Biko Agozino

The recent elections in Africa with a few exceptions confound political analysts and lay people alike in terms of why they are so chaotic compared to some elections in other parts of the world that appear more orderly. I believe that the explanation lies in what is known as African Fractals. Briefly, this is the finding that Africans prefer to design their social institutions and social relations in fractal patterns rather than the linear patterns which are preferred by Europeans. This fact was recorded by Ron Eglash in his book, African Fractals: Indigenous Designs and Modern Computer Engineering. According to Eglash, modern computer engineering, especially given the internet that was developed with the formula of the Nigerian genius, Phillip Emeagwali, is based on fractal designs rather than linear geometry probably due to the fact that the internet is a web with interconnectivity and not a grid with straight lines. Eglash was surprised to find that African town planning, architectural designs, beliefs in the supernatural, kinship patterns, board games, textile designs, hairstyles and what have you all exhibit an abundance of fractal geometry while European designs tend to be Cartesian and Native American designs tend to be Euclidean or three-dimensional. Many Africans entertain doubts about legalistic claims to finality - a finality that is alien to the African fractal way of thinking, which favours the fractal principles of complexity, reflexivity, interconnectedness, replicability, scaling, infinity and far-from-equilibrium states in contrast to European preference for easy-to-control borders, boundaries and fortresses laid out in Cartesian grids of straight lines. Eglash warned that this should not lead to the conclusion that Africans are closer to nature since nature itself is abundantly fractal while Europeans are closer to culture. Native Americans and other cultures that do not prefer the fractal patterns so common in Africa also do not share European culture. Moreover, African Americans continue to privilege fractal designs in their settlement patterns to the extent that the State of Georgia was forced to redistrict electoral boundaries to take into consideration the fact that African Americans did not settle in straight grids but in a chaotic fractal pattern and that they would be under-represented if electoral boundaries are based strictly on straight grids. Similarly, the musical genres created by people of African descent - jazz, blues, funk, rock n roll, reggae, ragga, calypso, soca, Afrobeat, highlife, gospel - all stubbornly resist the written musical score and privilege improvisation and the call and response motif common in African culture. Eglash did not speculate on the origin of these African fractal patterns but my guess is that after Africans were hunted and captured for hundreds of years during the African holocaust, it is understandable that people of African descent deliberately evolved complicated social and physical designs to help them to elude capture by slave raiders. This explanation was indirectly anticipated by Eglash who observed that the three great pyramids in Egypt were designed in fractal patterns thousands of years ago but then, the Egyptian civilization was itself the prey of many marauding invaders to the extent that even the educational system in Kemet was known as The Mysteries in which students were sworn to secrecy and very little was recorded in writing despite the availability of hieroglyphics. There is a notion of African Time that is found also among the African Diaspora which assumes that events will start later than the scheduled time but this makes sense if for hundreds of years the Africans who turned up in time for meetings were the ones kidnapped and enslaved first. This is only a guess but it sounds more convincing when we remember that Europeans may prefer Cartesian designs because the grids make it easier for them to conquer and control others. …

Any scholar who makes a lasting contribution to the African crisis would be recognized in the history of intellectual accomplishments as having made a unique contribution to the world. This is part of the reason why I am passionate about addressing the African condition, not simply because I am an African scholar. Surprisingly, criminologists have routinely buried their heads in the snow of Europe and North America with hardly any serious attempt to understand the hieroglyphics of African reality except when they perceive threats to European comforts in the form of human trafficking, terrorism, piracy, dictatorships or the drugs trade. What is wrong with Africa is that no other people went through what Africans went through in modern history and survived to tell the tale against the odds of enduring imperialist arrogance. This journal is open to all contributors who seriously attempt to address the African crises of authoritarianism whether the authors are of African descent or not.

... Said Adejumobi ISBN 0754612341 Maintaining our Differences Minority Families in Multicultural Societies Edited by Carol DH Harvey ISBN 075461246 ... 39 4 Crime, Social Change and Social Control in Namibia: An Exploratory Study of Namibian Prisons Annelie Odendaal 56 ...

