WordUp - kalamu’s words

 

jelly’s boast (backed up in writing)

 

i started jass with

latin tinged, cafe colored

keyboard handicrafts

 

 

if buddy bolden—or someone black like that—started jazz then how could ferdinand lementh “jelly roll” morton fix his mouth to boast that he “invented jazz in 1903”? simple, my man was the first to write it down, to figure out where and how the notes go when put on paper just so a musician trained in the reading of music but untutored in the ways of the raucous folk could play these wild new sounds or at least a rough approximation, or at least play the heads, the melodies.

 

and while a lot of folks like to claim that jelly’s skill was because of the creole in him most of those same folks know nothing about the deep draughts jelly drank from the brackish bottom of the blues’ most funky well. jelly had songs that could make a prostitute blush and a pimp hide his face in shame. storyville wasn’t no conservatory and jass wasn’t no waltz. jelly knew this. he knew about the blacks. he knew about the whites. and especially about everything that went down in between. like all good blues folk he also had a mean streak, that cut-you-if-you-stand-still and shoot-you-if-you-run temperament necessary to survive saturday nights in the roughest parts of town.

 

no doubt it was because of jelly that the story freely circulated that jazz was born in a brothel, specifically the cathouses of storyville. but all that’s said ain’t necessarily so. sure, jelly played jazz there, but  just cause jelly played for tricks and whores that don’t mean that’s where his songs came from. the music was actually made outside elsewhere and later on brought inside those doors. which is not to take nothing away from jelly because figuring out how to write it down was no mean feat, especially those lusty sounds his brothers uptown would just let rip, day after day and night after night, pouring their sacred souls into the secular atmosphere. jelly would listen, and listen, and grin, and hold those sacred riffs inside his jaws and against the crown of his mouth and later spit out onto paper those notes which a bunch of others had written in the air. i’m not saying jelly wasn’t original, i’m just saying a good scribe can always write more than he or she individually knows, especially when they are present at the creation and have the initial shot at drafting up tunes taken down from the motherlode.

 

given the mixed nature of jelly’s pedigree and his back-a-town, alley-crawling cravings, he was able to create music for all occasions. music for right now if you were ready to get it on and music for later after all the squares were gone. music colored by what jelly suggestively called the spanish tinge.

 

and what was this latin tinge that jelly so glowingly spoke of? was it african rhythms run through the backyard of the caribbean? one critic talks vociferously about the arab influence—what he maybe means is the moorish number that spain slyly claimed as an original contribution, or mali’s twist on the islamic prayer chant—arab influence, huh? arab sounds altered by contact with african souls and soil, and rearranged caribbean stylee (which “stylee” is just africans in the west reinventing our ancient selves). that mambo, that rumba, merengue, clave, son and so forth. those pentatonic scales, modes, falsettoes and nasal drones. yeah, it’s all arab straight from the heart of africa. jelly knew, that’s why he said the tinge in the latin rather than the whole roman enchilada.

 

anyway, as much as he wrote and as important as his compositions are, in the final analysis we remember jelly because jelly didn’t forget the import of what he heard, because jelly found a way to write without emasculating the music’s swagger, without perfuming the funk, without covering the flesh in a veil of false modesty.

 

we remember jelly because jelly accurately remembered us. and lord, lord, lord even if he had never written a note, just one quick listen will confirm how marvelously potent his playing was. that mr. jelly, mr. jelly, he sure could play that shit.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

Buddy Bolden

 

JAZZ 101

buddy bolden’s blues legacy

 

they said i’m crazy

but they still play my crazy

blue black shit today

 

we came from farm land, cane field and cotton country, outta rice paddies and satsuma groves, following the river both down and up to the city to try to set up home where a newly emancipated man could live at least halfway free and a woman didn’t have to be some man’s mule just to raise her family.

 

we brought with us the profound sense of betrayal as the retreat of federal troops was masked by the hoods of nightriders, fellows whose daylight faces we all knew. the hard hoofs of horses announcing the flaming torches flung through the paneless windows of our one-room rural homes. the no work for smart negroes and very low pay if you were dumb enough to accept what little was offered.

