Professor Appiah delivers BBC’s Reith lectures in Accra

GNA – Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of New York University, has delivered the third edition of the 2016 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Reith Lectures in Accra.

The BBC Reith annual lectures is dedicated to John Reith (1889-1971), who founded the BBC in 1922.

Prof Appiah’s four lectures under the banner: “Mistaken Identities,” focused on four themes: “Creed, Country, Colour and Culture.”

The first two lectures, which examined creed and country, were recorded in London and Glasgow; however, the Accra edition looked at colour or race.

The BBC World Service would start airing the edited versions of the Reith Lectures from October 18, from 0900 to 1000 hours.

However, the Accra lectures and question-and-answer sessions would be broadcasted on the BBC World Service on Tuesday November 1, from 0900 to 1000 hours.

Prof Appiah, who is a British-born, Ghanaian-American Philosopher, Cultural Theorist and Novelist in his delivery said: “Race is something we make; not something that makes us.”

He explained that there was little doubt that genes made a difference, alongside environment, in determining human height or skin colour.

“Some people are cleverer or more musical or better poets than others and no doubt genes play a role here, too; but those genes are not inherited in racial packages,” he said.

“And so, if you want to think about how the limits of individual human capability are set by genetic inheritance, it won’t help you to think about races,” he added.

Prof Appiah said: “We live in a world where the language of identity pervades both our public and our private lives.

“Not everyone accepts that you have to be a man or a woman; or that you can’t be both an Englishman and a Scot You can claim to be of no religion or gender or race or nation. Perhaps, in each case, someone will believe you. And that is one reason why the way we often talk about these identities can be misleading.”

Prof Appiah using a case study of a young Ghanaian man, Amo, who in 1707, at age five boarded a ship belonging to the Dutch West India Company from Axim to Amsterdam, Holland.

He said young Amo later ended up in the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in Germany.

Prof Appiah noted that Anton Ulrich took a special interest in young Amo, arranging for his education, and conferring on him, at his baptism, both his own Christian name and those of his sons; so the young man came to be known as Anton Wilhelm Rudolph.

“For the Duke, the gift of an African child was an opportunity to conduct an enlightenment experiment, exploring what would happen to an African immersed in modern European scholarship,” he said.

He said later on Amo called himself Anton Wilhelm AmoAfer, using the word for African in Latin, the language of European scholarship; he wanted to be known, then, as Amo the African.

“The experiment with our young African, three centuries ago looks like a success,” he stated.

“Amo, the Duke’s godson, educated with the children of the local aristocracy, clearly made a success of himself at the local university, because he went on to study law at the University of Halle, then (as now) one of Germany’s leading centres of teaching and research.

“There, he wrote a thesis about the legal status of the African arguing that the European slave trade violated the principles of Roman law.

“He soon added knowledge of medicine and astronomy to his training, and a few years later, moved to the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, where he became the first black African to earn a doctorate degree in philosophy,” he added.

Prof Appiah said: “Three centuries later, we are bound to see Amo’s story through the prism of race.

“Not so in his day. Then, everyone agreed there were what I called ‘peoples’ in the last lecture, groups of human beings defined by shared ancestry, real or imagined, as there had been since the beginnings of recorded history.”

He said Anton Wilhelm AmoAfer, upon reaching middle age, decided that it was time to go home, and, in 1747, he made his way back to the Gold Coast, to the Nzema villages of his birth.

Prof Appiah said: “It was a bold move. Someone who’d been raised in the heartland of the European Enlightenment and had built a scholarly career in some of the most prestigious seats of European learning was now turning his back on the grand experiment he embodied and resolving to make a life in a land he’d last glimpsed as a small child.”

Ms Sue Lawcey, the Chair of the BBC Reith Lectures, who moderated the Accra Lectures, lauded Prof Appiah for an excellent delivery.

The Accra Lectures was attended by dignitaries such as former President John Agyekum Kufuor, Mr Jon Benjamin, the British High Commissioner, Professor Atukwei Okai, a renowned Ghanaian Poet and Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, former Chief Executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation.

The last in the series of the 2016 BBC Reith, would be held on October 19, at the New York University.

GNA