A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
Benson Eluma has done me the honour of writing a long post on Olumide Abimbola’s blog with the same title as this one. I am very grateful to Olu (Loomnie) for his intellectual companionship in general and for this collaboration in particular. Benson’s post refers to my previous one here, Africa’s hope, which in turn […] →Read more
There is a lot more to be said about what has happened as a result of Africa’s urban revolution in the twentieth century. But let’s fast forward a bit and consider the prospects for the coming half-century. The publication of an oped piece by Chinua Achebe in today’s New York Times, Nigeria’s promise, Africa’s hope, […] →Read more
When I started out in the 1960s, most of what anthropologists’ knew about African cities came from the Manchester school who worked in Central/Southern Africa, mainly in Northern Rhodesia (which became Zambia and was best known for the Copperbelt). Cities in this region had been largely built and were controlled by white settler regimes. The […] →Read more
There is no doubt that my life was transformed by the two and a half years I spent in Ghana, 1965-68, much of it doing ‘fieldwork’ in a slum of the capital city Accra. Writing a doctoral thesis was straightforward enough, although I felt I had to disguise my own participation in what I described. […] →Read more
This one is longer than usual, but it does contain the foundation of my book’s argument concerning how Africa arrived at the 21st century. In the spirit of blogging, I link it here to a piece in today’s FT by the Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim on the implications of his country’s impending breakup for Africa’s […] →Read more
Today’s Financial Times has a global economic analysis of considerable historical vision by Martin Wolf. He takes his key terms from Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). Pomeranz argued that a major gap between China and the West opened up in the late 18th century. […] →Read more
Not long ago the same Polity Press that asked me to review Négrologie and contracted me to write my own book sent me another French book on Africa for possible translation, Le Temps de l’Afrique by Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray. Severino was until recently Director-General of the French Development Agency. My review was positive […] →Read more
I live in Paris and for a long time I have reviewed French books for possible translation by British publishers. One of them was Stephen Smith’s Négrologie: pourquoi l’Afrique meurt for Polity Press in 2005. Smith’s book won public acclaim in France, as well as provoking an angry response in the form of the book […] →Read more
The Memory Bank has never truly been a blog. Its purpose has always been self-publishing, the first place to put my papers and videos, and where from the beginning I made my book of the same name available. Now I have decided to blog about a book I want to write in the coming months. […] →Read more
“The distinctive feature of our age is that mankind as a whole is on the way to becoming fully conscious of itself.” (C.L.R. James) By “anthropology” I refer here not to the academic institution but to a human teleology in James’s sense. We must improve our self-knowledge as individuals and as a species, especially the […] →Read more
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