 

we had fought the civil war. we had survived the bewilderment of emancipation and now when we should be free we woke in the mornings and found ourselves harvesting strange fruit. we were the blacks with the blues. the unlettered ex-slaves whose agrarian skills offered no protection in the hinterlands and no employment in the cities. but caught between the busted rock of reconstruction’s repeal and the hard space of being put back into a semi-slavery place, we had no choice but to move on down the line. thus we came to the crescent seeking at least a shot.

 

everywhere we touched down we created settlements. st. rose, luling, boutte, kenner—the first mayor was a negro. carrollton—we built parks and celebrated with sunday picnics, and on into uptown new orleans creating all those neighborhoods: black pearl (aka “niggertown”), hollygrove, zion city, gerttown and what we now know as central city.

 

no matter how hard big easy bore down on us, urban exploitation was still a bunch better than constantly falling behind on the ledger at the general store, owing more and more every year, barely enough to get by. in the summertime chewing sugar cane for supper and maybe catching a catfish for sunday dinner. in the winter time making turtle soup to last the week if you could catch a turtle and always beans and beans, and more beans. somehow, even though we still had beans and beans and more beans and rice, it just seemed that red beans and rice was nice, nicer in new orleans than it ever was in the country and besides there was plenty fishing in new orleans too, in the canals, in the river, in the lake, in the bayou, in fact, more fishing here than in the country. so although the city never really rolled out a welcome mat, our people nevertheless still managed to make ourselves at home.

 

we found some work on the streets and in the quarter, but mostly made work cooking, carrying and constructing shit. some of us groomed horses, a healthy portion of us worked the docks. we eked out a living, gradually doing better and better. and it was us country-born, farm-come-to-city black folk who indelibly changed the sound of new orleans, who brought the blues a blowing: loud, hard, and without pretense, subtlety or any genuflecting to high society, these blues that were just happy to have a good time and were equally unashamed to show the tears of pain those country years contained, how the hard times hurted we simple, unassuming people who both prayed and cursed as hard as we worked, we who were not afraid of a good fight and never hesitant about enjoying a good time each and every opportunity we got to grab a feather or two out of the tail of that ever-elusive bird of paradise.

 

we were the fabled blues people who brought to the music a vision no one else was low enough to the ground to see. and no one should romanticize us. we were hungry, we were illiterate, disease-ridden, and totally unprepared for urban life, moreover often we were live-for-today-damn-tomorrow merciless in the matter-of-fact way we accepted and played the dirty, limited hands that life dealt us.

 

ours was a brutal beauty. a social order where no child remained innocent past the age of four. where the sweet bird of youth had flown, long gone well before twenty-five arrived. where somebody calling your mama a whore was just an accurate description of one of the major lines of work. where your daddy could have been any one of five men you saw for a couple of days through a keyhole when you were supposed to be sleep, but were up trying to peep what it was that grown folks did that kids were not supposed to do.

 

our people brought an unsophisticated, raw sound that cut through all pretensions and gutsily stripped time down to the naked function at the junction of hard-working folks careening into saturday nite let’s get it on. and of course by any standard of social decorum, we were uncouth and so was our blues, but it was this blues produced by we blues people that turned-out the music floating around new orleans, tricked it into something the world would soon (or eventually) celebrate first as jass (with two “s’s” as in “show your ass”) and then as jazz (with two “z’s” as in “razzle, dazzle” keep up with us if you can).

 

it was our don’t give a shuck about which way is up as long as we have a moment to get down.

 

our red is my favorite color morning, noon and night.

 

our play it loud motherfuckers let me know you deep up in there.

 

our this ain’t no job and you ain’t no boss so you can’t tell me shit about when to start, when to stop, or how nasty i get.

 

our if i drop dead in the morning ‘cause i done partied all nite then just go ahead and dance at my funeral pretty baby.

 

our i’d rather play it wrong my way than right the white way cause they way may be correct but it sure ain’t right.

