₦airaland Forum

Beaf:
^
Your reason is "it sounded like bullshit?" Incredible. Critical thinking is an art you desperately need to learn. Your googling never told you the word applies to monkeys? Unbelievable!
Your googling couldn't provide an explanation for the phrase, "Apes obey!" and its echo, "Aye!" Shocking!

You simply cannot walk up to any European today and identify him as belonging a tribe, whether gaulish, celtic or other crap. Have you identified any French man that claims he is a Gaulish tribesman? Have you ever met a Briton that identified themselves to you as Celtic tribes people?
Dude, stop providing braindead examples, it makes you come across as a dim bulb.
I find your input to be rather closed minded for the simple facts above. Have you ever spoken with a European? How can you be so ignorant? Dude its crass.

There are a group of Nigerians who imagine that they can make declarations of wisdom without proof. They all end up looking foolish, because their declarations turn out empty and no more than holding positions based on animal instinct and testosteronal ego's.

If you claim to belong to a tribe, its really your choice. To me a tribe and other thinking people, tribe is defined as a troop of monkeys.

How is blindly accepting some fairly tale that some workers chant sounds like "apes obey" evidence of your critical thinking? Please don't even insinuate that you have some sort of greater inclination to critical thinking over me or that you and the rest of the sheep that just accept anything they hear that fits in with their prejudices and assumptions have somehow employed some sort of deep analysis that is somehow beyond my grasp. As I said before, when and where and in how many areas in Nigeria and in all of black Africa were white colonial masters acting like overseers and working us as though it were the Belgian Congo? Or does your supposed critical thinking and wisdom suddenly end when asked to actually think?


I'm well aware that the word tribe applies to monkey that's why I brought up that fact when I asked you a simple question, when British and French refer to their ancestors as tribesmen are they calling them monkeys? Are the Danes called a Northern Germanic tribe because the rest of Europe is conspiring to reduce the ancestors of the Danish to monkeys? What I was trying to get across to you, and what you obviously didn't grasp, is that they refer to even their own ancestors that way because they wanted to demarcate nations and ethnic groups from subgroups with a low level of development and organization. I think you know very well that a lot of groups of Africans and Asians simply fit the definition, just as some other groups do or once did.

For example, the Sami are a people, but within that people are subgroups who speak variations of the same "linguistic theme," so to speak (their languages are closely related). Upon meeting some of these subgroups and seeing that they all had similarities to each other, but were not organized into a large formal state nor were a large single group, an explorer would be fully justified in calling one such subgroup a tribe. And in fact they were called such, but was it with the intention to call them monkeys? The Sami are not African or Asian. Now if an explorer met hundreds of such groups upon exploring just a fraction of Africa, obviously the tendency would arise to just start calling every group a tribe. But is this evidence of trying to necessarily put down another group or is it an accurate description of the state of a group of people compared with groups that could be considered nations or whole ethnic groups? These are questions people who actually think would ask.

Must a group of hunter-gatherers speaking one of the 800+ distinct languages in Papua New Guinea necessarily be considered an ethnic group?

Are the Twelve Tribes of Israel the Twelve "Monkey-Groups" of Israel? Are there Twelve "Distinct Ethnic Groups" of Israel? Let's be sensible here.

The word tribe originates from the Latin word for three, and was used to distinguish the three ethnic groups within Rome. In its original usage it was equivalent to ethnicity, race, etc. . .and was used to demarcate ethnicity within the Roman nation, later it was used by Europeans to demarcate between sub-ethnicities of larger groups or small isolated groups, and then it was applied to monkeys, NOT the other way around as has been insinuated here.

If anything, for groups  of monkeys to be called tribes was one of many attempts by Europeans to measure monkeys' social organization and behavior (a topic of constant interest to scientists, anthropologists, etc.) from the standpoint of humans and almost humanize them by acting as if each clan of monkeys (yes, I just said "clan of monkeys," will you now never refer to your extended family as a clan and the oldest male as the patriarch of the Beaf clan? Whether or not you ever did, the point I'm illustrating is that I can take almost any group word and start applying it to monkeys if I don't want to create some new word just to talk about monkeys) were really so distinct from another. Calling somebody a herd member or part of a flock could be an attempt to compare that human being to an animal. Tribe on the other hand, was used for millenia before anybody ever even thought of applying it to monkeys, contrary to the insinuations here.


What I tried to get across is that contrary to the assumptions being bandied around here like facts, tribe was used as a neutral, rather than derogatory term. Later it was applied to monkeys in one of many silly attempts by Europeans to over humanize them and cast them as human-like because of the way they group together and organize. That it is still being used to refer to monkeys and also still being used by Africans about Africans and by Europeans about Africans, is unfortunate, and problematic and that alone is a good rationale to stop using it but as things now stand there are many subgroups in Africa that do not constitute whole nations and whole ethnic groups like Dutch, British, French and have not forgotten (or learned to forget) that their small distinct group within a larger group or small isolated group within a country still has a name. This is how different European tribes became nations, ethnic groups, etc. There are some groups in Africa, Asia, South America, etc. who, simply put, who still fit what was historically considered a tribe. To concoct stories of some sort of master conspiracy to call us monkeys and get us calling each other monkeys when facts about the word and its actual history and usage are plain to see (even by the same google that you mentioned) is just spreading ignorance, and possibly even unearned resentment.

When confronted with a rumor/tall tale, I applied critical thinking and reached a reasonable conclusion. I hope in the future you can do the same.

chyz:
Well your Edo so your kind of Igbo.That could have been the reason.

What is the meaning of the bolded?

^^^^

I had already googled it before I responded and it still sounded like bullshit in those articles. And when and where and in how many places were white overlords working Africans like slaves in Nigeria? Or is all of Nigeria and all of Africa suddenly the Congo?

I never claimed to belong to a tribe, but I reject fantastical notions of some sort of conspiracy to degrade Africans in every aspect of the English language. There were very real attempts to degrade Africans in various ways but I can't see how tribe is one of them. At the level of development and structural organization which many Africans were at they were no different than the Gaulish tribes that later became the French nation or the Celtic tribes, so how would a colonialist calling them tribesmen be like calling them monkeys? Or are the British and French, who colonized much of Africa, by calling their Celtic and Gaulish ancestors different tribes saying that their ancestors were no better than monkeys compared to groups like the Romans?

