|
Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
/
From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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* * * *
What's
Your Name?
By Kalamu ya Salaam
Wangui wa Goro is from Kenya. A long way
from Kenya. She lives in exile in England. Unable to return to
Kenya because of the clash of her human rights activism with
Kenya's current barbaric administration.
She is both a creative writer and a
translator. Her most well known work is the translating of Ngugi
wa Thiongo's books into English. She is often identified as
Ngugi's translator. Some people even assume they are related.
So there is a double frustration in her
life. She can't go home because home is politically inhospitable
-- she will be jailed or, worse yet, assassinated should she
return. Additionally, her important work of translating
overshadows her creative writing.
For a day or so, Wangui stays at the
Marnico guest house but eventually moves to another hotel. Later
when we all return to Accra after the colloquium, we are staying
together at the Mariset Hotel in the East Condonment area of
Accra.
There are two Mariset Hotels in Accra. This
one is a lovely little, isolated accommodation. There is
original contemporary Ghanaian art decoring the walls. The rooms
are, for my taste, more comfortable than the Novatel. They have
a small fridge in each room. We use ours for water and juice
concentrates. There's a basket in the room with a fragrant
potpourri and the telephones have the "standard American
plugs" on them. Mariset's brochure notes them as
"international" telephone hook-ups. I resist the
temptation to jump on line and check my E-mail.
We see each other at breakfast and are soon conversing.
Wangui is traveling with her six year old
son, Mbuguah. A son who has never seen Kenya. "The only
time he was in Kenya was when he was a small seed growing inside
of me." Mbuguah nevertheless identifies Kenya as home.
Wangui is also joined by Adotey Bing, the
director of Africa Centre in London. I share some of the Tarzan
manuscript with them.
I have been working at night throughout the
trip and have already completed over seventy-five percent of the
writing. Fortunately, in Cape Coast I was able to print out the
manuscript. My Mac Powerbook has Apple file exchange. I've
brought both Mac and DOS discs with me. The setup in the
temporary Cape Coast colloquium office is DOS-based. I transfer
the file to a DOS disc and print with no problem. There is no
way I could have written all of this without a portable
computer.
Even while many of my colleagues continue
to resist using computers and hooking up E-mail, the fact is the
computer revolution is irreversible. In Accra, one small record
store on a nondescript side street had a computer. Between
computers and advances in telecommunications, Africa will
quickly be able to close a significant developmental gap.
Day to day communications across the
continent, as well as between Africa and the rest of the world
will take a gigantic leap in the next two or three years. This
will unavoidably also advance Pan Africanism, a philosophy which
seeks unity of the African world and thus grows closer to
fruition simultaneously with increased, easier and more
accessible communications. To my way of thinking, the computer
revolution is a boon for our movement.
As the manuscript goes around the table, we
talk. Wangui asks me about my name. She speaks Swahili and
wonders how my Swahili name came about. I tell her I took my
name at Kwanzaa in 1970 and that it was a political choice.
While we knew that the majority of African
Americans came from the West Coast of Africa, we chose Swahili
because it was the only African language that was the official
language of an African country. Most African countries use the
former colonial language as the official language. Swahili was
also a Pan African, trade language
spoken up and down the East Coast and throughout parts of
Central Africa. It was a language that was not associated with
any one people. It was easy to learn and had a basic grammatical
structural.
Wangui corrected me. Although it was widely
used by various peoples, it nevertheless was the indigenous
language of a specific group of people. She then commented that
she liked my name: "pen of peace."
Wangui is one of those gentle, iron-willed
spirits who possesses a fierce quietness. As silent as a distant
mountain in the moonlight, and just as unmoveable in her
convictions. She speaks in a tone about two small steps above a
whisper but she is also an independent thinker and a person of
purposeful movement. From my brief observations during the few
days we were together, I surmise there is very little wasted
motion in anything she does. Because of her focused intensity,
there is no danger that her quietness will be mistaken for
shyness or timidness.
Wangui, her son, and Adotey had an earlier
flight than we did, and so checked out early in the afternoon.
At that time I saw a demonstration of her battle stancing, the
kind of principle-based movement which I'm sure drove the Kenyan
law and order fascists straight up their government walls. When
the hotel bill was presented, Wangui refused to sign for the
last day. Wangui's position, which she stated in calm
nonnegotiable terms, was that they were not staying in the room
that night and therefore should not be charged for it. The clerk
said the policy was they should be charged for the night because
they were checking out in the afternoon.
The clerk couldn't believe what was
happening because all she wanted was for Wangui to sign for the
bill. PANAFEST was going to pay for it. The money wasn't going
to come out of Wangui's pocket. But for Wangui it was about
principle and not money. Finally, Wangui drew a line separating
the charges and signed for the other two nights but did not sign
for the last day.