 

it was this attitude, these blues, which turned new orleans music into something worth spreading all over the world. and it was we who were the roux in the nouveau gumbo now celebrated as crescent city culture.

 

it was our crude but oh so potent elixir that raised the ante on the making of music, it was our brazen red-hot, blue sound and the way the first creators acted when they screwed up their lips to produce the untutored slightly tortured host of notes which made the cascade of ragtime rhythms sound tame. we simple but complex characters who have been consistently overlooked, undervalued, and our social background scarcely mentioned in all the books (where do they think we uptown blacks came from and what do they think we brought with us?); we who were persecuted by the authorities worse than negroes singing john brown’s body lies a smoldering in the grave at intermission during a klan rally; it was us black heartbeats and our defiant music that made the difference.

 

and, yes, we had to be more than a little crazy to challenge the aural status quo the way we did, so, it is no surprise that buddy bolden, the preeminent horn player cut from this cloth, was an insane black man whose ascendency to the throne just made it easier for the odorous forces of the “status crow” (as caribbean scholar/poet kamau braithwaite calls it) to pluck bolden from the top of the heap and heave him into a mental institution and keep him there for almost thirty years, wasting away until he died.

 

they may have silenced our first king but they could never silence our sound. and regardless of what anyone says or does, nearly a hundred years later, no matter whether they admit it or not, know it or not, like it or not, it is the bold sound of black buddy conjuring some raw, funky blues in the night, layering his tone on whatever was a given song’s ultimate source. this neo-african gris-gris is the sonic tattoo marking the beginning and making up the essence of the music we now call jazz.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

Epiphany

(something like how nia feels to me, xcept, this one is not really abt her)

 

god sent me / here / she said / & smiled / when we first met

 

glowing / & unblinking / she looked me / brown eye to brown eye / which wasn't easy / seeing as how she was only five-three / maybe / sneaking up on five-four / one of them no make-up / womens / wearing a mixture of clothes / tie dyes / silks / colored cottons / whatever gave the impression / the vibe of red / yellow / gold / green / & a couple of blues / nobody has a name for yet

 

i wanted to say / well / god / must have been / mistaken / cause i ain't sent for nobody

 

well, not really sent / it's more like / i was called

 

oh shit / i thinks / to myself / she's one of them / touched people

 

later / when she reads / some of her poems / honey nectar tart sweet aromas / explore the air / around us / fill my ears / & it is i / who am touched / by this woman

 

this woman / i'm with / this woman / i will always be with / no matter / what happens / whether we separate / or stay together / there are people / places / experiences / that become you / contribute to / making you be you / people you can never unfeel / un-be / leave behind / even when they are gone / they are there in your particulars / the rush of your breathing in the dead of sleep / the timbre of your sound / singing to yourself / speaking to another / they are there / anyone who has been truly intimate / remains / impressed inside

 

later i learn / how this woman / has a way / of appearing before me / with every vision i get / like, i wake / in the middle of the night / to play a dream tune / & she is already up / waiting for me / with the lyrics for our next song / fresh ink on soft paper / she knows where i'm going / before i get there

 

what i mean / is not simply / her physically being there / because sometimes her body / still be in bed / but her inspiration / in my head / be tongue licking my imagination / how else could i conceive / except impregnated / by some emotion seed / she dropped / into my soul / when i was busy / not consciously paying attention / to how she was subconsciously / moving me

 

so what / could i do / but submit / to the beauty / touch / spirit intellegience / of this hip / bundled laughter / looking up / at me / one soft autumn day / in the late years / of my life / ? / you dig?

 

& that's how / i met / my second / wife

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

memories of death

 

my first unforgettable death scene was a man’s body all cut up. some man i didn’t know. i had gone to meet my father at his job. a laboratory technician, he worked on the third floor (or was it the fourth floor) at the veteran’s hospital. sometimes he would show us how he mixed chemicals with body fluids, mainly blood or urine. it was kind of fun but not really exciting once you had been there a couple of times. this particular time, i remember i was in seventh grade, and he told me he wasn’t ready to go. often i would go to the main library, which was only a few blocks from the hospital, and afterwards meet my father when he got off from work. on a few occasions i would get there earlier than his getting off time of 4:30pm and would sit around reading until he was ready. but this particular time it was after 4:30. he said he had some extra work he had to do. as most children do, i said, ok.