This article will attempt an original interpretation of Capital (Marx, K. 1867. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx) and other major works of Karl Marx to demonstrate that people of African descent are central to the discourse of Marx, contrary to widespread misconceptions by critics who attribute a Eurocentric orientation to Marx because of the accident of his birth in Europe and by allies because of his scholarly activism in European working-class politics. The paper argues that the earlier work of Marx and Engels ([1847] 1969. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, pp. 98–137. Moscow: Progress Publishers), especially the Manifesto of the Communist Party, may have misled critics into believing that the history of all hitherto existing society alluded to by Marx and Engels was exclusively European history. On the contrary, there are hundreds of references to the ‘Negro’ in Capital, not as part of a peripheral or superficial concern relating to the issue of class exploitation in Europe, but as a foundational model for explaining and predicting the ending of the exploitation of the working class globally. The paper concludes that this reading adds credence to Africana Studies paradigms that privilege critical, Africa-centred scholar-activism as an important contribution to original theoretical, methodological and policy innovations.

Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason by Biko Agozino. London: Pluto Press, 2003. The counterpoint of Counter-Colonial Criminology is the unmasking of Eurocentric criminology for what it is. In exchange, Agozino proffered sound academic reasoning grounded on reality. He suggests decolonization of criminology based on label-free discourse. By his approach, Agozino has, like Lombroso of scientific approach, and Durkheim and Sutherland of mainstream criminology, charted a new theoretical path in the way we do criminology. Henceforth, criminology will no longer concentrate in the study of crime and criminals, but will also include the study of justice. In conceptualizing Counter-Colonial Criminology Agozino has again proven himself worthy of joining the ranks of Walter Rodney (1972), Frantz Fanon (1963, 1965, 1967, 1991), Achebe (1959), and Wa Thiongo (1977) in demystifying colonial mystic. Avowed apologists of colonial criminology may disagree (and they have every reason to do so), but in time, Counter-Colonial Criminology will revolutionalize criminology by interjecting Africentric perspective unto the discussion table. He did not mince words in identifying the aims and purposes of the book as a "transdisciplinary theoretico-methodological intervention aimed at decolonizing theories and methods of imperialist reason in criminology." He backs this up by arguing that criminology as it currently is represents nothing but imperialist science designed to control others. This book highlights the shortsightedness of criminologists who acquiesced and turned blind eyes in the face of the brutish tortures, dehumanization, and degradation of other humans in the name of 'colonizing mission', while non criminologist writers like Kwame Nkrumah, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Fanon and Rodney were able to speak out against the attendant evils of colonialism and related policies. Related atrocious examples include the genocidal trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the genocidal massacre of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians. Eurocentric criminology further compromises itself by accepting that the punishment of the innocent is normal just as class, race, and gender-related punishment of offenders under colonialism is a civilizing "pitfall along the penal paths of progress." Counter-Colonial Criminology assumes critical criminologists' stance that crime and punishment is a function of power relations, and explains that it is relative power rather than relative deprivation that explains crime. On this note it faults Merton, Cloward and Ohlin, as well as Edwin Sutherland for focusing so much on individual's crimes while ignoring the wider and higher impact imperialist crimes. It also faults the radical perspectives of Becker for ignoring colonialism in its social discourse. Even in the 21st century, he contends, mainstream criminology has not caught up with practical analysis of colonial white collar crime elaborated as early as in 1965 by no less than Kwame Nkrumah with specific reference to the 'Belgium' Congo situation. Additionally, 'Western' criminologists have yet to muster courage to discuss the imperialist crimes committed against humanity in Biafra, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Middle East, Rwanda, and South Africa. …

"Wonders of the African World" was a captivating program to watch. I saw it when the BBC spread the broadcast over six weeks in the UK but it was refreshing to watch it again packed into three days on the PBS here the US. I am disappointed that such a program was shown in the UK without a public debate whereas it has not gone unchallenged here in the US. This is probably a reflection of the fact that people of African descent are better organized in the US where they have successfully struggled for so many programs in Black Studies and Pan African Studies compared to the UK where such programs are almost completely non-existent. However, the lack of debate in the UK may be as a result of the disinterested way the BBC spread the broadcast over six weeks, making it more difficult to follow.

