500 Years Later

“500 Years Later” is the title of an independent documentary film directed by Owen ‘Alik Shahadah, written by M. K. Asante, Jr. released in 2005. Crime, drugs, HIV/AIDS, poor education, inferiority complex, low expectation, poverty, corruption, poor health, and underdevelopment plagues people of African descent globally. 500 years later from the onset of slavery and subsequent colonialism, Africans are still struggling for basic freedom. Filmed in five continents, and over twenty countries, 500 Years Later engages the retrospective voice, told from the African vantage-point. In 2010, the sequel Motherland was released.

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The Forgotten Namibian Genocide

This documentary covers Germany’s use of genocide, concentration camps and ‘extermination’ policies in Africa – decades before World War Two and their use in Europe.

A hundred years ago, three quarters of the Herero people of the German colony of Namibia were killed, many in concentration camps.

Today, the descendants of the survivors are seeking reparations from the German government. This film tells for the first time this forgotten story and its links to German racial theories.

Described by the BBC as the story of Germany’s forgotten genocide. This powerful documentary by David Adetayo Olusoga took a sensitive and uncompromising look at the tragic circumstances leading to the massacre of three quarters of the Namibia population in German concentration camps built in Africa.

The programme included graphic reconstructions and did not shirk from showing disturbing scenes which revealed the savagery of european colonial ideology put into practise.

Click on link: Namibia Genocide

Baldwin’s Nigger (1969)

The windows into your soul

“Apartheid never died in South Africa. It inspired a world order upheld by force and illusion” by John Pilger

Excellent article by John Pilger

The murder of 34 miners by the South African police, most of them shot in the back, puts paid to the illusion of post-apartheid democracy and illuminates the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model.

In 1894, long before the infamous Afrikaans word foretold “separate development” for the majority people of South Africa, an Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, oversaw the Glen Grey Act in what was then the Cape Colony. This was designed to force blacks from agriculture into an army of cheap labour, principally for the mining of newly discovered gold and other precious minerals. As a result of this social Darwinism, Rhodes’ own De Beers company quickly developed into a world monopoly, making him fabulously rich. In keeping with liberalism in Britain and the United States, he was celebrated as a philanthropist supporting high-minded causes.

Today, the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University is prized among liberal elites. Successful Rhodes scholars must demonstrate “moral force of character” and “sympathy for and protection of the weak, and unselfishness, kindliness and fellowship”. The former president Bill Clinton is one, General Wesley Clark, who led the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, is another. The wall known as apartheid was built for the benefit of the few, not least the most ambitious of the bourgeoisie.

This was something of a taboo during the years of racial apartheid. South Africans of British descent could indulge an apparent opposition to the Boers’ obsession with race, and their contempt for the Boers themselves, while providing the facades behind which an inhumane system guaranteed privileges based on race and, more importantly, on class.

The new black elite in South Africa, whose numbers and influence had been growing steadily during the latter racial apartheid years, understood the part they would play following “liberation”. Their “historic mission”, wrote Frantz Fanon in his prescient classic The Wretched of the Earth, “has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.

This applied to leading figures in the African National Congress, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, now a corporate multi-millionaire, who negotiated a power-sharing “deal” with the regime of de F.W. Klerk, and Nelson Mandela himself, whose devotion to an “historic compromise” meant that freedom for the majority from poverty and inequity was a freedom too far. This became clear as early as 1985 when a group of South African industrialists led by Gavin Reilly, chairman of the Anglo-American mining company, met prominent ANC officials in Zambia and both sides agreed, in effect, that racial apartheid would be replaced by economic apartheid, known as the “free market”.

Secret meetings subsequently took place in a stately home in England, Mells Park House, at which a future president of liberated South Africa, Tabo Mbeki, supped malt whisky with the heads of corporations that had shored up racial apartheid. The British giant Consolidated Goldfields supplied the venue and the whisky. The aim was to divide the “moderates” – the likes of Mbeki and Mandela – from an increasingly revolutionary multitude in the townships who evoked memories of uprisings following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and at Soweto in 1976 – without ANC help.

Once Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the ANC’s “unbreakable promise” to take over monopoly capital was seldom heard again. On his triumphant tour of the US, Mandela said in New York: “The ANC will re-introduce the market to South Africa.” When I interviewed Mandela in 1997 – he was then president – and reminded him of the unbreakable promise, I was told in no uncertain terms that “the policy of the ANC is privatisation”.

Enveloped in the hot air of corporate-speak, the Mandela and Mbeki governments took their cues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While the gap between the majority living beneath tin roofs without running water and the newly wealthy black elite in their gated estates became a chasm, finance minister Trevor Manuel was lauded in Washington for his “macro-economic achievements”. South Africa, noted George Soros in 2001, had been delivered into “the hands of international capital”.

Shortly before the massacre of miners employed for a pittance in a dangerous, British-registered platinum mine, the erosion of South Africa’s economic independence was demonstrated when the ANC government of Jacob Zuma stopped importing 42 per cent of its oil from Iran under intense pressure from Washington. The price of petrol has already risen sharply, further impoverishing people.