 

he told me, come on. follow me. and we got on the elevator and headed to the basement. i walked behind him trying my best to keep up. my father was a fast walker. i’ll never forget his story about walking to new orleans from donaldsonville, louisiana. we twisted and turned through the basement. down this corridor, through that door, into another hallway, through another set of doors. i really wasn’t paying much attention. didn’t read any signs or anything. i didn’t have to. i was following my father.  and then we went through the last door.

 

and there it was. a corpse. i balked about ten feet away. the naked body was laid out on a big table that had a ridge around it and pans on carts next to it. the chest was cut completely open with the left and right rib cage folded back. a pan with internal organs was next to the torso. and worse yet, the top of the head was gone. i mean completely sawed off. the brains was in another pan.

 

i don’t remember it stinking or nothing. my daddy said, you can watch me or you can sit over there. over there was only like five or so feet away. i sat way over there. pulled a book out and buried my head in the book while my daddy started messing with that body. it would have been ok except they were making a lot of strange noises. my daddy was sewing the body back together with a big old needle and thread as thick as twine. when he started putting that man’s head back together and sewing the scalp back over the skull, it made this sucking kind of sound.

 

i had, of course, been to funerals before and seen bodies laid out at church, but this was my first really memorable experience with death. at that moment, i was de-romanticized about any thing i thought about dead bodies. i realized that for my daddy, death just brought another job he had to do. in fact it was a good job because it paid him overtime.

 

so this is what happens to you when you die. this is what an autopsy is all about.

 

between that time and my next memorable death experience i graduated from high school. in fact it was february of 1965, the year after i graduated. and, no, kennedy’s assassination was not a memorable death experience for me. by the end of high school i had been active in the civil rights movement: sitting in at woolworth’s and schwegmann’s lunch counters, picketing on canal street, knocking on doors and doing voter registration work in the black community. kennedy had never been a hero of mine. so here i was up in northfield, minnesota, a small town whose claim to fame was that’s where jesse james did his last bank robbery. the local folk had laid a trap for mr. james and they almost caught him. the james gang was badly hurt in the resulting shoot out and disbanded after that attempt. anyway, i was at carleton college. i hated it there and would leave in less than two months, but i also learned a lot there.

 

i was working at the college radio station doing a jazz show. my show came on on sunday nights from 8pm to 10pm, if i remember correctly. part of my job at the station was to get there by 7:30pm and literally rip the news off the teletype. it used to come in automatically and there was this big roll of paper that fed into a box. all the news, weather, sports and whatever. and you had to gather up that long roll of paper and cut it up, or rip it, to separate the items you wanted from the ones you didn’t.

 

there were only 13 black students at carleton, and 8 of us were freshman, so you know how lonely we were. that particular night, linda, a girl from little rock, was visiting my show. as i remember we were the only two black students from the deep south. and when i started ripping the news, i got the first and all subsequent reports: malcolm x had been shot. dead. linda was crying and my eyes were kind of blurry too.

 

at first it was just a line or two, and then later more and more info streamed over on the loudly clattering machine. i’m ripping the news of malcolm’s death for some college  kid to read. i don’t know how much, if any of that news item was read that night on carleton’s radio show, but i was strangely very, very affected by malcolm’s death. i say strangely, because i was not a muslim. i was not a follower of malcolm in the sense of being part of any organization, but i was, like many, many people my age, an ardent admirer.

 

why? what was it about malcolm? over the years i have had time to think about it and rather than focus on him, i realize now the focus was on myself and parallels that i scarcely recognized back then, if i saw any of them at all. for one, we both rejected the civil rights movement.