The recent elections in Africa with a few exceptions confound political analysts and lay people alike in terms of why they are so chaotic compared to some elections in other parts of the world that appear more orderly. I believe that the explanation lies in what is known as African Fractals. Briefly, this is the finding that Africans prefer to design their social institutions and social relations in fractal patterns rather than the linear patterns which are preferred by Europeans. This fact was recorded by Ron Eglash in his book, African Fractals: Indigenous Designs and Modern Computer Engineering.

The topic of discussion is a disturbing one. What Women's Studies offer men sounds quarter mocking and quarter serious, quarter threatening and quarter caring. Does the topic promise a move away from separatism in scholarship among women's studies advocates or is the topic a trap set by wise women to test the waters of the backlash against feminism? Is this discussion panel a set-up to trip some wannabe men and flare them or is it a genuine attempt to explore what men want from women's studies? Who gives a thus what men want from women anyway? If this is a genuine press conference by the Women's Studies Party on their electoral program, how come the experts, the front-runners, the women's studies gurus, the women, are not the ones telling us chauvinist pigs what we are missing by not listening to women's studies? Here we are, three men, saying what we think that women's studies offer men when it could be said that we have not got a clue what is the definition of women's studies.

The meeting of the African Criminology and Justice Studies Association which owns this African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies adopted this draft resolution in November, 2010, San Francisco. A similar draft resolution was submitted to the Association of Black Sociologists (and published in their newsletter, 'Resolution Against the War on African Americans' in The Griot: Newsletter of the Association of Black Sociologists, September, 2010).

The National Geographic reported on November 20, 2002, that 11% of a sample of Americans aged 18-24 (that is, high school graduates, undergraduates, graduates, or working adults) could not find their own country on a map of the world. Is that embarrassment of 'geographic illiteracy' behind the recent rash of Mapping reports from the National Intelligence Council of the US, in which largely unnamed 'experts' avoid locating any country on the map but proceed without shame to offer what they admitted are 'fictional' scenarios of the future? The only difference is that the authors pretended that what they wrote about Africa had no fictional scenarios but was completely factual. What do you make of a document that was issued by the National Intelligence Council with a disclaimer on every page 'Discussion paper - does not represent the views of the US Government' (a disclaimer that was not present in the Mapping Global Futures report)? Perhaps, the authors were just kidding around but after some African leaders took the report seriously and rushed to the national legislative assembly with a request for a national response to the document we cannot but weigh in on the 'discussion' of the paper. 'Mapping Sub-Saharan Africa's Future', the report of a January 2005 one-day conference of US experts on Africa, sponsored by the National Intelligence Council to discuss likely trends in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next 15 years, was prepared under the 'auspices of the National Intelligence Officer for Africa' and was published on March 02, 2005. Since then, some scholars and some journalists have responded to the paper but I am yet to read a criminological response especially from among African criminologists regarding the paper. I think that African criminologists should join this discussion and bring their expertise to bear on the mapping of the future of Africa. The title of the paper refers to mapping and not to a map, it suggests that the paper is part of the efforts to structure the future of Africa and we cannot afford to be silent in this process of social structuration -an on-going process in which social structures are always far from finished but continue to be formed, transformed and reformed through human agency (Giddens, 1984). What the title of the document suggests is not just map-reading but the more authoritarian cartographic task of map-making, more authoritarian because this appears to be the reserve of conquerors or colonizers although the Americans may deny any suggestion that they were trying to impose their preferred future on Africa. Theirs is only an attempt to predict the future as intelligence experts are supposed to do but with the modesty to declare that these are only 'likely trends' and not the destiny of Africa. The paper talks about 'structural obstacles' without identifying them but with enough indication that the experts subscribe to structural functionalism as a tool for analyzing the process of modernization, meaning westernization or what the document calls globalization. One radical Nigerian journalist and mathematician, Dr. Edwin Madunagu of The Guardian, saw the document as a wishful thinking that dreams of an Africa that is completely depopulated, leaving only oil, gold, diamonds and other minerals for the international community, which he consistently identifies as imperialism, to exploit at ease. He admitted that the doomsday scenario painted in the paper for many African countries is not news given that many Africans have also warned of the collapse of many of the post-colonial regimes in Africa but with the exception that patriotic Africans have always remained optimistic that the people will find a solution to the many problems facing us. Mapping Sub-Saharan Africa's Future is full of doom and gloom for the majority of Africans while singing the praise of a few settler colonial locations. Other journalists writing in the same Nigerian newspaper saw the document as a timely warning to the countries that were identified as failing states to put their houses in order or face imminent collapse in 15 years. …