This economic apartheid is now replicated across the world as poor countries comply with the demands of western “interests” as opposed to their own. The arrival of China as a contender for the resources of Africa, though without the economic and military threats of America, has provided further excuse for American military expansion, and the possibility of world war, as demonstrated by President Barack Obama’s recent arms and military budget of $737.5 billion, the biggest ever. The first African-American president of the land of slavery presides over a perpetual war economy, mass unemployment and abandoned civil liberties: a system that has no objection to black or brown people as long as they serve the right class. Those who do not comply are likely to be incarcerated.

This is the South African and American way, of which Obama, son of Africa, is the embodiment. Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of “lesser evilism” and changes nothing. Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama’s singular achievement.

Although Mandela and Obama cannot be compared – one is a figure of personal strength and courage, the other a pseudo political creation — the illusion that both beckoned a new world of social justice is similar. It belongs to a grand illusion that relegates all human endeavour to a material value, and confuses media with information and military conquest with humanitarian purpose. Only when we surrender these fantasies shall we begin to end apartheid across the world.

The Evolution Conundrum

I have been thinking about this proposition, the relationship between evolution and revolution since I read a recent comment by Amenta:

“…This post is a reflection as to why my personal concepts center around an evolution rather than a revolution. The world is being revealed to an extent as never before. So many hidden agendas are being exposed that we are going to have to take personal account of our own being, our own families extending outward into our neighborhood and onto the greater collective immediately surrounding us…

There will be no revolution, no unity, no moving forward without gaining a detailed understanding of who we are individually and internally. And, just how our mere existence is inter-related to one another and to the systems around us. Lets face it, we have a broken people we are dealing with. We are dealing with people who have been personally abused whether in childhood or as adults in relationships, whether physically, mentally or sexually that have to be overcome and yet the individual must find a way to come to terms with these issues before great progress can be made. This is part and parcel of an internal evolution that needs to be addressed.

Outside of that, self introspection is required of those of us that may not have had to deal with such abuse, but still we have allowed the world to cow us down to become that self-centered “i gotta get mines” being. Living on a survival level of existence.”

When you hand an ill-formed, nascent, wounded someone, a philosophy, a religion, a political heritage, the necessary evolution of the individual is short circuited. Nowhere in this culture – not the family, not the school, not the church – is one supported in gaining a “detailed understanding” of themselves “individually and internally.”

Thus, you have a population composed of educated fools, people with more books and informational resources available to them than any other people on the planet.

This country prides itself on the “rugged individualism” that birthed it, so the mythology goes. And yet, where are today’s evolved individuals? Where are the deep thinkers? Where are the people who made it their way?!

In jazz, there once was a concept called the “signature sound.”  Jazz musicians were strongly encouraged to developed their instrument’s voice so that it was unique to them. Rather than copying ‘Bird’ or ‘Diz’, the idea was to sound militantly like yourself. And if you ever listen to a song featuring Miles or Jackie Mac or Sonny Rollins or Trane, within seconds, you hear, not notes, but them.

Today, one trumpet sounds like a million others, every rapper says the same shit, every movie has the same manipulative structures and tugs at the same surface-y heartstrings. One’s personal, militant evolution is strangled at birth, stunted and siphoned into an externalized, dehumanized cadaver.

There’s one side or the other, politically. The idea that there are other pathways, or highways of thought, rather than a two lane road does not occur to the Amerikkkan because the notion of intellectual abundance is bred out of them. The preparation for thinking dualistically is born in childhood with the indoctrinated parent who teaches conformity to the status quo, not liberty from it, regardless of class or race.

Corralling and controlling the kitties, rather than observing the fascinating ways in which they think is de rigueur. The controlled kittens need a job, don’t they and the parent and the teacher know that if their little kitty doesn’t fit in, no employer will take them.

In most cases, being an evolved human being is revolutionary suicide.

Evolution is a precursor to a revolution, it seems to me. A great change within a small community or in a larger scale sense requires a shift within a significant number of people. And this great change can only occur if enough of these evolved types unite and fashion a vision of this change that inspires the nascent spirits in the larger community.

The people with power have great vision and they understand that in order to keep power, they must throw water on the fires of evolutionary growth and development. They must make sure that the schools train, but don’t educate. They must make sure that financial pressures are such that people live hand to mouth, hand to mortgage, hand to student loan repayment. These kinds of pressures dampen the evolutionary/revolutionary spirit and turn flower beds into swamps.

Thus, we take the easy way out and vote. We look at the two options offered us and pick one, though there is no difference besides the cosmetic between them. We numb ourselves with our mortgage, our music, our meals. We pick up the staff and lead the other deadened sheep to the stockyard. And we are too dead to notice.

I think Amenta’s point is on point: we owe it to ourselves to set aside our training, our brainwashing, our patterned rigidity, first, by SEEING IT! No easy task because most of us have a rosier view of our upbringings and our current reality than the actual reality of it.

