As Black history month is nearing its close in the shortest month of the year, I found myself engulfed in debates & really looking at Black history- past & present from Africa to the Diaspora. I went to a film screening of Fangafrika: The Voice of the Voiceless, which is a look at African underground hip-hop with a focus on francophone countries, put on by Nomadic Wax. The film was a great film from an African perspective, speaking of the same struggles, injustice, poverty, lack of basic civil rights & the right & need to have a say in one’s community & their governance as a nation by utilizing the same idea of music & storytelling which was the foundation of American Hip-Hop, Blues & Soul music, as well as the same foundation of Afrobeat, Reggae, Brazilian capoiera music, Negro spirituals and the traditional African proverbial story telling of our ancestors. Nothing new in its foundation, just new yet similar faces & places recognizing that our struggle for equality, civil rights & a right & duty to a voice & say in our communities & national governance still continues on a global scale from Africa to her Diaspora. A new Pan-Africanist movememnt errupting globally where our focus is back on education that starts with knowledge of self, empowerment , equality & economic freedom, not only on a national level, but on a globally free exchange international type of level!
The panel discussion after the film became a discussion on how the western media portrays Africans, sighting things like the 2007 Vanity Fair Africa Issue with Bono as the guest editor & expert on all things Africa along with the ubiquitous “Red” & “One” campaigns showing actors/musicians like Gwyneth Paltrow, Alicia Keys etc. with war paint on their faces with the tag line “I am African”. One of the panelist who happened to be from Ghana said “why are they so afraid to show African faces”. She took issue with the fact that they should have put or atleast included actual Africans in the advertisements instead of solely focusing on celebrities being the savior to help, represent & speak for Africa/Africans. They went on to speak of Africans currently taking charge of their own destiny & their own images in the media via social media, a flourishing Nollywood film industry & magazines like Arise. I personally took issue with this becase we are always ready to denounce & fault the “white man” or mainstream western media for not showing the depth & true beauty of Africa/Africans, while we ourselves do not accept the fact that we do our own-selves a disservice by perpetuating western/colonial mentality rather than showing the depth & true beauty of Africa/Africans within & without our homeland, even when we are the ones in charge.
Arise magazine is a wonderful well done magazine that shows Africa/Africans through the eye & direction of an Editor, who is a white English woman with many other white editors & writers, producing an African centric magazine in Europe with Nigerian financial backing. Why were the panelist so joyous in celebrating that, yet they took issue with having Bono be the editor for the Africa issue of Vanity Fair, an Anglo centric magazine with Anglo financial backing? Unfortunately I never got the opportunity to ask that question or to bring up that point because there were A’s without any Q’s.
Why do we take issue with the fact that western media/film industry often awards & puts the Beyonce, Alicia Keys & Halle Berry types of looks on covers of magazines & in films as their representation & celebration of “Black” instead of the Estelle, Jennifer Hudson, Angela Basset or Gabrielle Union types of looks; yet we do not take issue with the fact that many African centric magazines & films in Nollywood (Nigerian Film industry) & Ghallywood (Ghana Film Industry) do the same? The panelist specifically called out the movie “Beyonce” as one of the most popular Nollywood films, but she forgot to mention that the main character Nadia Buari, who is in most Ghanaian & Nigerian films is of the American Beyonce’s complexion & she is often put up as an adversary against Jackie Appiah, who is more of the Angela Bassett/ Gabriel Union complexion. Nadia Buari’s characters are often portrayed as the high society affluent girl while Jackie Appiah’s characters are often portrayed as the poor peasant girl who is either trying to run in the affluent circles or trying to bed the rich girl’s man- which is actually loosely the premise of the movie “Beyonce”. “Beyonce” in its various sequels is one of the most popular African films to date & it is actually not from Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) but rather from Ghallywood (the Ghanaian film industry). This is another thing I took issue with because the panelist while giving praise to the popularity of the film “Beyonce” lumped it in with Nollywood instead of giving the proper credit to Ghallywood, which is Ghana’s emerging film industry looking for its own rightful stand alone shine in the media, just as Broadway & New York filmmakers stand alone in their own contributions & shine to their Hollywood & California counterparts. We as Africans can’t get mad at the western media lumping an entire continent together as one instead of recognizing the many individual nations contributing to the greatness of the continent, if we ourselves don’t recognize them when we are sent to be their voice in the western world.