The whole exchange took maybe five or six
minutes. The clerk had struck a rock. Wangui was like a tree
planted by the water in her intransigence. There was no doubt in
my mind that a woman such as this would be killed in
contemporary Kenya which is rent by divisive neocolonial tribal
politics.
The majority of African states are not
politically ready to confront the limitations of tribalism and
nationalism, a potent mix which is always self destructive.
Moreover, as the conflagrations in Bosnia make clear, the
extreme negative that results from mixing tribalism and
nationalism is not a racial characteristic, even though, thanks
to the cultural hegemony of colonialism, whenever one says
"tribalism" one immediately thinks about either Native
Americans or Africans.
But regardless of the location or source,
we must confront and overcome the limitations of tribalism and
nationalism. This process of overturning ourselves is the life
work of Wangui wa Goro.
When confronted by a free thinking woman,
there is no doubt that many of today's nominal African leaders
(most of whom are not just male -- they are also
"macho") will exhibit a negative response. Her
traditional opponents notwithstanding, Wangui wa Goro's no
nonsense, principled and fearless attitude is precisely the
quality of leadership that (Pan-)Africa needs.
***
Pan African leadership, as its history
demonstrates, will come from unexpected places and in its own
time. The first day we were in Accra we went to the DuBois
Centre. DuBois, an ardent and globally significant Pan
Africanist, is buried in Ghana.
W.E.B. DuBois did not start off his
professional life as a Pan Africanist. In fact, when he was a
founding member of the NAACP, he was often the only person of
color integrating these meetings. Eventually, he broke with the
NAACP. As important as his NAACP work was, it was as a Pan
Africanist that DuBois made his mark internationally. He was one
of the chief organizers of the important Pan African
Conferences, international gatherings which fueled the then
nascent African independence movements. Attendees included many
of the initial heads of state of countries such as Ghana, Kenya,
and Nigeria.
DuBois' advocacy of Pan Africanism came as
a surprise to some who identified DuBois as one of Garvey's
staunchest and unremitting critics. In his book,
Dusk of Dawn, DuBois sums up the conflict between himself and Garvey in a
charitable fashion, displaying none of the bitterness and
name-calling that was characteristic of their long running feud.
My first effort was to explain away the
Garvey movement and ignore it; but it was a mass movement that
could not be ignored. I noted this movement from time to time in
the Crisis and said in 1920 that Garvey was "an
extraordinary leader of men" and declared that he had
"with singular success capitalized and made vocal the great
and long-suffering grievances and spirit of protest among the
West Indian peasantry." Later when he began to collect
money for his steamship line, I characterized him as a
hard-working idealist, but called his methods bombastic,
wasteful, illogical, and almost illegal. I begged his friends
not to allow him foolishly to overwhelm with bankruptcy and
disaster "one of the most interesting spiritual movements
of the modern world." But he went ahead, wasted his money,
got in trouble with the authorities and was deported from the
United States. He made a few abortive efforts later, but finally
died in London in 1940, poor and neglected.
The unfortunate debacle of his
over-advertised schemes naturally hurt and made difficult
further effective development of the Pan-African Congress idea.
Nevertheless, a third Pan-African Congress was attempted in
1923. It was less broadly representative than the second, but of
some importance, and was held in London, Paris and Lisbon.
Thence I went to Africa and for the first time saw the homeland
of the black race.
Eventually DuBois repatriated to Ghana and,
in so doing, gave his personal answer to the question of
"double consciousness" which DuBois eloquently
articulated in the
The Souls of Black Folk.
|
It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring
one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,
-- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history
of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and
truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the
older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize
America, for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of
white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
message for the world. He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows,
without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly
in his face. |
What is most interesting is that only after
visiting Africa is DuBois able to articulate the Negro
"message for the world." In a word, it is humanism.
Africa can teach humanism. Upon reading DuBois' reflections on
seeing Africa, I felt that in December of 1994 I had seen the
same essence of Africa that DuBois saw in December of 1923 and
wrote about in
Dusk of Dawn.
|
And there and elsewhere in two long
months I began to learn: primitive men are not following
us afar, frantically waving and seeking our goals;
primitive men are not behind us in some swift foot-race.
Primitive men have already arrived. They are abreast,
and in places ahead of us; in others behind. But all
their curving advance line is contemporary, not
pre-historic. They have used other paths and these paths
have led them by scenes sometimes fairer, sometimes
uglier than ours, but always toward the Pools of
Happiness.
Or, to put it otherwise, these folk
have the leisure of true aristocracy -- leisure for
thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter.
