Momodou ( or St. Sidibeh if you prefer)

Please permit me to respond to the first two paragraphs of your epistle plus the first sentence of your third paragraph, ending with the words ” no tangible results”

I’ll attend to the serious matter of your other verses later – just for the record.

About first names, I was only joking – and being slightly sarcastic/ironic about Mauricio…..didn’t you notice?
Everyone says Saddam, Yahya, the Honourable this and the Honourable that until you are tempted to say that honourable Mo-Fu……YOU KNOW THE KIND I MEAN…….Mo……

In one of his last interviews as head of State in South Africa , F. W. de Klerk ( you may call him Frederik or Fred if you like) was asked how he felt  about  being the last White man to be president of South Africa.
 Mr. de Klerk said that now that Apartheid had been dismantled – by law,  colour was consequently of little importance in the New South Africa and the possibility still existed that he ( or his) could be coming back…..( and I though to myself, maybe he is thinking of swimming back,  all the way up  North……

But in Sweden we live in another situation:

http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY_TABLE_2007_v3.pdf

If you overemphasise the blackness of Nyamko you are also signifying the otherness, the whiteness of the others – whereas this is not so so significant. I think that she actually wants the Trade portfolio followed by the post of prime minister. If she will deserve that in the near future remains to be seen.  What would Baffour Ankomah not say! At such a time  - he’d have to say, “the country was ripe for that kind of change.”

When it was suggested many years ago that Colin Powell might possibly be the  very next president of the United States, David Frost asked him in that interview ( Breakfast With Frost)  “ Sir,  how would you like to be remembered ?” – as if he was going to  be assassinated by the KKK shortly after taking the oath of office/ swearing-in ceremony , or any other time shortly thereafter…..

When I first read the news about the termination of funds to “the Anti-racism Campaign office” in which a relative of Nyamko was active – I thought that this was to kill at source, any rumours – that  might arise -  that could be promoted by her political enemies in the near future……about any kind of ne-po-ti-sm. And as to the effectiveness – how effective has it been?  We are to suppose that, in time, a similar type of organisation will eventually replace it – and that someone in that organisation could win the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King prize that Hon. Joe Frans created.

About first names, well I say Joe, but not George, or Fredrick , and Mauricio would be friendly, Mr. Rojas would be formal, like Sheik Momodou – but thanks for the social analysis, it sounded Dickensian in a post-colonial and assimilated kinda way.
Going a little further back ( Sweden has changed so much that it’s no longer the same country that I came to in 1971- and as the saying goes you can’t take a dip in the same river twice – but I’m talking about significant changes, so  that Tage Erlander would have difficulties estimating the number of years that have elapsed since he was last here, and even recently there was a time when even in the telephone directories people’s professions were part of their social identities  and so in “Swedish For Foreigners”  our textbook said “ There is Engineer Svensson. In the evenings he plays in an orchestra.” I used to see him on my way to Tempo –old blue eyes,  the guy with the neatly trimmed moustache,  Ingenjör Svensson. 

So far for first names….

 There’s nothing diversionary about Swedish issues or  EU issues like  the Pope’s visit and Turkey’s entry into membership of  the resurrected  old Roman Empire could be side issues that you deign to look at and indulge some petty opinions or take more seriously, or forever hold your peace about that and other matters which most directly affect your welfare and wellbeing  in this country where we live ( I’m still not sure if you are in Sweden or the Gambia)…..

Later Ali-G -ator
On the banks of the river Gambia…..

Ok?

