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Religion and Society By Rose Ure Mezu
Preface
Black Creativity and the
State of the Race
By Dr. Rose Ure Mezu
These essays are selected from the many
excellent papers presented at the 1998 Morgan State University
Second Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference,
“Writers of African Descent Speak: Black Creativity and the
State of the Race,” which took place from April 2-3, 1998 at
the University. The focus of the 1998 conference was
“Religion, Politics, and Literature.” During the 1997
Conference, the crux of the discussion centered on of the
multiple ills plaguing the black community and the role of the
Black Church. Since its traditional relevance is undeniable, it
became imperative to re-examine the Black Church’s place in
the contemporary Black Community. Hence the 1998 Black
Creativity Writer’s Conference chose “Religion and
Society” as its main theme.
As in the preceding year, speakers came from
academic institutions and from the community. There were
eighteen general and five plenary sessions. The five keynote
speakers included the Pan-Africanist scholars Dr. Ali Mazrui and
Black Arts Movement popular poet Sonia Sanchez and three
religious leaders – Rev. Dr. Wyatt Walker, Pastor, Canaan
Baptist Church, Harlem; Rev. Dr. Ann Farrar Lightner-Fuller,
Pastor, Mount Calvary A.M.E. Church of Towson, Maryland; and the
Banquet Speaker, Rev. Dr. Vashti McKenzie, Pastor, Payne
Memorial A.M.E. Church, Baltimore, Maryland.
The second day of the two-day conference was
spent reconsidering the influence and validity of the Black
Church in America, Africa, and the Caribbean. The Black Church
had become the primary base of cultural and economic development
as well as political empowerment in the Black community. The
early African American Church was the seedbed of revolutionary
radicalism as most of the fiery abolitionist preachers provided
leadership and response to the inhuman slave system.
Dr. Walker reiterates this legacy of service
in his lecture, “Roots-Musically Speaking,” and attributes
the longevity of the African American Church to the urgency with
which that institution has responded in every era of change and
transition to the perceived needs of the people it serves.
“Roots-Musically Speaking” becomes a paradigm for providing
wholeness and healing to a people’s broken spirit.
African authentic cultural and religious
experiences, directly traceable to African religious tradition
through its music, recentered black people within the warm bosom
of a black church. Rev. Walker asserts that the character,
structure, and tonal qualities of the sacred music of the
African-American religious experience are the most glaring
examples of the American fruit of an African root. West African
religion, highly transcendental, with its innate principle of
monotheism, has a parallel kinship with the New Testament
thought of Jesus. Walker therefore insists Africans were not
Christianized, rather “the ancestors of Africans Africanized
European Christianity” (Religion and Society, 15).
Battered by dehumanizing experiences of slave
cruelties, but already primed by their native spirituality,
Negro spirituals became the folk expression of a Black Theology
– whose themes are laced with liberation motifs, undaunted
courage in the face of hardship and bolstered by an enduring
faith in God – all elements of resistance that acquired a
universalism whenever people are faced with injustice and
oppression. Thus the music of African Americans with all its
transformations and phases became the baseline music, art form,
and further became the root of not only the music of Black
Americans but of all music indigenous to America, and beyond
America, the world.
Rev. Gabriel Ezewudo, C.S. Sp., takes up that
motif with “Christianity, African Traditional Religion, and
Colonialism: Were Africans Pawns or Players in the Cultural
Encounter?” Reverend Ezewudo insists that although Western
missionaries came looking for souls, “they could not take away
the African Soul” (Religion and Society, 41). Rev.
Ezewudo confirms what Rev. Wyatt Walker describes as cold
sterility and lack of emotional warmth of the sacred-worship
mode of the Western Church:
[Ironically, the older churches in the West
are experiencing empty pews and membership apathy. Instead the
industrialized West is swinging to seemingly secular attractions
that are reinstating the “gods of nature.” In the West, what
used to be “animism” is coming back with vengeance in the
advocacy of respect to nature. This appears to be a vindication
and validation of African traditional religious beliefs and
practices. The earlier blanket condemnation of these practices
therefore either derived from ignorance or was a manifestation
of belief in the superiority of Western colonial values (Religion
and Society, 42).
Thus Africa’s ready acceptance of
Christianity rather than be seen as evidence of imperialistic
imposition points to the acculturative disposition of the
traditional faith of the African ancestors. Therefore,
Africa’s traditional ancestors, far from being mere pawns, can
equally be seen then as players who “contributed to the
rediscovery of lost reverences.”
The late 1990s can be classified as the age
of the women in religion, the latter, traditionally a bastion of
masculinity. Black women preachers and leaders are presently
making the same incursion that the feminist ideology has made in
every human sphere. Rev. Dr. Ann Farrar Lightner-Fuller’s
interpretation of the teaching role of the Black Church
completes the male religious worldview. Her womanist
interpretation of the biblical story of Sarai and Hagar in their
competition for Abram’s love delineates the feminist
principles needed for a self-fulfilled existence:
self-awareness, self-definition, compassion towards fellow women
or sisterly bonding, clearly defined goals and reliance on God
rather than on others.
The thread of continuity knitting the essays
together again resurfaces in Dr. Ali Mazrui’s “Africa and
Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest” as he
takes up Reverend Ezewudo’s theme of Africa’s ready
acceptance of Western religion and mores as both an illustration
of the continent’s strength and weakness. To this, he
introduces a third dimension of the boomerang element of the
conquerors becoming in turn the conquered. The fight and
competition between the two alien “conqueror” religions –
Islam and Christianity – underscore the peaceful nature of
African Traditional Religion (ATR), tolerant of other religions
and never seeking to impose a religious point of view on a
neighbor or another ethnic group. But a reciprocal conquest
ensues as Africa begins to reform Islam, acculturate the
Christian religion, and revitalize even the French language
(shrinking in usage) by providing the largest French speaking
population worldwide.