I interviewed Abdul Salaam Mumuni, the Managing Director of Venus Films & the producer of the movie “Beyonce” while I was in Ghana in 2008. I asked him why he chose names like Ciara, Beyonce & Tyra for his lead characters in his films & he flatly told me it was because he was trying to appeal to the western world. All I could think is with the millions of Africans who watch western movies, why are we not given the same consideration in terms of the western world trying to appeal to us for our hard earned money? At the end of the day these African films are bought by more Africans than westerners & the industry is being built on the earning power of Africans, yet the ultimate goal is to appeal to the western world -the colonial mentality continuing to be perpetuated by Africans on Africans. During the panel discussion the same woman from Ghana who was speaking on the growing Nollywood film industry that is now entering many western homes through bootleg DVD’s & internet piracy made notice of the fact that many westerners can’t belive that African films are showing actors in the same trappings of their western counterparts, with fancy cars, designer wardrobes, flashy jewelry, fancy houses etc.; yet what we fail to recognize is that most of the designer clothes are made in China knock off’s because Dior , D & G, Vuitton & Chanel have not opened shop in Africa yet. While these African actors can be patronizing local designers who create true haute couture- one of a kind hand made pieces utilizing the abundance of locally made fabric, leather, wood, metals, natural materials turned into the finest designs in fashion & accessories-which has been all the rage in the past couple of years from the fashion runways of New York, Paris & London. There is a tailor/designer at every corner from Lagos to Durbin to Accra, but our high profile Africans in entertainment would rather appeal to the western world by showing them that they can be just like them, as we build their economies while dismantling & destroying our own. I was told by a MP (member of parliment equivalent to a congressman in the US) that a random white man or westerner can come to Ghana (Africa in general) & be able to meet with the president or get a buisness venture to take off in the country quicker than he or any native can. I SMH(shake my head) because I know this is a fact because I have seen the colonial mentality in full bloom live an direct. I have a friend who is an engineer that has worked for the US government & major companies in the US, who wants to return back home to Ghana to open up a technology business where hi-speed internet would be more accessible to the everyday people of Ghana, not only did he meet resistance from the many millionaires & government in Ghana in attaining financing for the project, but he was told that if he wanted Ghanaians to patronize his business then he would be better off using some sort of Chinese or western name instead of his own Ghanaian name which ironically means to fly/soar like a bird because Ghanaians & Africans in general would rather patronize western & now the almighty Chinese companies rather than their own. I guess not much has changed from Africa to the Diaspora & back again.
We constantly sit around in blame of the “white man” & the western world for our plights, yet we also wait around for the “white man” & the western world to bring us our salvation by waking us up from our continental slumber to recognize that Africa is the future with many riches to build from & on, when we have been choosing to leave & sell off Africa for centuries. We allow the western world to give us excuses for remaining dependent on their charity & education, while letting us know when & if we are beautiful & the trend for the season. Harlem is all of a sudden chic again because white people have decided to grace us with their presence, Africa is the place to be again because white people have decided that they can once again make a lot of money there & get a lot for very little- the continuous cycle.
Many Africans of today readily give up their families entire life savings to attain a visa & a plane ticket to come to the West or to China, or to get smuggled in like modern day slaves having to work for their freedom from their smugglers or to attain the most grueling jobs for less than minimum wage as home care attendants, maids, nannies, taxi cab drivers etc., some of whom leave their countries as university graduates, engineers, doctors & lawyers. The constant pursuit of the dreams of western/colonial mentality without any appreciation for building & pursing the dreams of an African mentality which is powerful, free & flourishing!
As I always shout out my favorite quote from Benjamin Disraeli, ” The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.” But this is not the way of those who wish to only be the beneficiaries of mental enslavement & deep seeded colonial mentality.
Very few people know that the NAACP was started by Blacks & Jews in a collective fight for civil rights during the Civil Rights Movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. said “the segregationist and racists make no fine distinction between the negro & the Jew“.
