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Pieces
of a Dream
By
Mariahadessa
Ekere Tallie
Piece
One
The
truth is that the eight months I spent in Namibia saddened me.
I have read at least a hundred times that the way to go
into anything is without expectations. But tell me, how can an African-American go anywhere
near the African continent and have no expectations?
I
did not think that there would be a “Welcome-Home
Long-Lost-Sister-Committee” greeting me at the airport. I did
not expect to see traditional dancing every night. I didn't
exactly know what to expect, but I know what I did not expect.
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10/30/04
journal
entry
And
being American, people drive me crazy with their assumptions
about who I am and what the US is. There is a lot of ignorance.
The lady at the market is crazy.
She is a grown woman and she thinks the US is Hollywood.
I know people get all their ideas from television but they need
to think more critically.
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People
often asked me if I knew Ja Rule, 50 Cent, or Jennifer Lopez.
Many of my students were shocked when I told them that
Tupac is quite dead. When
I asked my students if they had heard of Martin Luther King or
Malcolm X, most of them hadn't.
Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes were also new names for
them. There is a fascination with the West, with popular images
of Blacks from the States, but there is no real foundation for
understanding who we are and why or how we are related.
A
colleague and I were talking about the slowly changing roles of
men and women in Namibia. My
colleague asked me, “What is it like in your culture?”
Then he corrected himself, “Oh, you don't have a
culture.” Living in Namibia often meant putting myself in context.
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My
students were the light of living in Namibia.
In my first classes, I asked the students to interview
and introduce each other and then I gave them the chance to
interview me.
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“What
is your mother tongue?” A few students asked.
“English.”
They
stared at me shocked.
“You’re
surprised right?”
They'd
offer a collective, “Yes.”
“Does
anyone here know how it is possible that my mother
tongue is English?” |
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Usually
the students had no idea. I
would talk to them about the slave trade and what happened to
those languages, cultures, and religions we had known so well
before we were forced to the other side of the Atlantic. I would
tell them how special it was for me to be in Africa after being
away for three generations.
Often students would applaud or announce that they were
happy I'd come home.
While
most of my Namibian colleagues were distant for my first few
months, my students were warm, full of life, enthusiasm, and
curiosity. My students taught me about apartheid.
My students taught me to put my disappointment in
context.
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Maybe
I had expected something. I'd
expected the Africa I heard about countless times:
the one where people invited you home for dinner, called
you sister, the Africa of traditional healing, the Africa my
neighbour from Sierra Leone embodied, I'd expected to have a
constant stream of people of good-will-people flowing in and out
of the house. I'd
expected unity.
Namibia,
I learned through my students, was the lab for apartheid.
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“My
mother was beaten.”
“My
father was murdered in front of me.”
“We
were forced into exile.”
“Blacks
were divided into territories depending on their
tribes.”
“We
were forced to speak Afrikaans.”
“My
brother disappeared.”
“They
came to our school and tortured the teacher in front of
us.”
“Blacks
were forced to work for Afrikaners for little or no
money.”
“The
teacher had a rifle in the corner of the classroom.”
“People
were buried alive.”
“My
uncle is in a wheelchair to this day.” |
These
are lines from some of the essays I received from my third year
students when I asked them to write about life before
independence.
Apartheid
was so brutal that even 15 years after independence I could see
the scars immediately.
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9/11/04
journal
entry
Oppression
and colonization mess up people's heads.
They are made to think that they're not good enough.
They are good enough. Smart enough.
Capable enough. But
I already see some of the same things in Namibia that I see in
the US and that disturbs me.
I see Afrikaners, Germans, Portuguese, and Chinese people
creating businesses and controlling industry and I see the black
people whose country this is, working for them and giving them
all their money. Maybe
the cuca shops (also know as shebeens, drinking establishments)
are black-owned but those are certainly not building healthy
communities. Who
owns the lodges and the tour companies here? No one African.
Black folk here need to get up on it financially while
they still can or else Namibia will only be African because it
is on the African continent.