I don't think there was an Edo "tribe" but there are other groups in Africa for which the word tribe seems slightly more appropriate than to make what is clearly a sub-group into a full-fledged ethnicity. That is the purpose of the word tribe, demarcation, not necessarily degradation. It is not a fitting term in the 21st century for most ethnic groups but it didn't necessarily come into use as part of some effort to dehumanize every single group of non-white people.

slyopez:
This moderator seems to be against my Igbo broda, if abagworo was banned for tribal hatred, what happens to the likes of Bluetooth, Mr Cork, bkbabe, onlytruth etc they should be banned from browsing the internet in their entire life. Seun, jarus, aisha do something b4 i label u ppl tribalist.

Gworo-Aba was banned for spam, not hate. It happened to me too and I'm not Igbo.

ezeagu:
Yoruba ♥ Bini once upon a time. Yoruba >kicks out> Bini. Bini >wanders>. Ijaw >good samaritans> or >intimidated>. Bini gets land. >To be continued>

?

Doubtful. Especially given the ethnic settlement pattern of the Ijaws.

But your ancestors probably had tribal marks. Or are these now to be euphemized as "ethnic marks" when they didn't serve the purpose of distinguishing between different ethnicities but of distinguishing between different subgroups of ethnicities.


There are sub-groups within ethnicities that were called tribes such as Celtic tribes, Gaulish tribes, etc, it has nothing to do with ethnicity or race, it's about the level of development of a group. And that story from Beaf sounds like bullshit, If you're going to tell tall tales at least make them believable,

abagoro:
The truth remains that he never made any of those claims but the media made it for him.I still believe he has made the most impact on computing than any black man.

Wrong. Mark Dean.

And Emeagwali's original website is the source of all his bogus claims. He has had no impact and never will. Frauds are forgotten.

T9ksy:
@Osama,

No, its not news but i just gotta mention mens dept's take on the issue. Isn't it sad that our muslim brothers jump through many hoops to be in the good books of their islamic masters in saudia arabia yet they turn round (in many instances) and treat us like shiite.

Our govt. spends millions of naira to sponsor these people to hajj only for them to return and append the term "alhaji/alhaja" to their names like a title. This term in actual fact meant "stranger" and is used by the saudis to differentiate between indigenes and visitors to the holy city.

We never hear of Alhaji Osama bin landin or Alhaji gaddafi or Alhaji Ahmeddenajad but only in our shores do we see all these mo.rons return from hajj and proudly call themselves "strangers" in their own motherland. Some will even fight tooth and nail just so they could go to hajj and then have the right to call themselves Alhaji so-and-so.

Lol, alhaji is one spelling of the honorific given to Muslims who have completed a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. Come on, this is basic knowledge. Where are you getting this your "stranger" theory?

Buhari is scum. Anyway isn't this the same clown who said that if an Igbo man became president he would leave Nigeria and never come back? And this guy would parade himself as some sort of Nigerian statesman. How can you be blatantly prejudiced against 20% of the population of your country but then claim you should be elected to govern it?

ezeagu:
Eri counted the market days and the children of Nri, Eri's son founded Idah. The Igala royalty trace their roots to Nri. The Igala probably 'gave birth' to the Yoruba as well.

You say a lot of strange things.

slap1:
Can't Abagoro post Abagworo's interesting article?

Then he'll become Abagorowolowo. That spam buster doesn't play.

Inspiring story. This guy acts on his dreams and that alone is enough to earn my respect.

This still does not match most people's idea of a flying car as portrayed by science fiction films and it doesn't seem that easy even with there being only that one button because it seems one would still need to know how to actually fly a vehicle rather than just drive/steer while levitating as we would expect of the cars in the science fiction films. I could be wrong though.

Yes, but he's a Nigerian pastor, so it's expected.

Now a scientist on the other hand. . .that's supposed to be a man of integrity!

PhysicsMHD sympathizes with abaGORO's situation.


Times is hard, son. Times is hard.

Jakumo:
Former Nigerian military tyrant Ayatollah Buhari will FAIL in ALL endeavors on which he squanders his looted government cash.

Buhari will FAIL to ever get elected to any post higher than village dog catcher, and his law suits protesting that failure will all FAIL in similar fashion.

He will FAIL in realizing his mad dream of converting Nigeria into a rogue Taliban Islamic terror state.

He will FAIL to get it up when his ugly wife demands it, and he will FAIL to jail another human being for the rest of his wasted life.

And finally, Buhari will FAIL to garner any sympathy at all when he dies in poverty after wasting all his stolen wealth.

Even in death, Buhari will FAIL to copulate with the 70 virgins in paradise, but will instead spend eternity shovelling hot coals in the fiery bowels of hell, while having the living crap flogged out of his sorry butt by cackling, scaly demons.

LMAO.

Lol. . . Who would have thought. . .40 years later and people are proposing their own Aburi accords. Unfortunately, after 1966, it is either an arrangement like the present one, or complete dissolution. People have thought these things through before. There is a sort of stumbling block to federalism in the fact that there is absolutely no way that  the country will not be "subordinated to any arbitrary and capricious decision of a leader in Abuja" only for the other federating units to reject that  (in their view, he/she would be an idio.t, whether or not what he was proposing was only a small and simple thing that merely appeared capricious and wrong to this or that particular region, that's the nature of politics), leading to a political gridlock which would no doubt escalate into secession of some or most of the federating units, especially if ethnic or religious angles were introduced into the discussion (conflict, actually, not discussion. . .)

The thing which must be admitted is that, with each small area able to progress in any or most areas it deems necessary without central government approval, or without money from the center, it could progress at a rate proportional to the ability of the people in the state. Of course such a scheme might leave a certain very large region of Nigeria out in the cold and helpless. I think we all know what this region is. Recently, people from this region have been complaining that something is zoned to them. And people often suspect that the only reason there is no federalism is because of this region.

On the other hand, the things many people here are complaining about are mostly economic. Admittedly good economic development comes with good governance, so the fundamental problem here is mostly one of quality and competence of leadership, not necessarily the supposedly more productive governments that would somehow immediately follow from more local control.


It's about quality, my friends. One Jerry Rawlings (and no, not just somebody to kill off corrupt politicians, because those can always spring up again, somebody to actually develop the country as well), one Deng Xiaoping, and the particular brand of government becomes quite irrelevant. A benevolent dictator is many times better than several "elected" idiots.

The truth is when people talk about "true federalism" and "resource control" they're talking about far more than creation of state-controlled police, so lets leave such nearly trivial concerns out of this. What people are saying is that the current system has utterly failed to properly address their potential - both their human potential and that of their lands - to bring them out of their very low standard of living. But if, in the years following 1970, the leaders, most of them military leaders, had actually succeeded in developing Nigeria just off of sheer competence rather than failing woefully out of their actual gross incompetence and simplistic throw-oil-money-at-everything policies, lack of vision, and militaristic tendencies, would we hear so much about how "structure" or "lack of resource control" were the reasons for Nigeria's problems?