 

i remember sitting on the steps of mt.zion methodist church before our weekly n-double a-c-p youth council meeting. we had been the main force picketing and leading the boycott on canal street. after close to a year of demonstrating, the merchants decided they wanted to negotiate. we said, sure. they said, stop picketing and we can talk. we said, let’s make an agreement and we will stop. the merchants balked. in response to the impasse the adult branch of the naacp, then led by the future first black mayor of new orleans, ernest “dutch” morial, instructed the youth council to stop picketing so negotiations could proceed.

 

we were adamant. we’d stop when the merchants met our demands. not before. the national office sent down wally moon, one of the main officials to instruct us, stop picketing or we will put you out of the naacp. they didn’t have to tell me twice. i decided to leave.

 

for close to two years, the youth council had been my life, consuming all my free time and a lot of my thoughts even when i was in school. i was a few years younger than the leading members, who were mainly college students but they were my gang, whom i hung out with, admired, wanted to be like.

 

i sat there on those church steps and finally decided: i couldn’t do it. anyone who has ever, for whatever reasons, abandoned a love can appreciate the pain of this voluntary separation. that was my first divorce.

 

malcolm had divorced himself from the muslims. also, malcolm was advocating internationalism and self-determination. i agreed with both. plus, malcolm had been a preacher--well, officially he had been a muslim minister, but anyone familiar with his oratory knew that malcolm was not just a master minister, he was a full blooded, get down preacher who spoke so eloquently both birds and angels hushed their singing while he was delivering the word. amen.

 

i had been groomed to hold forth in the pulpit, i knew a thing or two about public speaking, and i knew that malcolm was about the best we had, martin luther king notwithstanding. king had dreams but malcolm had the fire.

 

to paraphrase malcolm’s eloquent post mortem, the march on washington had been a picnic. the white man told those negroes when they could march, where they could march, how long they could march and when to leave town, and you know what, they came when the white man said you can come and they said what the white man wanted said and they left when the white man said go! malcolm. malcolm. el hajj malik shabazz, malcolm x.

 

knowing about the organizers’ attempt to censor the march on washington speech of john lewis, the chairman of the student nonviolent organizing committee, whom walter reuther (of the afl-cio) and others considered too militant was proof to me that malcolm had been right. the sell-out house negroes and their white liberal supporters were emasculating our leadership. i was a young man; speaking truth to power was a sine qua non of my definition of manhood, and in that regard no nationally recognized black leader was more man than malcolm.

 

plus as an insider, i knew all the stories, tales and gossip about our black leaders--king as a philanderer; this one on the take; the other one married to a white woman; on and on. but  when it came to malcolm there was nothing, and malcolm was so hard on middle class negro leadership, i knew that if anyone had anything on malcolm we all would have been made aware. malcolm was a model of leadership in a category unto himself. and now he was gone.

 

days afterwards, i tried to find out as much as i could. and when i saw one of the death scenes: malcolm carted out on a gurney, his head back and to the side, his mouth sort of open, i thought about that body my father had sewn up and wondered would malcolm be cut up like that. my subsequent thoughts were about the men who shot malcolm, how they could do it. death comes in many forms, but for us in the movement, the hardest to confront is the seeming endless cases of black-on-black killings. 

 

death makes you think. at first you just recoil in shock, but sooner or later, the philosophical aspects confront and confound. malcolm’s murder in particular initiated many hours of trying to figure out what, if anything, i could do to address, and ultimately stop, black on black murder. i was too young to know how old that particular problem was. fratricide has never been a racial issue, has never been anything but a human issue, and mainly a human male issue.

 

nevertheless, when your leader and hero dies at the hands of our own, you never forget. i don’t recall what music i played the night malcolm died. despite any nostalgia for my youth and the glory days of seemingly boundless energy and optimism (which two qualities are, after all, the hallmarks of youth regardless of the specifics of any particular time period), despite the fog of memory and the hunger for the good old days (isn’t it oxymoronic that we call the days of our youth “the good old days”?), despite any and all of that, all i remember about that sunday night is malcolm was assassinated. our movement was in crisis. i was in crisis. those were difficult days.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - November 30, 1987) 

 

________________________________________________

INVENTORY / ON BEING 52 (parts 1, 2 & 3)

Music by David Linx, Pierre Van Dormael

James Baldwin – narration

David Linx – vocals, drums, percussion

Pierre Van Dormael – guitar

Michel Hatzigeorgiou – bass

Deborah Brown - vocals

Viktor Lazlo - vocals

Steve Coleman – alto saxophone

Slide Hampton – trombone

Jimmy Owens – trumpet, fluegelhorn

Pierre Vaiana – tenor saxophone

Diederik Wissels - piano

________________________________________________ 

 

 

JAMES BALDWIN:

The Preacher Poet

 

I would like to use the time that’s left to change the world,

to teach children or to convey to the people who have children that

everything that lives is holy.