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People
distrust people from different tribes. Western clothes and music
abound. White folks still go straight to the front of the line
at many institutions and no one questions it.
When my husband asked a woman waiting in line about this
practice she said, “Maybe we think the whites are better than
us.” Honestly,
there are many things I am still processing, so while I might want to, I don’t think I am ready to talk about relationships between Namibian men and women where it
appears that men have absorbed the behavior of their former
oppressors. Nor
will I talk about the coloureds, the abundance of shebeens—there
were eight in the tiny village next to me—or the complete
rejection of traditional spiritual beliefs.
And
while SWAPO, the freedom fighters and the ruling party of
Namibia, freed the people's bodies, I often looked around and
saw a people whose spirits, psyches, and dreams were deeply
damaged by apartheid. I
wondered what exactly freedom had, would, and could mean for
them.
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Definitions:
Afrikaner/Boer-White
South African of Dutch ancestry, often with German or other
European ancestors. Their
language is a Dutch derivative called Afrikaans.
Shebeen/Cuca
shop-Sometimes
licensed, other times not, these are local bars where folks
gather to drink, talk, and dance.
SWAPO-Armed
liberation movement formed in South West Africa in 1959 to
oppose South African rule
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Namibian
History
Namibia—known
as South West Africa before Independence— is a country with a
complex history. The country was taken over by the Germans in
the 1880’s, but Germany faced fierce opposition from the Namas
and the Hereros, two of the tribes living in the territory.
This opposition led to the massacre of tens of thousands
of Hereros, who have started a reparations movement. At the
beginning of World War I, South Africa took over the country. In
1948 South Africa’s Afrikaner led National Party won elections
and began enforcing the system of apartheid in South African
territories.
SWAPO, the South West African People’s Organization,
formed to end apartheid and gain independence for Namibia.
On March 21, 1990, after numerous negotiations, armed
struggles, and deaths, Namibia became independent.
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The
following timeline is from the BBC News website:
1886-90
- Present international boundaries established by German
treaties with Portugal and Britain. Germany annexes the
territory as South West Africa.
1892-1905
- Suppression of uprisings by Herero and Namas. Possibly 60,000,
or 80 per cent of the Herero population, are killed, leaving
some 15,000 starving refugees.
South
African occupation
1915
- South Africa takes over territory during First World War.
1920
- League of Nations grants South Africa mandate to govern South
West Africa (SWA).
1946
- United Nations refuses to allow South Africa to annex South
West Africa. South Africa refuses to place SWA under UN
trusteeship.
1961
- UN General Assembly demands South Africa terminate the mandate
and sets SWA's independence as an objective.
1966
- Swapo launches armed struggle against South African
occupation.
1968
- South West Africa officially renamed Namibia by UN General
Assembly.
| 1972
- UN General Assembly recognises Swapo as "sole
legitimate representative" of Namibia's people.
1988
- South Africa agrees to Namibian independence in
exchange for removal of Cuban troops from Angola.
1989
- UN-supervised elections for a Namibian Constituent
Assembly. Swapo wins. |
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Independence
1990 March - Namibia becomes independent, with Sam Nujoma
as first president.
posted 26 august 2005 * * * *
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Karma’s Footsteps
By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgotten among us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney /
Ekere Tallie Table /
I Leave My Colors Everywhere
ChickenBones Black Arts and Black Power Figures (Compiled by Rudolph Lewis) |
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"More than a guide to a holistic, healthy pregnancy; it's a
confessional, a warning, and a roadmap for navigating the
rewarding, relentless terrain of motherhood." No, it is not
for the faint-hearted. But if you are a mom, have friends
who are new or expectant mothers, or if you work with
pregnant women, this is 33 pages of advice that most of us
never got about motherhood.
And while you're visiting, do look around. We've added an
audio file of me reading my piece from the anthology,
Go, Tell
Michelle, a new mothertongue piece, and links to new
poems.
Hope you enjoy all the new offerings. one love, ekere
PS: Please spread the word
Mother Nature 33
pages $8 |
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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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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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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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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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