http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Interview-with-Ngugi-Wa-Thiongo
The current issue of Granta magazine features an interview with Ngugi Wa Thiongo.
Ellah Allfrey takes the African-language-warrior through his forthcoming memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War. He talks about the phenomenon of the ‘concentration villages’ created by the dislocation of hundred of traditional villages by the colonists. Now, that’s a story I’d like to read. Read more »
Human Trafficking.
Chika Unigwe’s recent novel, On Black Sister’s Street, puts some faces on the issues. Yet, the choices that are exercised by the victims of Human Trafficking vary widely: from those seduced by promises of a better life to others who are kidnapped in the first place. All are trapped in situations of inhuman exploitation. All the ingredients of the Great Slave Trade are present: especially a criminal immorality that sits beneath the radar of popular outrage.
Human Trafficking is a catchall for a wide variety of turpitude, not all of which is sexual.
No country is innocent of the odium of H.T. – some countries are Sources, other are Transit or Destination countries. A few are all three, and we are all essential partners in the fight to end this shameful vestige of slavery.
Here is essential reading if you need to plug into the issues.
Chuma Nwokolo
Many yesterdays ago, India’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) announced another benefit of cloning technology: even if the Tsunami had wiped out all the members of the endangered Onge ethnic group (whose numbers were around 100 at the time) the CCMB would have been able to clone more Onge people from their DNA bank by using surrogate mothers from related ethnic groups.
The real question of course was just how ‘English’ – for instance – a child can be who was cloned from English ‘stock’ but raised in Brazil by a Portuguese-speaking family.
Science has of course a naked appetite for enquiry – and rightly so. The Onge ethnic group has already proved a source of much information for Indian, British and Malaysian scientists. If the Onges tragically went extinct, it follows that cloned specimens could further advance the interests of science.
Yet, although cloning technology may raise the man, it will not begin to recreate the language, cultural, and other envelopes that demarcate an ethnicity. A zoo, with all the best intentions, is still a zoo. Real help should go, early, to endangered communities across the world to bring them to viability. But the proper dues for our remains, whether human or ethnic, is a dignified funeral. Everything ends eventually, and no human deserves to live in the glorified fish bowl of a formalin jar.
Chuma Nwokolo
My name is Chuma Nwokolo. I am a writer and
lawyer currently living in Britain. Memories
of Stone is my first poetry collection. One
More Tale for the Road and Diaries
of a Dead African are my most recent novels, with Extinction
of Menai, forthcoming. Welcome to my blog.
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