Howard W. French
speaker
832 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Howard W. French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
You had to observe rituals honoring British royalty, et cetera, et cetera, with holidays for them and whatnot.
Habeas corpus was not observed.
The British in the colonial period destroyed opposition press.
They jailed people without trial, including Nkrumah.
on and on and on.
You had no right of obviously political representation until they were ready to allow it.
You had no right of free speech, no right of free assembly.
We could continue, right?
And so the reviewer said in his article,
How is this germane?
In other words, does that have to do with assessing what Nkrumah did or how he comported himself, as if this were a mere excuse?
And my response to that is, as a reader of American history, there is no classic account of American history, the founding of this country, which does not say that part of the American Enlightenment that our founding supposedly resulted from drew on
the previous enlightenment in the UK, right?
The ideas of John Locke and John Stuart Mill and people like this, these grand philosophers of democracy and freedom in the UK that created a tradition out of which flowed this American democratic
So which way do we want to have it?
Is the immediate path germane, only when it's convenient to say, look, this is a nice thing about us?
Or is it not germane because we are too tight to allow for the fact that Africans, like people everywhere, are imperfect, but that the precedent created in their own history under domination by others was an important feature in some of their imperfections?
Well, I would say, first of all, this was something that involved lots of discovery for me, too.
I have actually spent a lot of time in Congo.
Born in Blackness, my previous book, talks at great length about the deeper history of Congo, meaning going back to the 15th century.
Showing 341–360 of 832 · page 18 of 42
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