“The story of Black-Jewish relations in the United States is a long and complex one…. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. African-American newspapers were among the first in the U.S. to denounce Nazism…. FROM SWASTIKA TO JIM CROW creates hope and reminds us of a time in U.S. history when the two communities came together.”David Horowitz, Washington Review
I bring up this point because Jewish people came from the same struggle from Egypt (Africa not the middle East for all those who are geographically challenged) & throughout the Jewish Diaspora that Black Africans did, but somehow they never internalized the same self hatred in perpetuating their condition in oppression from generation to generation. Jewish people never fell into the confusion of adopting their oppressors words such as “kike“,”yid” or “hymie” as global, out of the secrecy of home terms of endearment amongst themselves, but rather they were always quick to shut down & have heads roll if anything remotely close to those words were uttered as anti-Semitism. Ask Jesse Jackson if he has been able to recover from uttering the word “hymietown”, even though he walked hand & hand with Jews in the struggle for his & their civil rights.
The murders in Mississippi on June 21, 1964 of two young Jewish civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman & Michael Schwerner who were with James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi brought more national uproar & put a brighter spotlight on the civil rights struggle in America than was received prior by the thousands of lynchings of Black men, women & children. The video above says “has anything changed in 40 years” -I say for Jewish people -yes, but for Black people not much has really changed.
Jewish people have built & gained their power in Europe, America & the Middle East- a power of economics, a power in reparations from their oppressors & a power that upholds their holocaust history as the lowest moment in their history- which they will never forget, never let their perpetrators or the world forget, as well as a moment in history which they will never allow to happen again. Jewish people recognized that power on the world stage first & foremost comes from economics, while many Blacks fought amongst themselves & focused on blaming white people for their condition. Jews organized, mobilized & saw that freedom & power was not something they were going to attain from some words on a piece of paper, but thru unity in numbers & economics -I think this is why most white supremacist hate Jews more than Blacks because they out-mastered the master in what means most to him -money/economic power!
Jews have been able to get reparations from Germany with land for settlement, their jewels & other family possessions back from Swiss banks & have been able to take over a territory which had nothing to even do with their oppression & even bring in their fellow Ethiopian Jews from Africa in efforts to raise their numbers in a land that strategically on the world stage is their greatest position of power & where are we as Black people? Still fighting for equality & basic civil rights in a land that we originally helped build into a world power. I have personally witnessed from my Jewish clients how they patronize one another’s businesses, give to their own charities regularly, have their own banks & financial institutions & further the cause of never being the victims of oppression, degradation & destruction again by supporting Jewish causes & businesses locally & globally. While Black people globally practice kinship by merely calling one another brother or sister, Jewish people practice kinship by economically supporting, empowering & patronizing one another in the honor of continual brotherhood & sisterhood.
Jews saw the bigger picture of economics that would ultimately be the true measure of freedom & equality that was beyond any Emancipation Proclamation or Civil Rights Bill. Now compare the Jews & Blacks who have worked together toward the same goals – tell me if Russell Simmons & Jay Z have made more money off of Def Jam/hip-hop than Rick Rubin & Lyor Cohen & the many other Jewish people before them who ended up profiting more off of Black music, inventions etc. than Black people did, which makes we wonder will we ever see the bigger picture? Even looking at a modern day company like Nomadic Wax , as much as I give props to Ben Herson for his accomplishments & him being able to take African hip-hop to another level in the western arena- this was happening before he got to Senegal in 1999 & subsequently going on to do his thesis & building a business off of his new discovery. There had been Africans pushing the music on a local & global level way before his arrival, yet at the end of the day he may end up eventually profiting & being more known as starting the movement more than the makers & creators if the mindset of the African & her Diaspora does not eventually change to see & work toward the bigger picture that the Jews saw & worked toward in their own economic empowerment. We can’t blame someone for having a plan for business & economic empowerment, when we are sitting around without one & just hoping for an opportunity to sell our goods & to eat for the day. I am a true & pure global fusionist who believes in us working together as a global society- sharing, creating and profiting from our mutually shared ideas & talents in true partnerships that does not have a foundation of benefitting off of another’s societal, mental or physical weakness & oppression because anything less than that is disingenuous & solely based on profiteering. What is fair trade when the maker gains significantly less of the profits than the seller?
