Buharry,

Thanks alot for the forwards.  They are quite enlightening.  I did 
learn alot from a previous posting on the Continental philosophers, 
i.e.  Heidegger, Kojeve and Sartre...Although I sense a perennial bias 
characteristic of the Anglo-American Analytical philosophers, and their 
preference to logical positivism.  

Okombe of Fordham does have very interesting ideas of women and I think 
she has illuminated very salient features of gender relations within 
the African society.  However, I think she hasn’t tackled the issue 
of “power” as a socio-economic phenomenon very well.  Somehow she 
managed to highlight instances within very narrow tribal contexts: 
domestic cases amongst the Yoruba.   She also makes a tragic mistake in 
her attempt to reject “Western tools of analysis” as unfit to study the 
gender power dynamics in Africa.  I belief the “Western” tools do 
bequeath women with an impressive armory of critical tools:  Derrida’s 
approach of deconstruction is astounding in analyzing the structure of 
language and how the idea of logo-centrism works in binary opposition 
by privileging a group over the “other” and thus alienating them in the 
process.  Foucault also did some very brilliant work in analyzing the 
dynamics of power in history and society, i.e. how phallo-centrism 
dominates and defines what it means to be a “women” through out 
history.  Finally the old man Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectics in his 
seminal Phenomenology of Spirit is still a canon in critical theory.  
In fact, I was just reading a passage from late Senghor’s Negritude, 
and his whole idea of the e-motive African was essentially Hegelian.  
My only fear eventually is that appeals to traditions by some African 
scholars, misinterpreted religious teachings and atavistic tribal 
history claims are all but wretched subterfuges.       

Finally Achebe’s speech was definitely right on the money... it is 
quite a fresh breath of humanity to that number-crunching, insensitive 
and hopeless institution called the World Bank.

Thank you very much brother.

Ebou Jallow 
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