Of course not.


The problem is and always has been that some people, most of them from a certain geographical area that I'll leave unnamed for now, are just not up to the task of turning one of the most populous undeveloped nations in the world into a developed nation because that is a monumental task that they are not equal to in terms of quality. With the ascendancy of the PDP, a party composed chiefly of people unequal to this task, and their claim that they will rule Nigeria for 150+ years, and the apparent reality that they are in fact correct and that they will rig elections and rule for decades while the populace sits back and does nothing, I cannot blame people for inventing phantoms like "structure" and "resource control" as the panacea to all of their problems. Times are truly getting desperate. However the reality is that some of the "primitive" totalitarian states have seen enormous development without a regard for local voices over the strong center simply because the most competent were allowed to rise to the center.

With regard to the original post, I commend Fayemi for being a thinking governor, though I hope it is not just all for show.

The individuals you mentioned didn't start 50 moroni.c threads in a row within a 20 minute time span dedicated solely to Igbo bashing. You on the other hand do not seem to have any problem engaging in such idio.cy . I really wish you could somehow be permanently banned and not be able to come back under another username not because I think it will actually result in ethnic bashing ceasing or decreasing-I'm pretty sure other tribalists would take your place and escalate the Yoruba-Igbo war of words just as you have done but because your particular repetitive, one-dimensional, obsessive, obnoxious, persecution-complex laden, and whiny posts are bringing down the quality of the politics section (a section where intelligent, enlightening and informative debates and discussions DO take place at times) by shooing away intelligent commentators and attracting brainless, crass boors like yourself who seem to need to engage in rabid tribalism and ethnic warfare to sexually climax. Tribalist threads would always pop up but it seriously reduces the forum to shi.t when they pop up every 4 minutes.

Jarus is probably just worried about your mental health.

Kano is a major city. However, this is a private initiative, not a government initiative, and private individuals can 't be made to build economic bases and invest time and hard earned money in places they have no economic or social interest in. If Northerners want the equivalent in Kand, which they need to make their business tycoons responsible.

akigbemaru:
Please, anybody on this Nairaland, never called Black; a White. Haba, why Achebe? His equation never balanced and he wants to become first. Then, don’t misconstrue Noble Peace Price for Nobel Laureate. Despite we have had numerous African Americans or Africans who were/are talented and have come and gone. Wole Shoyinka is the only black man in this universe who has ever won a Noble Laureate – that speaks volume about him. But if you are talking about about Noble Peace Laureate, we can talk about Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Junior and co. Toni Morrison (African American) is also the only black female in this universe to ever win a Noble Laureate. She and Wole Shoyinka are just two elitists on their own (it may take another 500 years for any black to win it again – maybe Achebe may have it in his dreams or postmortem). Noble Laureate is too precious and it’s also issued once in a year to anybody that has demonstrated exceptional knowledge in Literature, Science, Physics and so on.

Remember again, Nobel Laureate not Noble Peace Laureate is only issued to just only one person in a year. To get it, you must be exotic. That’s why you see Wole Shoyinka hair stood up differently from other African people.

@ the bolded, you're not really serious, are you? What's exotic about Toni Morrison?

Anyways, stop the chest beating. Toni Morrison is good but Achebe's work is better in most aspects and ultimately more important, and I think most readers and even the professional literary world (professors, writers, literary critics, etc.) would agree with me on this. The African American writers I would compare to Achebe in terms of importance and quality of work are Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, definitely not Toni Morrison.

Anyways, as far as Nobel prizes go, tiny St. Lucia has produced two Nobel laureates (the economist Sir Arthur Lewis and the acclaimed poet Derek Walcott) and not just in the same field, while the supposed giant of Africa has only one in one field, so you should actually want the prize to be awarded to Achebe, if you are Nigerian, to at least catch up with St. Lucia in numbers (I never imagined I would type such words, but I've got to give St. Lucia, and the Caribbean their due credit).

fstranger:
Soyinka was given the prize after careful deliberation of his work based on  the toatlity of the books he wrote prior to when he was awarded the prize. He is not a one book star like our neighbour to the East.  

And to those claiming that Achebe was the first to write from an African's view point, did Soyinka write from an Indian's perspective? Truth be told, Achebe is a great writer, obviously better then 99% of the rest of the world, but not good enough for a nobel prize. That is the truth! He will never win the prize.

?

No Longer At Ease
Arrow of God
A Man of the People
The Trouble With Nigeria
Home and Exile
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

You've heard of none of these?

I'll assume that either a) you have heard of them, but are deliberately ignoring them so you can engage in some sort of ethnic or cultural chauvinism or b) you've never heard of any of these and thus, are speaking on somebody you know nothing about. Either way you sound kind of silly.

rhymz:
I like the divergent views expressed by many of the posters. I know my question is kind of derailing but I ve always wondered which of Wole Soyinka's books won him the nobel prize, unlike Achibe, I am not too familiar with many of Soyinka's works, just a few, the man died and some of his drama books. I mean he seems more like a political activist to me than a writer especially when one has to consider that he is a Nobel Laureat.

They claim to have given it to him for the totality of his dramatic work. This I simply don't believe because[i] The Man Died[/i] is so far ahead of the rest of his work, and indeed ahead of anything written by any African in depth, passion, and brilliance. However, a few of his works of fiction stand out in my opinion:

1. Death and the King's Horseman (one of the first examples of African historical fiction, in that it adapted a real event and conflict to literature for our reflection and brought to our attention the existence of a culture and its conflicts with the colonizer's culture in a way that made us appreciate the seriousness and respect with which their ancestors viewed their culture. It elevated the profile of older African societies in a way, by showing that they too had kings, laws, protocol, things which they felt were sacred.

2. Season of Anomy (could be called the first, or at least one of the first significant, "philosophical novels" written by an African. I should note that many of the world's greatest novels are of the "philosophical" bent, in my opinion. It's a shame he didn't go further in this direction beyond just this one novel. Many of the world's greatest works of fiction, such as Dostoevsky's The Possessed, are really studies and critiques of societies and of man in general via storytelling.)