I would suggest to anyone so inclined, to question everything; to consider that everything they have learned from the crib was designed to mold you, rather than help you be you. Imagine it, sit with it. Just ask yourself if you were allowed to be, or if you had to be what your parents and teachers and employers wanted you to be.

And ask yourself if you are an evolutionary being, someone who is truly in relationship with the self, asking questions, examining/allowing your feelings, insecurities, traumas, victories, discarding old skins, growing new ones.

WE can’t, if I won’t, if I won’t look into me and get butt nekkid with myself and try to heal. And if I do that work and you do that work and she does that work and he does that work, perhaps it is with those/within those that the revolution lies.

I have used the term revolution often in the past, believe we need a massive revolution still. However, I believe that Amenta is right. No real revolution without evolution, is possible, and is decidedly undesirable.

Maybe the real revolution is when we create an environment that supports and allows us all to evolve into the butterflies that we are. That would be enough for me.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

By EMMANUEL ORTIZ

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or

killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam – a people,
not a war – for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

The Spiritual Reality of Black Unity

“I do have a job but I have to work tons of overtime just to be able to afford food, shelter & clothing. My father made it a point to teach me African American History. I was reading Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois as a child. However no matter how knowledgeable I become about regarding the Black experience or the diaspora that does not really help me economically. I can’t eat history, it will not provide me shelter nor will it pay my bills. My reinvention consists of doing things I thought I’d never have to do to survive. Being degraded and dehumanized are not the reinvention I want. The price I’m paying is not worth it and believe me the cost has been and is very high. But it goes back to the point Asa made that Black unity is a farce. Just be down on your luck and see if any of your sisters or brothers come to your aid. People are only on your side when life is going well for you and you can do something for them. In this life we are truly alone.” dancingpalmtrees

You ever read something that moves from your mind, jumps into your heart and  settles into your spirit? This is what I experienced when I read the above comment on a previous post. My first instinct was simply “WOW!” It literally shook me to my core, awoke me from a self-induced slumber to remind me that for some, life experiences are not simply the basis for intellectual dissertations or a Sunday sermon. That for some, maybe most, daily life is a real struggle. I knew this on an intellectual, cosmic level… but I actually felt it in her words.

So for a few days now I have turned the above comment over in my mind, savoured it within my heart and meditated on it in my spirit, contemplating on if and what I wanted to say.

My grandmother had a saying: “he who feels it, knows it” and this sister has dropped some serious truth here. There is nothing truer than what you experience, for it is the foundation of what you know… what you feel about your existence and relationships with those you engage with. Knowledge is power when you utilize your knowledge to empower others to first and foremost, meet their basic needs… i.e., food, shelter, clothing. Unity, like charity, therefore begins at home… with family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances… then onto community and beyond.

These are not the values of our current society. Individuality is the idol to be worshipped. Self-centredness is revered. Knowledge is power to empower and enlighten oneself… “to only get yours”. Caring about the needs of others is weakness for it competes and detracts from satisfying one’s own selfish needs. There is no value seen in unity… unless others unite to confirm and conform to “my” self-adulation… i.e., agree with all I say and believe… or to satisfy “my” personal wants.

I believe in Black unity. People of African descent worldwide have a shared history, as well as similar present day experiences, based first and foremost on the colour of our skin. Although we may have these shared experiences, we are not homogeneous in our beliefs and perspectives, but we don’t need to be to work for a common purpose. Our empowerment as a comm-unity is based on our unity of commitment… therefore what we need, first and foremost are people who are committed… not to a principle, ’cause just like history, you can’t eat principle and it won’t provide shelter and pay the bills… but people who are committed to do the work necessary to create a foundation for this unity.

This is where the truth in the sister’s statement that “Black unity is a farce” is right on point! Many will talk about being for Black unity but aren’t willing to put in the work, as simply as coming to the aid of a brother or sister, especially when they are down on their luck. Sure they are more than willing to engage in intellectual discourses on the Black struggle, share conspiracy theories, offer advice and bible verses for comfort and encouragement, but when it comes to actually do something… giving selflessly of themselves to provide food, shelter, clothing or whatever else may be needed… well that’s where the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude jumps out at you.

I have also found that many who preach Black unity are quick to “degrade and dehumanize” other Black people who don’t share their opinions and beliefs or view the world as they do. As I stated in a previous post, “working to unite with only Black people who believe as you do, whether politically, culturally or religiously, is neither work nor unity.”

What we need is a spiritual transformation, a renewing of our minds, before the reality of Black unity can be ever achieved. Seeking the truth within oneself isn’t a noble endeavour. It’s misguided and based in vanity. In fact, finding the truth within oneself is easy as it will be revealed in what you do to aid those less fortunate than you. That is the noble endeavour, the foundation of Black unity: helping others… and in doing so, the truth about oneself will also be revealed. The spiritual reality of Black unity isn’t about focusing within, it’s about reaching out.