—James Baldwin

 

-1-

 

James Baldwin voiced us—articulated black experiences with a searing intensity that frightened some and enraptured others of us. Even if you could not read, once you heard Baldwin you were convinced of the power of words. His ability to move air was such that the vibrating oxygen Baldwin set in motion spoke to us as surely as if the words had issued from our own mouths.

 

Baldwin’s sermons (and that’s what his words were, instructions for living) entered us, vital as breathing.

 

Baldwin’s breath proclaimed what it meant to be flesh, and black. He told us of the here and now, told of barbarians who feared life in others and feared those who truly lived to love rather than to conqueror.

 

Baldwin spoke of racist hatred for black people, telling us that their hatred was but a mask for the intense hatred they felt for themselves and the sordid, twisted mess they had made of their own lives.

 

The gritty texture of Baldwin’s voice testified to the realities of black life, the ups, the downs, the terrors, as well as the hard-won tenderness found in our usually brief but nonetheless frequent stolen moments of exquisite and redemptive love. He was no romantic, but oh how he loved. He loved us all and gave his all in the love of us.

 

Indeed his very behavior posed the quintessential question: if not for the opportunity to love, what are we living for? Certainly not labor and toil, nor riches and fame, which we can never take with us when we inevitably exit the world; If we do not love our selves and our children, what will our living matter in the future? And if we do not understand that everyone’s child is our child, then how whole can we be as a human being?

 

When I was younger, when I thought I had a taste for anger, a yearning for retribution, I was always mystified and sometimes even miffed by Baldwin’s insistence on love. Now I am older, directed by the wisdom of age: sooner or later, most of us grow tired of fighting but we never tire of love.

 

What was bracing about Baldwin was his insistence that we be humans regardless of how inhuman our tormentors might act, and as Baldwin so eloquently reminded us, their behavior was an act, most likely a ruse to mask their fear of us, or worse yet a lie to camouflage their fear that they were not what they tried to make us believe they were; they were not gods, conquerors, lords and such. No. They were merely what we all are, human beings trying to survive and prosper.

 

It is easy to think of Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone. He was, after all, a professional evangelist as a teen. It is easy to think of Baldwin as a Shakespeare in and of Harlem since his command of language is now legendary. But it is wrong to reference Baldwin solely from outside of black culture. Think of this black voice as a life-force, as the sound of us, as the sound of living, as a drum. A drum, an insistent beating drum whose rhythm was synchronous with our own heartbeats.

 

The fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard. Only once your heart was moved by the way this man moved words could you fully understand the power he brought to us who were told time and time again, in a million ways, day, night and seemingly always that we were totally powerless, or at least powerless to prevent first our enslavement and now our ongoing oppression and exploitation.

 

The power Baldwin brought to us was a clear-eyed recognition of world realities, we, just as everyone else, were the range of behaviors and emotions, memories and dreams that it means to be human, and as such our task was to be the best human we could be, which best necessarily meant the embracing of other humans. You are a human and you must embrace other humans is a powerful message to give to those who have been taught otherwise.

 

And this fire to be wholly human that Baldwin breathed into our lives was no mere mental exercise. Baldwin went far, far beyond thinking because he spoke with a passion for life, a passion to get the most out of life even as he admitted that as we struggled on inevitably we would err, we would make mistakes, we would fail from time to time, even backslide, and knowingly do wrong, after all we are humans and that’s part of what humans do, but Baldwin would remind us as long as we are alive we have the opportunity, indeed we have the obligation to correct our mistakes and to strive to be better than we have been.