> 
> From: Momodou S Sidibeh <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2006/11/29 on PM 02:59:22 CET
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Ämne: Re: Sabuni and FGM
> 
> C. Edward Hamelberg
> 
> Keeping the discussion rolling on these matters is no easy task for me at 
> present, draining from my tissues the energy required to continually justify 
> why the talk must go on, barring recognition that these "Sweden" issues are 
> perhaps a stimulating diversion. But I do not find much disagreement 
> anywhere. Except, well in re: the matter of me being in first name terms 
> with Nyamko Sabuni and Mauricio Rojas. Swedish tradition has done away with 
> such mystification of identities as is supplied by useless titles: Mr., 
> Mrs., Sir, Dr, Your Highness, Chief, Alhaji, and so on..., perhaps not quite 
> tolerable for the post-colonial mind still soaked in the science of social 
> stratification? The prime minister is just Fredrik Reinfeldt, not Your 
> Excellency Fredrik Reinfeldt. The idea of being on first name terms is to 
> remain down to earth without invading the other's integrity. Just listen to 
> yourself say: His Excellency, Dr. Alhaji Yaya A.J.J Jammeh, and then imagine 
> the cruelty he represents. What a waste?
> 
> So Nyamko Sabuni can be called Nyamko, even on tv! Your attempt to write-off 
> Mauricio I hope, was purely for practical reasons. The man is no longer 
> politically interesting, I agree. But let us at least recognise the two have 
> shared the podium on very significant issues in the past: language skills 
> testing for Swedish wannabes, deportation of "hardened" criminals 
> (irrespective of social links to the country, such as children and spouses); 
> reformation of public funding of private religious oriented schools, and the 
> implementation of more aggressive control mechanisms to "smoke" out social 
> welfare crooks, and so on. Thus, your writing off one, while lauding the 
> other as a "saint who treads where angels fear" deliberately bends the rules 
> of logical inference. In a country where even the BertIan double (Bert 
> Karlsson and Ian Wachmeister) recognise that immigrants and people of 
> immigrant ancestry receive stiffer sentences than ethnic Swedes for 
> similar(!) crimes, to call for the deportation of "grova kriminella" (severe 
> criminals) even if that should mean their leaving behind children and 
> spouses, is simple, callous cruelty. If all that is just the cake, let us 
> look att the icing that crowned it!
> One of the very first "ministerial" assignments she executed without delay 
> was to stifle funding for the Anti-racism Campaign office on the grounds 
> that its work brought no tangible results! When about a month ago, Veckans 
> Affärer (Sweden's version of Business Week, so to speak), the most bourgeois 
> of the right-wing press asked her for comments on the immigrant brain drain, 
> she said she had no time! [Hundreds of well educated immigrants remain 
> unemployed and/or underemployed for years in Sweden only to find suitable 
> lucrative positions as soon as they arrive in Britain or Canada. Nyamko 
> finally commented on the issue last night]!  All of this, plus more 
> discursive soup served by a very eloquent black lady minister.
> 
> Let us recapitulate on what Sweden means to me, and hopefully us. Rampant 
> discrimination and racism, certainly. Night clubs that refuse blacks and 
> dark-haired immigrants are plenty, and employers will tell you all sorts of 
> lies for not offering you a job. These days if you are called Abdirizak 
> Mohammad, or Ali Baba, or Abdurahman Omar, your chance of becoming gainfully 
> employed might lie in altering your name to Magnus Lindkvist or Ingrid 
> Johansson or some other blue and blond name. Forces of cultural alienation 
> are sending a lot of immigrants, both young men and women to plastic 
> surgeons. Persian and Arab youth alter their facial features, nose and chin, 
> so as to look more caucasian! Others, having lost their souls in tentative 
> integration into a society that eventually rejects even those with good 
> grades, take to violent crime. (Have you read "Snabba Cash"?).
> But their is as well, a noble history of genuine solidarity and progressive 
> politics. Sweden offered the most help to the ANC and liberation movements 
> on the African continent. It still pours millions in aid to Ethiopia, 
> Tanzania, Mozambique, and Vietnam, significantly subsidising the budgets of 
> these countries. That Nelson Mandela's first trip outside Africa after his 
> release from prison in 1990 was to Stockholm was not simply incidental. 
> Swedes risked their lives running underground support systems that helped 
> sustain the families of victims, killed or jailed, of the apartheid regime.
> My friend it is in these complexes of contexts we must place and weigh 
> Nyamko Sabunis performance as minister. Perhaps she is no Uncle Tom, but she 
> is an Auntie Igrid to me! and even if she deserves a honeymoon on account of 
> her historic appointment, I am sure she will be colliding with many 
> activists, including me. I know that I am travelling to an entirely 
> different destination. The question is whether you are just taking a 
> different bus to the same destination as Nyamko. Tell me, please.
> 
> I am holding on to Ginny's position on female genital cutting. As she 
> rightly opined, some Africans have already gone underground, secretly taking 
> their daughters to their home countries where they are cut, and then brought 
> back to Scandinavia. It is a horrifying practice to all of us, i.e those 
> convinced that they know better, and we should work to abolish it. Yet, I 
> cannot think of any country where education and information have been more 
> effectively used as instruments of social engineering, as a way of altering 
> attitudes, as a consistently proven method of implememting even socially 
> unpopular reforms. It has been the cornerstone of social democratic politics 
> for decades since the pre war years.
> Subjecting African girls to examination to determine the state of their 
> genitalia is not just an abominablel invasion of their privacy. Even if 
> Nyamko says her suggestion was to provoke debate, that such a suggestion 
> came from her is a reflection of the general climate of antagonistic 
> cultural encounter immigrants experience here. Because female genetical 
> cutting is demonised, its practitioners are equated, perhaps not explicitly, 
> as savages whose brutal impulses towards their own wives and daughters must 
> be aggressively checked. Why, a trip to the gynaecologist must be taken as a 
> most ordinary and compassionate samaritan act. Behold, even Cornelius 
> Hamelberg thinks FGC has its historical roots buried in the primordial 
> cruelty of men bent on depriving women of their divine right to a life 
> endowed with sexual bliss. But don't we know better? Are there no medicinal 
> roots to FGC, even if ill informed? And like the circumcision of males, is 
> that of girls not largely a crucial aspect of initiation rites into 
> womanhood? But besides, whence does all this anti-FGC hail?
> 
> Anti-FGC militantism is hardly older than the rise of feminist activism in 
> the West. It is this political project of gender liberation that has largely 
> defined FGC as an incredible act of widespread cruelty. Yet as genuine as 
> the concerns of westerners are, the brutality of the application of "rusty 
> knives" on female flesh in the African bush, is hardly more severe than the 
> tortuous lives of women in societies steeped in violent misogyny. Sex 
> reassignment surgery - never mind the clinically decent name, nothing 
> brutish here you see - is in many instances, more horrifying than many forms 
> of FGC including infibulation. Male to female surgery involves cutting off 
> the testicles completely, apart from other complicated procedures required 
> for making a man sexually female. There are "clit" clinics in L.A where 
> women go to be operated upon to alter the look of their genitals. If you can 
> imagine an old grandmother using crude knives in the African bush to slice 
> open the  breasts of young girls and stuff them with different kinds of 
> silicon implants you would come closer to understanding why words, 
> professional training, money, clinical environments are all brought to bear 
> to create a mental projection defined by a dominat culture that sees one 
> practice as "barbaric" and the other as qualified aesthetic surgery. It is 
> all about the exercise of power.
> 
> Unless their is genuine respect for other people inspite of their 
> traditional practices, attempts to alter attitudes may prove more painful 
> than necessary. That is a message we need to convey to Nyamko Sabuni.
> 
> Cheers,
> sidibeh
> 
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