpack the psychological legacy of slavery on modern-day Africa. Where colonialism was largely about recreating the African into the European image: teaching her to speak European languages, worship European gods, behave like a “lady” and so on, the transatlantic slave trade was the segue to colonialism…and the more we incorporate that history into psychosocial analysis of African people today (as Jewish people have rightly done with the holocaust) the more we can heal, build and come to grips with the event of colonialism.” I think I got the gist of what you mean here but would appreciate if you could explain better what you mean by the “transatlantic slave trade being a segue to colonialism”..? Thank you.
Hi Efrutik, thanks for reading and leaving a comment. There is a longer answer to the question you ask, but in short what I was thinking – so as to justify the transatlantic slave trade, the ‘white psyche’ was made to feel superior (more moral, holy, pure etc.) to the ‘African psyche’, and this was done through art, writing and especially Biblical images and texts. The superior/inferior power structure later enabled Europeans to even consider colonialism and Africans, perhaps, to in some cases embrace it. That’s the psychosocial context I was getting at, going back to how the inferior/superior idea started as part of the decolonisation process. Does that make any sense?