As Africans we have adopted western mentality, names amongst ourselves & within our business structures which we feel have recognition in the western world, basically allowing the western world who we say does not define us properly to define us generally. Ghana allowed its national music which was Osibi to be given the western name of hi-life & let it spread throughout the world without taking it back to its original name or at least letting the world know of its original name & history within the context of it’s new name. The Kenyan warriors & freedom fighters allowed their colonizers taunting name of Mau Mau to define & name them in history for life because it had spread & been popularized througout the western world, much the same as the word “Nigga/Nigger” is today.
My night after the film screening ended at a friend’s house where the conversation turned to John Mayer & the preverbal debate of the use of the “N” word: who can use it, who can’t & when & why it should be used. Frankly I am exhausted with this never ending debate because everyone has their views & I don’t see anyone having their minds changed one way or the other any time soon; however during the very heated debate of uptown Black & Brown Harlem intellectuals, who have all paid their dues & served time in the western world of media, I actually came to a new understanding from my position that has always been that no one should ever use the word outside of its original historical definition/context because we can never redefine the word from its original intention.
We all told our stories of having cabs pass us by, dealing with certain comments by our white colleagues that are often out of line & would never be directed at our white counterparts- yet we have to check ourselves in our reaction as to not give them the expected angry black man/women stereotype, having to work twice as hard to get promotions that are steadily given to subordinates( who often we have trained) because of who they know & the fact that they run in the same circles, being taunted in your community as a “sell out” or some sort of anomaly for being educated as a prep school negro while being taunted in school as some type of affirmative action award recipient, as if getting a scholarship as a black person is socially & genetically wrong or suspect while getting one as a white person proves genius, being “dressed to the nines” & waiting for a vale to give you your car while some white person coming out from the same event where you just came out of, dressed in the same tuxedo & gown that you are dressed in just automatically assumes that you are there to serve them, so they hand you their vale ticket to get them their car. Essentially all the many episodes where you hear the word “Nigger” without it ever being verbalized.
One of my friends testified that growing up in the Black American community in Harlem, she heard the word “nigger” used often -but it was well known amongst everyone that you were not to use it outside of the home because everyone knew it was derogatory & were not looking to give it the global passage of usage which it has been given within this new generation. Basically at the end of it all another friend said it has been spread so globally now that we can not take it back much like the words hi-life & mau mau. My answer to that was the fact that slavery was also something that had spread far & wide globally, but we chose to put an end to it & take back our freedom. I also realized within our conversation that the word “Nigger” had evolved from slavery to Jim Crowe from a word simply meaning “Black” to our European colonizers/slave masters, a word that just diffrentiated them from us by color. We eventually allowed ourselves to internalize just a word for black as something extremely negative as the word black in itself is used to describe certain dark, negative & bad things in our global society. We basically came to internalize self hatred in associating our color as a symptom of the conditions put on us by our colonizers & slave masters & continued to perpetuate this from Africa throughout the Diaspora & back to Africa again- the same continual psychological cycle which our colonizers & slave masters came to recognize as the way to keep us perpetually in our condition & in check.
We as Black people all over the world internalized the foreigner’s word for black as being something that was less than, something that was bad, something negative, an internalized self hatred, which our slave masters/colonizers utilized in the further breakdown of our psyche by giving favor to their lighter skinned/mixed race slaves, allowing those favored slaves to administer punishment on the closer to black than white slaves & eventually creating a permanent stamp in our pyche which we would spread from generation to generation, teaching us that the closer you were to white the better your treatment; therefore being black had to be bad & the curse for the conditions of slavery & colonization. A European attempt to merely differentiate by color without pejorative intention i.e. Negus, Negro, Niger etc. eventually became Nigger- the most highly debated, inflammatory, hateful word in Black American/American history, which is now being taken back as just “Black” by a new generation in proclaiming love of brotherhood/sisterhood of blackness globally. A return to change the psyche where another man’s foreign language for being Black no longer internalizes self hate, but rather a celebration of Black. I realized that my many of my Spanish speaking friends have always called me “negra” or “negrita”, merely as just a reference to my blackness & Africaness which I never found or took any offense in, but rather found a certain special love & acknowledgement in the same word that the Spanish & Portuguese slave traders named my ancestors that eventually became an Americanized word that I detest. HMMM-this was the new understanding that I came to toward those who wish to perpetuate the word “Nigga” in that context, but at the same time if one accepts a redefintion then one must accept it fully on a global celebratory level as we have accepted the words mau mau & hi-life with no pejorative intent regardless of who says it; otherwise we must truly work to get back to our true & rightful historical names if we want to ever break the cycle of slavery’s psyche & colonial mentality.