With the Africans entrenched in America, the
vista becomes hopeful that in the coming millennium, just as
musically, Blacks have influenced the world, African American
may (as they effectively advance technologically), also share
those skills with the rest of the black diaspora. They could
well become to Africa, in the intellectual and technological
sense, what the Jews of the world are to Israel. Thus
counter-penetrating one’s conquerors, in Ali Marui’s
visionary praxis, appears an exciting an enticing possibility.
Society and literature commanded an equal
attention during the conference. Dr. Rose Ure Mezu’s “Women,
the Black Race, and Pan-Africanism” traces the history of
womanism and memorable womanist activists projected into various
leadership positions as redeemers of their race. These women
epitomize self-knowledge, confidence, and self-reliance as they
show compassion towards members of their sex and total
commitment to their missionary quest for service to the black
race.
Rita Dandrige extends this praxis as she
advocates that black women must enter the theoretical landscape
in order to keep instep with the changing black fictional mode
that is progressively eschewing Eurocentrism in favor of
Afrocentricity. She exemplified her revisionist theory with
Terry McMillan’s female models – caught up in a confluence
of ambiguous values – but who defeat oedipalizing (Deleuze and
Guttari’s term) hegemonic myths to reach a liberatory phase of
self-definition and self-actualization. Theirs become a womanist
cultural consciousness of the urban cultural collectivism that
encompasses the black community and embraces a race
consciousness. This race consciousness becomes the agent capable
of transforming Black America from powerlessness to power.
In turn, Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu provides the
general historical overview of black activism as its progress
and survival intersect with the fortunes of publishing. The
black publishing industry – past, present, and future – is
revisited as the platform for Black Aesthetics and other
Afrocentric values advocated alike by black ideologues, artists,
and activists. In decrying the dearth of black publishers, he
underscores the ironic situation where even in Historically
Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), black scholars looking
for promotion and tenure sink or swim depending on if their
books are published by white publishers with vast resources or
by black publishers with limited or no resources for glossy
covers, and even less for marketing and promotional activities.
This theme of the dearth of viable black
publishers is reiterated by Tracey Walters as she compares and
contrasts American and British Black Arts Movement (BAM). Tracey
Walters regards the movement as the aesthetic and spiritual
sister to the more revolutionary Black Power concept that
advocates self-definition and auto-determination of the Black
masses. BAM remains ongoing in Africa and its diaspora since
marginalization and sub-categorization will always provide the
fuel needed for revolutionary agitation.
With Black Arts Movement highlighting the
plight of the black masses, Wavie Gibson wades into the
controversy regarding their manner of speech, namely, Ebonics or
vernacular Black English (BEV) and its validity vis-ŕ-vis
standard English. Gibson’s insightful analysis synthesizes the
core arguments and finally isolates pride, fear, and shame as
the crucial factors polarizing the black community over this
issue. He advances the theory that given the Negro’s
problematic situation in America, blacks were forced to
capitulate to “well-designed image manipulation” by those
who sought to instill in them shame for their blackness, their
culture, and their language. This cultural and psychological
imperialism, he insists, can be countered by what he calls
“code switching.” This would involve thoroughly re-educating
African Americans on the issue of Ebonics so as to uncover
“the real reason for African-American students’ academic
failure” (Religion and Society, 165).
Anthony
Mark Neal evinces similar concern for blacks, especially black
youth, as the victims
of spatial displacement of the post-industrial urban space. This
regional and spatial dislocation within the Black Public Sphere
is fraught with dangerous economic, cultural, and political
dangers, for it connotes the “death of the community” to the
young blacks. As the middle-class blacks flee to the suburbs,
the deprived urban Black youth become displaced humanity severed
from the aesthetic and political sensibilities of the Black
Public Sphere. Into this vacuum steps a young black constituency
seeking a communal discourse across a fractured national
community.
And
so Hip-Hop recordings and videos become vehicles of “Ghetto
Noir” aesthetics – a critical discourse of the lifestyle and
experiences of urban black put in musical forms that is
increasingly fusing with jazz (hip-hop/jazz fusion). Neal
reveals that in keeping with prevailing mores, black females’
insurgence into hip-hop reveals a two-fold intent: first, as a
form of black female nationalist challenge to the exclusionary
larger society and, second, to respond to the unresolved gender
and sexuality tension pre-existing within the black family,
community, and labor force. And so since this mirrors the core
ailments prevalent within the contemporary black life, hip-hop,
in the final analysis, must not be blamed as the sole repository
of such maladies.
Thus
“Religion and Society” as the issue of The Second
International Interdisciplinary Conference – “Writers of
African Descent Speak” Black Creativity and the State of the
Race” continues the already established tradition, begun by
ideologues such as W.E.B. Du Bois and other black nationalists,
that of preserving African intellectual, cultural traditions,
and mythopeia – a goal that will be delved into in depth
during the 1999 Black Creativity Writers’ Conference with its
focus on “Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. Washington,
and Kwame Nkrumah.”
My
sincere thanks go to Morgan State University for encouraging and
sponsoring the Black Creativity conference, to Dr. Burney J.
Hollis, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and to Dr. Clara Adams,
Vice President for Academic Affairs, for their continued support
of the project and to all the participants for their almost
religious belief in our aims and objectives.
Religion and Society (1999) was published by
Black Academy Press, Inc. / P.O. Box 619 / Randallstown, MD 21133 * * * *
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posted 7 November 2007 |