They have time for their children -- such well-trained,
beautiful children with perfect, unhidden bodies. Have
you ever met a crowd of children in the east of London
or New York, or even on the Avenue at Forty-second or
One Hundred and Forty-second Street, and fled to avoid
their impudence and utter ignorance of courtesy? Come to
Africa, and see well-bred and courteous children,
playing happily and never sniffling and shining.
I have read everywhere that Africa
means sexual license. Perhaps it does. Most who folk
talk sex frantically have all too seldom revealed their
source material. I was in West Africa only two months,
but with both eyes wide, I saw children quite naked and
women usually naked to the waist -- with bare bosom and
limbs. And in those sixty days I saw less of sex
dalliance and appeal than I see daily on Fifth Avenue.
This does not mean much, but it is an interesting fact.
The primitive black man is
courteous and dignified. If the platforms of Western
cities had swarmed with humanity as I have seen the
platforms swarm in Senegal, the police would have a busy
time. I did not see one respectable quarrel. Wherefore
shall we all take to the Big Bush? No. I prefer New
York. But my point is that New York and London and Paris
must learn of West Africa and may learn.
*
* * * *
African life with its isolation has
deeper knowledge of human souls. The village life, the
forest ways, the teeming markets, bring in intimate
human knowledge that the West misses, sinking the
individual in the social. Africans know fewer folk, but
know them infinitely better. Their intertwined communal
souls, therefore, brook no poverty nor prostitution --
these things are to them un-understandable.
On the other hand, they are vastly
ignorant of what the world is doing and thinking, and of
what is known of its physical forces. They suffer
terribly from preventable disease, from unnecessary
hunger, from the freaks of the weather.
Here, then, is something for Africa
and Europe both to learn; and Africa is eager,
breathless, to learn -- while Europe? Europe laughs with
loud guffaws. Learn of Africa? Nonsense. Poverty cannot
be abolished. Democracy and firm government are
incompatible. Prostitution is world old and inevitable.
And Europe proceeds to use Africa as a means and not as
an end; as a hired tool and welter of raw materials and
not as a land of human beings.
I think it was in Africa that I came
more clearly to see the close connection between race
and wealth. The fact that even in the minds of the most
dogmatic supporters of race theories and believers in
the inferiority of colored folk to white, there was a
conscious or unconscious determination to increase their
incomes by taking full advantage of this belief.
And then gradually this thought was
metamorphosed into a realization that the income-bearing
value of race prejudice was the cause and not the result
of theories of race inferiority; that particularly in
the United States the income of the Cotton Kingdom based
on black slavery caused the passionate belief in Negro
inferiority and determination to enforce it even by
arms. |
This is the DuBois who lived out his last
years working in Ghana. This is the DuBois, his eyes opened by
Africa, who committed class suicide by siding with the
development of the African masses rather than remaining a
lionized intellectual in America. This is the DuBois whom most
of us seldom encounter. A DuBois who tired of the high wire,
double consciousness balancing act, and decided to cast his
total lot with Pan Africanism.
DuBois was an intellectual: first, last and always. His
was no romantic nor nostalgic cleaving to Africa. He was a
rationalist unswayed by emotionalism and appeals to
sentimentality. Here's how he described himself in Dusk of Dawn,
his autobiography written when he was seventy years old as a
summing up of his life:
|
My
leadership was a leadership solely of ideas. I never
was, nor ever will be, personally popular. This was not
simply because of my idiosyncrasies but because I
despise the essential demagoguery of personal
leadership; of that hypnotic ascendancy over men which
carries out objectives regardless of their value or
validity, simply by personal loyalty and admiration. In
my case I withdrew sometimes ostentatiously from the
personal nexus, but I sought all the more determinedly
to force home essential ideas.
|
One of the most forceful of those ideas is
this seldom quoted insight in which DuBois locates the fervor
and future of Pan Africanism squarely in the masses of the
diaspora.
|
From the eighteenth century down the
Negro intelligentsia has regarded segregation as the
visible badge of their servitude and as the object of
their unceasing attack. The upper class Negro has almost
never been nationalistic. He has never planned or
thought of a Negro state or a Negro church or a Negro
school. This solution has always been a thought
upsurging from the mass, because of pressure which they
could not withstand and which compelled a racial
institution or chaos. Continually such institutions were
founded and developed, but this took place against the
advice and best thought of the intelligentsia.
|
Pan Africanism will have its day. Will
future rise. But not because of ideas, no matter how prescient
or how logical. Rather Pan Africanism will rise because the
masses of we African people in the diaspora will find that their
brightest future is located in the complex matrix/nexus of
African unity and not simplistically in the countries wherever
we may have been born as a result of colonialism and the slave
trade. Our brightest future will be wherever we can band
together and work with and for each other as a specific
manifestation of Africa, whether that be at "home" in
the Americas or abroad, in the diaspora or on the continent of
Africa.
