Ha!!!As I expected this Djehuti chap has nothing to say to my response, given as it was in an African speech. Now how can he claim to walk the walk when he cannot talk the talk.

The point I was making is that someone whose experience of Africa comes out of a book written a long time ago by someone who has probably never set foot on the continent simply has no place to describe as naive someone ( namely, moi) who was not only born in Africa but lives his life as an African. Living as an African is dynamic, my friend, it cannot be fixed on to the pages of some book.

I can trace my lineage back over 5000 years, my earliest ancestor being a priestess of Ra in ancient Khem. From that time, my forbears have been Kings and Queens, warriors, scholars, priests and mystics, slaves even, mere peasants, traders, explorers, Hebrew wanderers, Christian converts, vassals of a British colonial system, civil servants in an independent African State and so on. No book could ever contain the wealth of experiences handed down.

I never thought I would ever sink to the level of what appears to be characteristic of Black Diaspora academia- this whole Mirror-Mirror-on-the-wall-who's-the-Blackest-of-us-all thing. But I guess I cannot abide having my Africanness questioned by someone who has so little of it except what he has read about.

By the way, I have nothing against books, having a large library myself. I also happen to be literate in more than one language and more than one script. I bet Djehuti can only read heiroglyphics. which must sort of limit his capacity to exchange ideas with other people as most of the people who read and write heiroglyphics have been dead for a very long time. The result is that Mr Djehuti lives in a world inhabited mostly by Horus reciting the rubric for turning himself in to a crocodlie so he can swim accross the river in the Underworld.

I am assuming Djehuti is a man. No Black woman of any shade would allow their fingers to work a keyboard without the neccessary supervision of their brains. Being a man myself, I am not all too sure about some members of my gender.