It seems everyone but Black people benefitted from the battles & wars we fought for freedom from the revolution, to the World Wars, to Civil War to Civil Rights. All the minorities in search of equality from white women to Jews received the benefits of the fight & struggle, while Black people still seem to be on the picket line & marching on washington to finally attain the dream of equality. Black history month this year seemed like there was an all out assault on its celebration. As we celebrated the fisrt full year of President Obama’s presidency, as the first Black president in America, the tea party, Republicans and what seems like the majority of Americans- Black White & other were letting him know just how disappointed they were with his fist year & how quickly they were losing their hope for change. Tiger Woods, the pre-Obama ultimate role model for the possibility of what a negro could & should be in the eyes of mass White acceptance fell from grace & also had to withstand the backlash of Black, White & other letting him know just how disappointed they were in his actions. Police bruatality reared it’s ugly head again against Black men, while Sean Bell could not be truly laid to rest because once again police officers emptying clips into a Black man & taking his life due to mistaken identity is just a casuality of the job, never warranting a guilty verdict. We had a national debate sparking interest in mainstream White America that felt sorry for all of the educated Michelle Obama type of Black women who could not seem to find themselves any kind of husband let alone a Barack Obama; While John Mayer let Black women know that they were like kryptonite to his “white supremacist penis” gaining an erection while finding his freedom to use the “N” word. We found fashion week still having issues of black model exclusion from the runway, while European magazines keep testing our limits & boundaries by using blackface in editorials for cheap shock value, lacking creativity type of publicity that is so easy to find these days when your target is the first Black president or stereotypes of Black people & other minorities. We found ourselves as Black people arguing, fighting & debating over all of this with no new solutions, panaceas, initiatives or a way to finally rid ourselves of the mental enslavement that has become the crutch for the stagnation in our forward movements, just to come back again next time to start the cycle of slave/colonial mentality all over again.
I however, am filled with a certain optimism that change is truly on its way even if it is brought about by a small minority of believers in hope. We have found forward movements of hope for greatness through the type of focus, dilligence, hardwork and being able to make something out of nothing that has kept black people/ black history from Africa to her Diaspora alive & thriving in many aspects for centuries. The hope in our forward movements for this new decade & beyond appears with Olympians like Shani Davis & Kwame Nkrumah Acheampong as the Williams sisters continue to make world & black history, while First lady Michelle Obama epitomizes the grace, dignity & class holding the first Black family up through all adversity. The New Orleans Saints bringing back the sunshine from the rain right in time to celebrate mardi gras & the explosive new energy of Pan-Africanism erupting globally thru political actions of activists fully in sync with the beautiful powerful soundtracks of musical activists leading the charge of hope & empowerment in a new decade, where we have no choice but to create, manifest & accept Change!
Here’s to ending Black History month on a high note & creating & manifesting a new decade & future where Africa & her Diaspora truly gets our house in order in efforts to write our own history in the manner that we would like to be recognized & heralded.
“We don’t have to wait for someone to greenlight our projects we can create our own intersections..we don’t just have to act in the sitcom, we can own the show & the network..we don’t have to be at the end of the line waiting for a hand out, we can be at the front giving a hand up..we don’t have to wait for somebody to give us 40 acres & a mule we can buy our own.. U can b born into a whole lot of a nightmare but God can usher u into a dream” Tyler Perry -Taking us back 2 what Black history has always been from Africa 2 her Diaspora.