Then there are his many creative and original plays like The Road, The Lion and the Jewel, Madmen and Specialists, etc. that the Nobel committee claim they give him the award for. And they might be right and honest in saying this, and might feel that his many plays, many of them creative, original, and insightful, but some of them also rather mundane might be enough to win it for him, without regard to The Man Died, Season of Anomy, or his other work. I say this because if you've seen some of the literary nobodies/mediocrities they've been giving the award to recently, you'd realize that they seem to sometimes go out of their way to reward something that is new, unique, and offers a different perspective, without always requiring that the author's works be masterpiece-level or have "classic status."

Whatever you do though, avoid his first novel, The Interpreters, it's pretty awful.


In my opinion, almost all of Soyinka's best work is his nonfiction (which is fine, the Nobel has been awarded multiple times for outstanding nonfiction),

1. The Man Died
2. The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis
3. Myth, Literature, and the African World (especially interesting as he gives opinions on Achebe's Arrow of God, Cheikh Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams, Camara Laye, J.P. Clark, and many others)
4. Ake
5. You Must Set Forth at Dawn (anytime Soyinka starts writing in a memoir like style, he's amazing, and minimizes the use of the 12 letter words he seems so fond of)


Soyinka is also a decent poet:

"Telephone Conversation"

The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey—I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"







"Twelve Canticles for the Zealot"


I
He wakes from a prolonged delirium, swears
He has seen the face of God.
God help all those whose fever never raged
Or has subsided.

II
Perched on church steeple, minaret, cupola
Smug as misericords, gleeful as gargoyles
On gables of piety, the vampire acolyte
Waits to leap from private hell
To all four compass points—but will not voyage alone.
His variant on the doctored coin reads: Come with me or --
Go to—hell!

III
He craves a parity
Beyond the contents of his skull.
A hundred thousand
Vacuities of mind are soon
Cowed beneath the grace and power
Of one gossamer quill—yet
Beware the mute! Beware the furtive power
Of the mutant’s blade.

IV
The trade of healing takes strange turns.
Doctor and reservist, seeks the lethal path
To hearts of devotees in East Jerusalem,
Makes cadavers of believers turned
Eastwards in devotion—then turns the barrel
Inwards—still in hot pursuit?
For there are no post-mortems in the after-life
Though rigor mortis settles on the breath
Of peace.

V
They would be killers anyway, and anywhere.
Their world’s a hiatus. Jerked to life,
They suck the teats of piety, briefly shed
A long cocoon of death. Dead eyes,
A death humility, death wish, dead end,
A death asymmetry that befits
A death-bound unbeginning.

Their mentors live, and thrive, instruct.
Behold their vengeance for a living death—
Wielding infantile gums but—
Teethed at school.

VI
It was his own kind, nailed
Yitzak Rabin to crossroads of the Orient
Arms extended to the Heights
Of peace. Across the Suez, the ghost
Of his precursor on the viewing stand
Watched the grim replay of a familiar reel.

VII
Ogun came riding through the streets
Of Jerusalem. The Chosen barred his way.
His bright metallic lore was profanation,
Railed the wandering tribe, custodian now
Of streets and pathways, closed on hallowed days
To songs of iron and steel, even a child’s meandering
Bicycle, or infant’s crib.

Come war, will they deny
The aid of iron? Come death
Can they delay the caller’s blade
By plea of Sacred Feast?

The zealots’ hands
Are stretched to rock the erring vehicle,
But not as rock the cradle of an infant peace.
Claws of hate, and clasp of closure reach
From pole to pole, embracing
Convertites of every faith. The maiming,
Killing act is all.

VIII
A god is nowhere born, yet everywhere.
But Rama’s sect rejects that fine distinction—
The designated spot is sanctified, not for piety but—
For dissolution of yours from mine, politics of hate—
And forced exchange—peace for a moment’s ecstasy.
They turn a mosque to rubble, stone by stone,
Condemned usurper of Lord Rama’s vanished spot
Of dreamt epiphany. Now a cairn of stones
Usurps a dream of peace—can they dream peace
In iconoclast Uttar Pradesh?

IX
The meek shall inherit the earth ,
Blessed are the peacemakers ,
Shalom ,  Shalom ,  Shalom ,
Irosu wonrin, irosu wonrin.
Salaam ailekum, ailekum
Shanti ,  shanti ,  shanti ,
Oom ,  oom ,  oom ,  ooom ,

Seek havens of peace on ocean floors,
Submarine depths, in lost worlds, black holes
Collapsed galaxies, in hermit caves
In jungle fastnesses and arctic wastes
Thorns of crowns and hairy shirts, beds of nails,
The saintly cheek that turns the other side, but—
Not in texts, not by learned rote. It’s there
The unmeek prove inheritors of the earth.

They are the scripture grooms, possessive
To the last submissive dot. Punctilious
Guards of annotations, they sleepwalk blind to all
But the fatal hiatus:
Boom for oom and—sword for Word.
What is missing is—fulfilled!

X
Ile gbogbo nle orisa ee, ile gbogbo nle orisa
Ile gbogbo nle orisa ee, ile gbogbo nle orisa
Enia lo m’orisa w’aiye oo
Ile gbogbo nle orisa ee*

Invent your god and forge his will
The home of piety is the soul.
I come from Ogun’s land where
Women plant and teach and cure
Mould and build and cultivate,
Bestride the earth on sturdy thighs
Wipe sweat off open faces.
I come from Ogun’s land where
Women spurn the veil, and men
And earth rejoice!

XI
Cast the sanctimonious stone
And leave frail beauty shredded in the square
Of public shame. This murder
Is the rock of sin, the wayward veil
A mere pebble’s glint.

XII
Orunmila! Eleri ipin
Ibikeji Olodumare
Ajeju oogun
Obiriti, Ap’ijo iku da , **

Some words are coarse, obscene, indecent.
They make a case for censorship, such words as
Pagan, heathen, infidel, unbeliever, kafiri, etc.
The cleric swears he’ll sweep the streets clean
Of the unclean, armed with Book and Beard. Both
Turn kindling, but overturn the law of physics.
For the fire consumes all but the arsonist. He lives
To preach another day. The promised beast
Of the Apocalypse left me unbeliever
Till a rambling cleric apportioned death on CNN—
Surely that devil’s instrument!—on Taslim Nazreem.
She wrote of an equalising God, androgynous
Who deals, ambidextrous, with the Left and Right.

XIII
, and a thirteenth for the merely superstitious.
This thirteenth canticle for you, and let
Ill-luck infest your dreams awhile, stress your fears.
Not one but both—Friday and thirteen
Joined to press the entry of my world
Onto your calendar. Would I could boast
A triple six, a Grand Slam by Satan’s reckoning—
I would have long submerged the world
In cosmic laughter!