THEORIZING BLACK FEMINISMS Theorizing Black Feminisms outlines some of the crucial debates going on within contemporary Black feminist activity. In doing so it brings together a collection of some of the most exciting work by Black women scholars around, it encompasses a ...

Cheikh Anta Diop (1991) presented evidence of the African origin of Greek philosophy by demonstrating that some of the key texts of Greek philosophers bore resemblances to a number of written texts by classical African thinkers thousands of years before Greek civilization came into existence. Plato proposed to ban poets from his Utopian republic because he dismissed their art as not only subjective and mimetic or unoriginal but also subversive of the unelected tyrants who emerged as privileged students from Plato’s Academy. Aristotle accepted that poetry is more philosophical than history but such a sharp distinction equally flies in the face of African Griots who have been delivering epic historic tales in the form of lyrical poetry. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was a philosopher-poet, scholar-activist, and statesman much like Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Agostino Neto who set out to develop a practical philosophy in poetic forms for the benefit of all of humanity, irrespective of differences in skin color, gender, religion, class or region of origin. This article seeks to flesh out the breadth of the poetic philosophy of Azikiwe that his young followers dubbed Zikism with emphasis on its opposition to injustice everywhere and its support for personal freedom and for national liberation. Since other authors in this special issue have dwelt on the scholarly and political writings of Azikiwe, this introductory papyrus will focus on the poetry of Zikism as a rich source of the representation of Zik’s philosophy. Finally, the lessons that present and future generations of Africans could learn from the great “Zik of Africa” will be outlined as part of the conclusion.

Part 1 Epistemological and conceptual issues: methods of data reception, Biko Agozino some conceptual thoughts on migration research, Andreas Demuth. Part 2 The family and migration research: linking migration and family studies - transnational migrants and the care of ageing parents, Loretta Baldasser and Cora Baldock processes of reconstructing migration biographies - the experience of "return" from the West to the East of Europe after 1989, Roswitha Breckner notes on a southern European model - immigration, the Welfare State and society, Natalia Ribas Mateos. Part 3 Socio-legal studies and migration research: beware of strangers or the myth that immigrants are more likely to be deviants, Biko Agozino theoretico-methodological issues in the study of Germany's repatriation policies, Douglas Spencer Moore investigating legal labour migration from the Maghreb in the Nineties. Part 4 International relations and migration research: notions unbounded - a critical (re)read of transnationalism suggests that US-Caribbean circuits tell the story better, Dennis Conway migration, ethnic minorities and international relations in post-Soviet contexts -the case of Estonia, Andreas Demuth.

To download this abstract, check the box next to the NCJ number then click the "Back To Search Results" link. Click the "Download" button on the Search Results page. ... The processing of black women in the criminal justice system of England and Wales was examined by ...