The secret of Pan Africanism is that it is
about Africa the people and not simply about Africa the land.
Make no mistake, the control of Africa the land mass is
important. But the ultimate measure of civilization is the
social welfare of the people and not the material level of
industrial development or lack thereof.
Africa: The children smiling. The women
toiling. The men struggling mightily to make things work: old
cars, crumbling buildings, underdeveloped townships. The people.
Waking up. Walking. Working. Talking. Touching. Singing.
Dancing. Collectively.
***
Tomika. Jamilla. Shaqiel. Kunta. Kwame.
Lashawna. Tariq. Kenya. Rhodesia. LaToya. Keasha. Aiesha.
Damieka. Damella. Shawneeka. Tupac. Assata.
And the list goes on and on and on.
African-sounding names picked by the working class to illustrate
their identification with Africa even when they don't know one
word of an Africa language.
To some people this is all laughable.
Pan Africanism is laughable.
Africa is laughable.
These nonsensical, totally homemade, made-up, crazy
sounding names: laughable.
Laugh if you want to, but Africa is alive.
It's alive and its the working masses keeping Pan Africanism
alive. All across the diaspora.
A child is conceived in Kenya and born in
England. His mother teaches him that Africa is his home.
In Ghana we met elderly African American
women. Quiet. In their sixties. Some of them married to
Ghanaians. They've been there twenty, thirty years. Not thinking
about returning.
In America there are thousands and
thousands, thousands and thousands of African Americans who will
never return to Africa but who turned out to support both Winnie
and Nelson Mandela when they separately toured the United
States.
The will is alive in the hearts of the masses.
The worsening conditions of our inner
cities waters the tree of Pan Africanism. As massive lay-offs
increase and government entitlements decrease. As personal
security can no longer be guaranteed, and, indeed, insecurity
and fear become the norm. As family ties unravel and people find
themselves living not blocks or a few miles away from the
nearest relative, but living in different states separated by
thousands of miles. And, conversely, as the world shrinks
because of technological advances in telecommunications and
computers. All of this contributes to the development of Pan
Africanism.
What is now a leap of faith, tomorrow may
be but one small and rationale step toward a better life.
As the skilled and semi-skilled working
masses of us: the teachers and mechanics, social workers and
industrial equipment operators, postal workers and truck
drivers, nurses and medical care providers (e.g. x-ray and
laboratory technicians, therapists and nutritionists),
administrators and office workers, accountants and retail
merchants, as those of us who work everyday and help make the
world go round, as we assess our relative positions and,
increasingly, opt to investigate and exercise other options,
particularly the option of living and working elsewhere, for us
Africa will become more and more attractive.
Pan Africanism's most pressing problem is
not a lack of will but a lack of leadership. Committed and
inspiring leadership which can articulate and implement solid
plans which provide linkage and opportunity. Leadership. But
it's coming.
And the bulk of this leadership will not be
the extraordinary individual geniuses but rather will be
composed of the ordinary, hard working laborers who will choose
a historic option, and, in so doing, make real the promise of
Pan Africanism. The leadership will rise from among the most
capable of the masses. From those whose strange and funny names
are illustrative of an undying African dream. From those who
right now may not even have a clue. No concern for Pan-anything.
Just young and full of themselves, looking to make a way in the
world and sure to find no way. None of their names inscribed
anywhere. And they will be forced, by circumstance and by the intransigence
of our historic oppressors (both internal and external), these
young people, if they are to become even marginally productive
as adults, these young people will have to struggle for their
rights. Indeed, even if all they want to do is party, they will
have to struggle for their right to party. They will have to
struggle just to live.
The nineties will be both the best of times
and the worse of times to be young, not to mention gifted and
black. But out of the ever encroaching social malaise which
threatens to engulf all of us, a new wave of leadership will
emerge. A leadership which will turn to Africa, the Africa
within all of us as well as Africa the continent. Some of them
will "choose" to turn that way. Others will turn
toward Africa because they have no other viable choice. In the
long term, in terms of the social development of the masses of
our people, linking and uniting Africa, that is the only way
ahead available to the leadership that is coming.
From: Tomaniqua. Nefertteti. Ashanti.
Cinque. The leadership is coming. From: Oduno. Latifa. Tiaji.
Bomani. It's coming. Leadership, the last missing puzzle piece,
is coming.
Source: Kalamu ya Salaam.
Tarzan Can Not Return to Africa,
But I Can
-- PanaFest 1994
* * *
* *
Chiefs in Cape
Coast, Ghana /
Grand Durbar Parade
*
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*
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Guarding the Flame of Life
New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
* * *
* *
|
Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
* * *
* *
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
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* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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* * * * *
The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* * *
* *
Ancient African Nations
*
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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