* All earth is the home of deities
All earth is the home of deities
It was mortals who brought the gods to the world
All earth is home of deities


** Orunmila, Hand that apportions Fate
Second only to the Supreme Deity
He who swallows the potency of herbs
Immense One, who turns aside the day of death



(from Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known)



So to answer your question, he is as much a writer as he is political activist, and actually more of a writer as he' s touched on all major areas of writing: novels, plays, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs, non-fiction prose

Femi Ojo-Ade's book on Ken Saro-Wiwa decimates the idea that he was some sort of saint,

This is really all already known. I wouldn't go so far as to call him the greatest writer of our time, as many new stars from around the world have emerged on the scene since he stopped writing and there were some stars that outshone him while he was writing. He's definitely the most gifted African writer

The writer just rehashed things people already knew, though his slant is a little extreme I think. To say that the Nobel committee is refusing to acknowledge truth is not really accurate. This same Nobel goes out of its way to pick and reward activists and people who speak out for truth against oppression or injustice and has done so consistently. Boris Pasternak, Alfriede Jelinek (though I don't think she deserved it), Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, etc,  are examples. There's no evidence right now that they've ever objected to his criticism of Conrad or that they reject the message of Things Fall Apart in showing that Africans had humanity and a culture that colonizers chose not to respect. What the author probably doesn't even know is that Joseph Conrad lived long enough to be eligible for the prize 23 times (he lived until 1924 and the prize started in 1901), but the Nobel committee never chose to award it to him despite his acclaim. Can we then assert that that was politically motivated too?

But this view expressed by the writer that everybody has assumed to be true for a while now might not really be so.


Consider that brilliant writers with masterpieces just as weighty as Achebe's, or even greater than his works were deliberately ignored and passed over by the Nobel committee

1. Leo Tolstoy (author of what might be the best fiction book ever written)



2. Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers)
3. Robert Musil (although he never published all of the volumes of The Man Without Qualities, so perhaps he never would have been considered) ,
4. Yukio Mishima (author of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and many other great works)
5. Vladimir Nabokov (I'm not a fan of his, but an enormous amount of the literary world considers his writing brilliant and influential), 
6. Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita, easily one of the cleverest, most brilliant, and original books ever written)
7. Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, and now his newest piece Against the Day, are seminal and extremely original)
8. James Joyce (Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, etc.)
9. Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time)
10 Benito Pérez Galdós (Fortunata y Jacinta, etc.)
11. Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory, etc,  though I'm REALLY not a fan and I could understand if the Nobel committee weren't either)
12. F. Scott Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, etc,  not a fan of his subject matter, and not really a fan in general but he was enormously talented as far as actual writing skills go and was ignored while his equals Hemingway and Faulkner (both of whom I like even less and whom I feel are less talented as actual writers) were given Nobels)
13. Émile Zola (the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, which includes Germinal)
14. Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, etc., his whole body of work)
15. Anton Chekhov (his masterful short stories, plays, )
16. Jorge Luis Borges (brilliant stories, truly one of the most creative people ever to write)


As can be seen, no less than 16 brilliant writers who wrote Nobel quality material were just completely ignored while people at their level or below them, even from their own countries and geographical areas in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America, went on to be awarded it.

I don't feel that there's necessarily a conspiracy against Achebe at work here, though at one time I had held that view.

Some questions,


1. I have to know, how were Igbo societies egalitarian when many of those societies practiced a caste system and discriminated against "Osus"?

2. Also how can "The Igbos have kings, chiefs, Eze and other titles of honor. Movement to the top is open and free for any individual." and "As many persons as can wield power, whether through personal strength, influence or authority, can do so." make sense? How can one just move up to the status of chief or Eze without being made so by someone who already has such a title and thus was previously one's superior? If so, movement to the top is not open or free (I don't see why it should be, actually).Is this effectively stating that there could be thousands of chieftancy titles if need be and thousands of people "wielding power" in a single community? What is the chain of command, really?

Abagworo:
I've read lots of stories about Bini-Yoruba studies and use of some words but little on Bini-Igbo.From a personal experience,I once had an encounter with an Edoman on the name ''osakwe''.i told him it was an igbo name literally meaning 'God Agree'.he revealed that it has same meaning in edo.i also read on nairaland that ugbo means farm in both bini and igbo.i would like to know if there might be more similarities between bini and igbo.it is also not news that a lot of igbos believe that they migrated from bini.

I think "unu" is also common to both Bini and Igbo.

Yes there are similarities, but for the same reason that there are similarities between different Celtic languages in UK, or different Germanic languages in Western Europe, or different Slavic languages, not necessarily because some Igbos migrated from Benin or Binis from Nri.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta-Niger_languages]Volta-Niger languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Volta-Niger
Geographic
distribution: West Africa, from Eastern Ghana to central Nigeria
Linguistic Classification: Niger-Congo
Atlantic-Congo
Volta-Niger
Subdivisions:
Akpes
Ayere-Ahan
Gbe
yeai
noi
? Ukaan
Nigeria Benin Cameroon languages.png
Some important branches of the Volta-Niger and Benue-Congo families are concentrated in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Benin.

The Volta-Niger family of languages, also known as West Benue-Congo or East Kwa, is one of the branches of the Niger-Congo language family, with perhaps 50 million speakers. Among these are the most important languages of southern Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and southeast Ghana: Yoruba, Igbo, Bini, Fon, and Ewe.

These languages have variously been placed within the Kwa or Benue-Congo families, but Williamson & Blench (2000) separate them from both. The boundaries between the various branches of Volta-Niger are rather vague, suggesting diversification of a dialect continuum rather than a clear split of families.

The constituent groups of the Volta-Niger family, along with the most important languages in terms of number of speakers, are as follows (with number of languages for each branch in parenthesis):
Volta-Niger



Akpes (1)




Ayere-Ahan (2)




Gbe (21: Fon [2 million], Ewe [3 million])





Yoruboid (15: Igala [1 million], Yorùbá [22 million])




Edoid (27: Edo [Bini, 1 million])




Akoko (1)




Igboid (7: Igbo [18 million])






Nupoid (12: Ebira [1 million], Nupe [1 million])




Oko (1)




Idomoid (9: Idoma [600,000])





? Ukaan (1)


The Yoruboid languages and Akoko were once linked as the Defoid branche, but more recently they, Edoid, and Igboid have been suggested to be primary branches of an as-yet unnamed group, often abbreviated yeai. Similarly, Oko, Nupoid, and Idomoid are often grouped together under the acronym noi. Ukaan is an Atlantic-Congo language, but it is unclear if it belongs to the Volta-Niger family.
[edit] References

* Wolf, Paul Polydoor de (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo (Thesis, Leiden University). The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
* Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Benue-Congo Overview', pp. 248—274 in Bendor-Samuel, John & Rhonda L. Hartell (eds.) The Niger-Congo Languages — A classification and description of Africa's largest language family. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.[/quote]There are also similarities between Yoruba and Igbo but we don't usually hear a lot of Igbos believing they originated from Ife or a lot of Yorubas believing they originated from Nri. It's just a matter of geography in this case. Benin happens to be in the center of the hypothetical "YEAI" proto-language, in-between one end (Yoruba) and another (Igbo).


