Even if he was born in Ethiopia, he is an alien body in Ethiopia. I hope you can understand this. Let me repeat a phrase from the previous post.
“If we are to claim that Christianity is African, we must prove that the Christian culture is rooted in a culture that is properly and particularly African. We can not assign the roots of Christianity to a geographical reality as such, because by themselves stones, trees, waters and dust are not able to have or create a culture. If this was not true, if Christianity is African due to the geographical area called Africa, then Africa would be Christian today, but is not.”
The same is true about color. If we are to claim that the Greek tradition has even partially african roots, we must prove it to be connected with a properly and particularly African culture – not with the color of a person, because a color as such does not have nor is able to create a culture.
Where is the African culture to which Aesop belongs? Nowhere. No matter his color and origin, it was in Greece that Aesop became what he became, in the Greek environment and society. Aesop in any case can not be considered a root (the root is in Homer), and from that aspect I understand why you say “it’s no big deal”, but it is a big deal in our discussion to understand why Aesop can not be considered as even a secondary African influence, since it was Greece that produced Aesop, not the opposite. Place him in Ethiopia, and you will not be able to understand him; what Aesop became has not any precedent or continuation in the African culture(s).
Page 12
Night Traveler
Living in central Africa, former Belgian Congo, for a couple of years, taught me to appreciate truly expressive human faces! It seemed easy, even for a child, to recognize in a person’s face joy or pain. Back in Europe, in the Netherlands, I got confused. I couldn’t express a secure judgment on people’s feelings anymore. In High school, on a relevant essay subject, I argued that Africans are richer compared with Europeans, because of their incoming ability to be joyful, even in difficult situations! Was there any truth in my argument? If yes, it had the characteristics of truth, being myself cruel and non delightful, I was simply rejected, as delight was superior to truth for them. Unfortunately, this is how I was. But as I said, Africans had already taught me that it could be done, I could find true joy in unpleasant situations, as they did.
E-Blog
If you are right, how do you explain this tendency in people of African origin to deny their ways, and this not to adopt creatively the western ways, neither to imitate, but to pretend?!
Night Traveler
It seems to me that African people where pushed towards that direction, as the one-way, which would secure them acceptance and recognition from the so called “civilized world”. Neither the civilized world, nor the African people seemed to remember that you deserve the praises of your ancestors, only if you are like them and you have achieved their accomplishments.
E-Blog
I don’t understand your point. Africans who seek the acceptance of the West obviously don’t care about their ancestors, their praises and their accomplishments of whatever kind.
Maybe you try to say that to deserve the approval of the West, Africans must have achievements and not only ancestors. However, the problem is that they don’t have the ancestors they claim to have (let alone the achievements). But their want of the approval of the West by itself means something good must exist in the West.
On the other hand, perhaps you are not right when you say that the West does not remember the need of having achievements and not only ancestors. The West has achievements (according to its measures), if we agree that Rilke, Hoelderlin, Heidegger, Valery, Dickens, and so many others, can stand together with older western poets and philosophers.
Good or bad as it might seem to you, the West has a a creativity with roots in a tradition. On the African side or on the side of the “Macedonians” of Fyrom, I see only the creativity of a thief and opportunist, without values and without dignity. And if they had indeed the open-heart that you say they have, then their hypocrisy, their falsifications of history, the betrayal of their self and the hideous ways by which they try to become accepted in the West, brings them even more shame.