Senator Orwoba not the first person to try and turn ridicule into honour

Senator Gloria Orwoba. She was asked to leave Parliament for showing up in blood-stained pants. [Elvis Ogina, Standard] There are times when the inconvenient compels people to reflect on given assumptions and to downplay certain realities because they are embarrassing. Senator Gloria Orwoba attracted attention by wearing 'blood stained' white pants in Parliament in order to 'walk the talk' of fighting what she called period shame. She was not the first to try turning ridicule into honour. England's King Edward III, in 1348, elevated a woman's slipped garter into the highest English honour as The Order of the Garter. Similarly, US President Andrew Jackson lifted the donkey into the symbol of the new Democratic Party that advanced 'democracy' for white men. This inspired American aggression to annex Mexican territories from California to Texas, ostensibly to spread democracy and even tried to draft God, through claims to 'Manifest Destiny' in grabbing lands from a sister republic. Will Orwoba succeed in turning 'period shame' into 'period honour'? Whether menstruation was a social liability or not bothered Zara Yacob, 17th Century Ethiopian Philosopher. Raised and schooled in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, he had a questioning mind. He struggled to find the origins of everything, including his whereabouts long before birth. He concluded that God, the self-created self, was the beginning and could not be faulted. God had created everything in perfection and gave man ability to reason. That very existence of a reasoning man was proof that God existed. That ability to reason led Yacob to conclude that some parts of the Bible were wrong because they purported to question God's work. In terming women impure because of a natural phenomenon that was responsible for population growth, Yacob asserted, Moses faulted God. He noted that each people claim that their God is the true God, thereby making the concept of God relative to particular cultural settings. Since he wanted everything to make sense because God created man to make sense, Yacob downplayed religion and dogma because they tend to violate reason. Besides Yacob, there was also Anton Wilhelm Amo making a name in Germany between 1720 and 1750. Their European contemporaries received attention as purveyors of 'enlightenment', mainly because Europe was in global geopolitical ascendancy. Those champions of European 'enlightenment' also championed the exploitation of the Africans which happened in two ways. The first was to glorify everything European and to reorganise history. The Second was to suppress and deny achievements that Africans had made. Those 'enlightenment' champions included Briton David Hume and German Emmanuel Kant who, to feel superior, tried to make Africans feel inferior. Amo, being their senior in age and reputation, had operated in three German universities as student and teacher for about three decades; their supposed ignorance of Amo does not add up. These two sought to justify their assumed sense of superiority by denying the intelligence of the Africans. In 1753, Hume wrote of Negroes in Europe as lacking "any symptoms of ingenuity" and in Jamaica as having "slender accomplishments like a parrot". Kant, admiring Hume's anti-African views, asserted that the evidence of African stupidity was in the blackness. The thrashing was in the colonial states which hinged on the lie of white supremacy. Carlo Conti Rossini, Italy's colonial administrator, argued that Zara, being black, could not produce philosophical work because, "Ideas as those of Zara Yacob would not be expected in Ethiopia." Italian leader Benito Mussolini, besides rewarding Rossini for his 'services to history and moral sciences', was plotting how to avenge the 1896 Italian defeat at Adowa. Mussolini said he was doing Britain and France a favour by removing a bad example of black people ruling themselves. Trying to counter the unpleasant truth of Zara's philosophical acumen, therefore, encouraged Hitler's big lie and the big war. The search for 'truth' tends to unclothe some philosophers.

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