[quote author=ezeagu:
Yeah, and the Bini and Igbo look similar as well, hmm . . . . . . . .

Lol @ that. How so? I remember in a thread where you were arguing with tpia, she said Binis were basically Igbos and you countered that actually they were basically Yorubas. Of course you two were both wrong. It doesn't necessarily follow that because two groups that are close together and have some similar features that there was even any mixing of them in the past (if that is what you were "hmmm"ing about)

Abagworo:
Benin city in the past was a mix of people of different ethnic background and most outward migrations were like the biblical exodus where people of a particular tribe were expelled.

Read this story on the history os Asa in Abia State.


Ancestors of Asa People

The Asa people pledged allegiance to ancestors of two distinct groups known as the Ozos and Ipus who migrated northwards from the coastal region. They were Ibo origins that broke up from the Benin Empire just like Ndokis, that migrated eastwards, then southwards to the coastline, then later moved northwards to settle in the area north of their present location.

Huh?@ the bolded. What does that even mean? There were different groups of migrants and traders in Benin, like Itsekiri traders, but Benin city certainly was never a mix or even really a melting pot.

If you understand anything about the languages in Edo state you'll realize that most of them are all dialects of the same ancestor language, and all variations on the same "linguistic theme," so to speak, so it would be inappropriate to call a distinct dialect of that theme (Bini) a mix. If it really were a mix, the language would sound VERY different, and even very different from the surrounding Edoid languages.

ChinenyeN:
I read somewhere that Nri and Edo had diplomatic relations in the past. How true is that? and what kind of relationship existed?

ezeagu:
I would think that would have been the only option, I don't think they could ignore each other, and there's no way they could have not known about each other.

^^^^

Isisdore Okpewho, in his book Once upon a kingdom: myth, hegemony, and identity basically argues that the Ikegobo "cult of the hand" or "altar of the hand" in Benin originates from the Igbo (Nri) Ikenga, the deity of strength/deity of the "right hand" based on etymology. However, in fact this cult of "success/achievements originating from the hand" is manifested in Igbo, Igala, Bini, Isoko and Urhobo with diffferent names. It's not clear whether it would have originated in Benin and then spread to Urhobo and Igbo and then to Igala, or originated in Igbo and spread to the other groups or originated from any of the other groups since there is not some sort of "oldest" Ikenga/Ikegobo sculpture that can be dated and shown to be associated with any one group much earlier than any of the others. The Ikegobo bronze sculptures in Benin date back to only about the 1700s from the ones I've seen so that doesn't really show that the concept originated in Benin, though maybe somehow finding older (wooden) sculptures associated with a specific date would show that it was from Nri as is commonly assumed.

He also states on multiple occasions that "medicine men," "ritual experts" and various other men of knowledge traveled from Nri to other parts of southern Nigeria spreading their knowledge, and at some point influenced Benin in some way though he does not say how.

He also suggests that bronze casting originated in Nri (Igbo-Ukwu), then went around Benin (somehow), over to Ife, and then from Ife to Benin, though he gives no really convincing evidence of how this could be. He just insinuates that Ife bronze casting had to have come from Igbo-Ukwu since Igbo-Ukwu bronze casting has precedence over that of Ife, though he gives no evidence of whether there was any real contact between Ife (from which Benin bronze casting apparently orginated) and Nri.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas



[close]
Vivien Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Thomas' 1969 portrait by Bob Gee
Thomas' autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work With Alfred Blalock

Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Vivien Thomas was the first African American without a doctorate degree to perform open heart surgery on a white patient in the United States.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Early life
* 2 Working with Blalock
* 3 Working at Johns Hopkins
* 4 Blue baby syndrome
* 5 Decisive surgery
* 6 Relations with Blalock
* 7 Institutional acknowledgment
* 8 Legacy
* 9 References
* 10 Bibliography
* 11 External links

[edit] Early life

Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. The grandson of a slave, he attended Pearl High School (named for a Union sympathizer Joshua Fenton Pearl and now known as Pearl Cohn Comprehensive High School) in Nashville in the 1920s. Even though it was racially segregated, the school provided him with a decent education. Thomas had hoped to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. He worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry but was laid off in the fall. In the wake of the stock market crash in October, Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and, through a friend, in February 1930 he secured a job as laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. Although Blalock had hired Thomas to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs used for surgical experiments, he discovered Thomas' extraordinary eye–hand coordination developed during his carpenter work. When Blalock found that Thomas had an equally sharp intellect, Thomas began doing more laboratory work and less maintenance. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Before meeting Blalock, Thomas married Clara and had two daughters. When Nashville's banks failed nine months after starting his job with Blalock and Thomas' savings were wiped out, he abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened.
[edit] Working with Blalock

[b]Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. This work later evolved into research on Crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. In hundreds of flawlessly executed experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement. Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid 1930s. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.[/b]
[edit] Working at Johns Hopkins

By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed him at the forefront of American surgery, and when he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins in 1941, he requested that Thomas accompany him. Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year, confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, heads turned.
[edit] Blue baby syndrome

In 1943, while pursuing his shock research, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig, who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called Tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome, although other cardiac anomalies produce blueness, or cyanosis). In infants born with this defect, blood is shunted past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue pallor. Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins' Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. According to the accounts in Thomas' 1985 autobiography and in a 1967 interview with medical historian Peter Olch, Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes" in some way to increase the level of blood flow to the lungs but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the anastomosis, or joining, of the subclavian to the pulmonary artery, which had the effect of increasing blood flow to the lungs.

Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition by means of the pulmonary-to-subclavian anastomosis. Among the dogs on whom Thomas operated was one named Anna, who became the first long-term survivor of the operation and the only animal to have her portrait hung on the walls of Johns Hopkins. In nearly two years of laboratory work, involving some 200 dogs, Thomas was ultimately able to replicate only two of the four cardiac anomalies involved in Tetralogy of Fallot. He did demonstrate that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient. Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery.
[edit] Decisive surgery

On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. She could only take a few steps before beginning to breathe heavily. Because no instruments for cardiac surgery then existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those in use in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and coached him step by step through the procedure, Thomas having performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, Blalock only once, as Thomas' assistant. The surgery was not completely successful, though it did prolong the infant's life for several more months. Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with complete success, and the patient was able to leave the hospital three weeks after the surgery. Next, they operated upon a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. The three cases formed the basis for the article that was published in the May 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock and Taussig for the procedure. Thomas received no mention.

News of this groundbreaking story circulated around the world via the Associated Press. Newsreels touted the event, greatly enhancing the status of Johns Hopkins and solidifying the reputation of Blalock, who had been regarded as a maverick up until that point by some in the Hopkins old guard. Thomas' contribution remained unacknowledged, both by Blalock and by Hopkins. Within a year, the operation known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt had been performed on more than 200 patients at Hopkins, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away.

Thomas' surgical techniques included one he developed in 1946 for improving circulation in patients whose great vessels (the aorta and the pulmonary artery) were transposed. A complex operation called an atrial septectomy, the procedure was executed so flawlessly by Thomas that Blalock, upon examining the nearly undetectable suture line, was prompted to remark, "Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made."

To the host of young surgeons Thomas trained during the 1940s, he became a figure of legend, the model of a dexterous and efficient cutting surgeon. "Even if you'd never seen surgery before, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple," the renowned surgeon Denton Cooley told Washingtonian magazine in 1989. "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." Surgeons like Cooley, along with Alex Haller, Frank Spencer, Rowena Spencer, and others credited Thomas with teaching them the surgical technique that placed them at the forefront of medicine in the United States. Despite the deep respect Thomas was accorded by these surgeons and by the many black lab technicians he trained at Hopkins, he was not well paid. He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. This led to the peculiar circumstance of his serving drinks to people he had been teaching earlier in the day. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest paid African-American on the institution's rolls. Although Thomas never wrote or spoke publicly about his ongoing desire to return to college and obtain a medical degree, his widow, the late Clara Flanders Thomas, revealed in a 1987 interview with Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe that her husband had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the Blue Baby period and had only abandoned the idea with great reluctance. Mrs. Thomas stated that in 1947, Thomas had investigated the possibility of enrolling in college and pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor, but had been deterred by the inflexibility of Morgan State University, which refused to grant him credit for life experience and insisted that he fulfill the standard freshman requirements. Realizing that he would be 50 years old by the time he completed college and medical school, Thomas decided to give up the idea of further education.
[edit] Relations with Blalock

Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas' race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. On the one hand, he defended his choice of Thomas to his superiors at Vanderbilt and to Hopkins colleagues, and he insisted that Thomas accompany him in the operating room during the first series of tetralogy operations. On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgment, and his social interaction outside of work.

After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65, Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. In his role as director of Surgical Research Laboratories, he mentored a number of African-American lab technicians as well as Hopkins' first black cardiac resident, Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., whom Thomas assisted with his groundbreaking work in the use of the Automatic Implantable Defibrillator.

Thomas' nephew, Koco Eaton, graduated from the Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained by many of the same physicians his uncle had trained. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays.
[edit] Institutional acknowledgment

In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait (by Bob Gee, oil on canvas, 1969, The Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives) and arranged to have it hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. However, because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate, but it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medical School to call him doctor. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery.
[edit] Legacy

Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. He died on November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention for the first time in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired filmmaker Andrea Kalin to make the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart",[1] which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS' American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians' Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004.[2] McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin,[3] formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

Thomas' legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. In Fall 2004, the Baltimore City Public School System opened the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, and on January 29, 2008, MedStar Health unveiled the first "Rx for Success" program at the Academy, joining the conventional curriculum with specialized coursework geared to the health care professions. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas' portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1968. The Journal Of Surgical Case Reports (JSCR) announced in January 2010 that their annual prizes for the best case report written by a doctor and best case report written by a medical student would be named after Thomas.[4]
[edit] References

1. ^ Hopkinsmedecine.og
2. ^ OAH.org, OAH Erik Barnouw Award Winners
3. ^ Washingtonian.com
4. ^ JSCR Website

[edit] Bibliography

* (1985) Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock (originally published as Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock), University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812216342.
* (1989) "Like Something the Lord Made", by Katie McCabe. Washingtonian magazine, August 1989. Reprinted in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, ed. by Jay Friedlander and John Lee. May also be accessed via the Washingtonian.
* (2003). Partners of the Heart. American Experience.
* (2003) Stefan Timmermans, "A Black Technician and Blue Babies" in Social Studies of Science 33:2 (April 2003), 197–229.
* (2004) "Something the Lord Made", HBO movie, Portrayed by Mos Def
* (2006) Tsung O. Cheng, "Hamilton Naki and Christiaan Barnard Versus Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock: Similarities and Dissimilarities" in American Journal of Cardiology 97:3 (February 1, 2006), 435–436.

[edit] External links

* Blue Baby Operation Exhibit

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas"
Categories: American surgeons | Johns Hopkins University faculty | Johns Hopkins Hospital physicians | 1910 births | 1985 deaths | People from New Iberia, Louisiana | Deaths from pancreatic cancer | African American surgeons
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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Thomasv.jpg

?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas


[close]
Vivien Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Thomas' 1969 portrait by Bob Gee
Thomas' autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work With Alfred Blalock

Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Vivien Thomas was the first African American without a doctorate degree to perform open heart surgery on a white patient in the United States.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Early life
* 2 Working with Blalock
* 3 Working at Johns Hopkins
* 4 Blue baby syndrome
* 5 Decisive surgery
* 6 Relations with Blalock
* 7 Institutional acknowledgment
* 8 Legacy
* 9 References
* 10 Bibliography
* 11 External links

[edit] Early life

Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. The grandson of a slave, he attended Pearl High School (named for a Union sympathizer Joshua Fenton Pearl and now known as Pearl Cohn Comprehensive High School) in Nashville in the 1920s. Even though it was racially segregated, the school provided him with a decent education. Thomas had hoped to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. He worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry but was laid off in the fall. In the wake of the stock market crash in October, Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and, through a friend, in February 1930 he secured a job as laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. Although Blalock had hired Thomas to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs used for surgical experiments, he discovered Thomas' extraordinary eye–hand coordination developed during his carpenter work. When Blalock found that Thomas had an equally sharp intellect, Thomas began doing more laboratory work and less maintenance. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Before meeting Blalock, Thomas married Clara and had two daughters. When Nashville's banks failed nine months after starting his job with Blalock and Thomas' savings were wiped out, he abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened.
[edit] Working with Blalock

Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. This work later evolved into research on Crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. In hundreds of flawlessly executed experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement. Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid 1930s. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.
[edit] Working at Johns Hopkins

By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed him at the forefront of American surgery, and when he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins in 1941, he requested that Thomas accompany him. Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year, confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, heads turned.
[edit] Blue baby syndrome

In 1943, while pursuing his shock research, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig, who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called Tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome, although other cardiac anomalies produce blueness, or cyanosis). In infants born with this defect, blood is shunted past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue pallor. Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins' Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. According to the accounts in Thomas' 1985 autobiography and in a 1967 interview with medical historian Peter Olch, Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes" in some way to increase the level of blood flow to the lungs but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the anastomosis, or joining, of the subclavian to the pulmonary artery, which had the effect of increasing blood flow to the lungs.

Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition by means of the pulmonary-to-subclavian anastomosis. Among the dogs on whom Thomas operated was one named Anna, who became the first long-term survivor of the operation and the only animal to have her portrait hung on the walls of Johns Hopkins. In nearly two years of laboratory work, involving some 200 dogs, Thomas was ultimately able to replicate only two of the four cardiac anomalies involved in Tetralogy of Fallot. He did demonstrate that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient. Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery.
[edit] Decisive surgery

On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. She could only take a few steps before beginning to breathe heavily. Because no instruments for cardiac surgery then existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those in use in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and coached him step by step through the procedure, Thomas having performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, Blalock only once, as Thomas' assistant. The surgery was not completely successful, though it did prolong the infant's life for several more months. Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with complete success, and the patient was able to leave the hospital three weeks after the surgery. Next, they operated upon a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. The three cases formed the basis for the article that was published in the May 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock and Taussig for the procedure. Thomas received no mention.

News of this groundbreaking story circulated around the world via the Associated Press. Newsreels touted the event, greatly enhancing the status of Johns Hopkins and solidifying the reputation of Blalock, who had been regarded as a maverick up until that point by some in the Hopkins old guard. Thomas' contribution remained unacknowledged, both by Blalock and by Hopkins. Within a year, the operation known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt had been performed on more than 200 patients at Hopkins, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away.

Thomas' surgical techniques included one he developed in 1946 for improving circulation in patients whose great vessels (the aorta and the pulmonary artery) were transposed. A complex operation called an atrial septectomy, the procedure was executed so flawlessly by Thomas that Blalock, upon examining the nearly undetectable suture line, was prompted to remark, "Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made."

To the host of young surgeons Thomas trained during the 1940s, he became a figure of legend, the model of a dexterous and efficient cutting surgeon. "Even if you'd never seen surgery before, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple," the renowned surgeon Denton Cooley told Washingtonian magazine in 1989. "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." Surgeons like Cooley, along with Alex Haller, Frank Spencer, Rowena Spencer, and others credited Thomas with teaching them the surgical technique that placed them at the forefront of medicine in the United States. Despite the deep respect Thomas was accorded by these surgeons and by the many black lab technicians he trained at Hopkins, he was not well paid. He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. This led to the peculiar circumstance of his serving drinks to people he had been teaching earlier in the day. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest paid African-American on the institution's rolls. Although Thomas never wrote or spoke publicly about his ongoing desire to return to college and obtain a medical degree, his widow, the late Clara Flanders Thomas, revealed in a 1987 interview with Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe that her husband had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the Blue Baby period and had only abandoned the idea with great reluctance. Mrs. Thomas stated that in 1947, Thomas had investigated the possibility of enrolling in college and pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor, but had been deterred by the inflexibility of Morgan State University, which refused to grant him credit for life experience and insisted that he fulfill the standard freshman requirements. Realizing that he would be 50 years old by the time he completed college and medical school, Thomas decided to give up the idea of further education.
[edit] Relations with Blalock

Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas' race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. On the one hand, he defended his choice of Thomas to his superiors at Vanderbilt and to Hopkins colleagues, and he insisted that Thomas accompany him in the operating room during the first series of tetralogy operations. On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgment, and his social interaction outside of work.

After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65, Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. In his role as director of Surgical Research Laboratories, he mentored a number of African-American lab technicians as well as Hopkins' first black cardiac resident, Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., whom Thomas assisted with his groundbreaking work in the use of the Automatic Implantable Defibrillator.

Thomas' nephew, Koco Eaton, graduated from the Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained by many of the same physicians his uncle had trained. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays.
[edit] Institutional acknowledgment

In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait (by Bob Gee, oil on canvas, 1969, The Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives) and arranged to have it hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. However, because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate, but it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medical School to call him doctor. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery.
[edit] Legacy

Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. He died on November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention for the first time in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired filmmaker Andrea Kalin to make the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart",[1] which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS' American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians' Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004.[2] McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin,[3] formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

Thomas' legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. In Fall 2004, the Baltimore City Public School System opened the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, and on January 29, 2008, MedStar Health unveiled the first "Rx for Success" program at the Academy, joining the conventional curriculum with specialized coursework geared to the health care professions. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas' portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1968. The Journal Of Surgical Case Reports (JSCR) announced in January 2010 that their annual prizes for the best case report written by a doctor and best case report written by a medical student would be named after Thomas.[4]
[edit] References

1. ^ Hopkinsmedecine.og
2. ^ OAH.org, OAH Erik Barnouw Award Winners
3. ^ Washingtonian.com
4. ^ JSCR Website

[edit] Bibliography

* (1985) Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock (originally published as Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock), University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812216342.
* (1989) "Like Something the Lord Made", by Katie McCabe. Washingtonian magazine, August 1989. Reprinted in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, ed. by Jay Friedlander and John Lee. May also be accessed via the Washingtonian.
* (2003). Partners of the Heart. American Experience.
* (2003) Stefan Timmermans, "A Black Technician and Blue Babies" in Social Studies of Science 33:2 (April 2003), 197–229.
* (2004) "Something the Lord Made", HBO movie, Portrayed by Mos Def
* (2006) Tsung O. Cheng, "Hamilton Naki and Christiaan Barnard Versus Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock: Similarities and Dissimilarities" in American Journal of Cardiology 97:3 (February 1, 2006), 435–436.

[edit] External links

* Blue Baby Operation Exhibit

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas"
Categories: American surgeons | Johns Hopkins University faculty | Johns Hopkins Hospital physicians | 1910 births | 1985 deaths | People from New Iberia, Louisiana | Deaths from pancreatic cancer | African American surgeons
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