 

Baldwin was telling us: grow up. Of course, you’ve been done wrong and you’ve done wrong. We all have. We all have been done wrong. We all have done wrong. Grow up, face life. All the wrong in the world does not mean that you and I can’t do what’s right.

 

And ultimately, while James Baldwin the writer is important, James Baldwin the human voice is equally important, especially now that the technology exists so that we can all hear him, we can all experience the ways in which he manipulated human sounds of communication. In other words, the fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not totally understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard.

 

Baldwin was full of passion and the very fire light of life. To reduce him simply to books is to miss the music that this man made of words.

 

Thus, if you think you know James Baldwin, if you think you love our literature and you have never heard him deliver the word, and you do not have his spoken word CD, then you don’t really know the breadth and depth of James Baldwin.

 

-2-

 

Between September 19, 1986 and September 18, 1987, James Baldwin spent a year working on a spoken word CD with producers/composers/musicians David Linx and Pierre Van Dormael. Recorded in Brussels, Brooklyn and New York City, A Lover’s Question (Label Beu, Harmonia Mundi) is a masterpiece of merging words with music: a precursor to what is now a popular artform.

 

The producers succeed in more than providing a sonic backdrop for the words; they actually composed orchestrations that both complemented and mirrored the intent and expression inherent in Baldwin’s delivery of his complex poems. The success is then on three levels: the poems are phat, the music is tight, and the musicians respond with an exhilarating verve that let’s you know they too were giving their all, giving their love and not simply going through the changes to get paid.

 

Aside from a brief musical introduction and an elegiac solo rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” on which Baldwin talk-sings the famous gospel composition, there are only three poems on this CD. One poem, “The Art of Love,” features operatic vocalist Deborah Brown and is done as an art song, an interlude between two poetic suites.

 

The two-part “A Lover’s Question” continues in the vein of the Fire Next Time. Baldwin questions the citizens of his birth nation as to their desire to hate: “Why / have you allowed / yourself / to become so grimly / wicked?” and “No man can have a / harlot / for a lover / nor stay in bed forever / with a lie. / He must rise up / and face the morning / sky / and himself, in the / mirror / of his lover’s eye.” As Baldwin knew, true love is always honest even though honesty is seldom an easy fact to live with in a land where lies and commerce replace truth and reciprocity.

 

The concluding number is the three part opus “Inventory / On Being 52” and it is the introspective Baldwin fingering his own wounds (some of them self-inflicted). He does not flinch as he cross-examines his own life and realizes the terrible costs of his mistakes, the terrible beauty of embracing both the terrors and joys of being human. Baldwin manages in a stream of consciousness style to encourage us to live the good life, suggesting that the good life is a different life from the life/lie that too many of us live. Baldwin encourages us not simply to march to the beat of a different drummer, Baldwin tenderly implores us to be different drummers.

 

Tap out the real rhythms of life with our every footstep in the dark, our every embrace of what we and others are and can become. Reject the ultimately tiresome and ephemeral wisdom of materialism / accept the rejuvenating life-cycle rhythm of the earth. Thus Baldwin says “Perhaps the stars will / help, / or the water, / a stone may have / something to tell me, / and I owe a favor to a / couple of old trees.”

 

“Inventory / On being 52” is a deep song, but then, as he says, “My father’s son / does not easily / surrender. / My mother’s son / pressed on.” Every young poet needs this old man’s CD in their collection, this compass of compassion, this example of the passionate heights the spoken word can attain. If you as a poet do not know A Lover’s Question then you do not know the full history of your own human heartbeat.

 

-3-

 

James Baldwin. His life, his teachings, his commitment, his words embody one of the great paradoxes of the contradictions of life—and regardless of misplace beliefs in idealism, in an eternal anything, in a person being solely and only one thing or another, regardless of our worship of the false idol of ideas and dualism—experience teaches us, all life, every life is contradictory. In fact, to be alive is a contradiction, is a fight against death, literal death, symbolic death, the death of compassion, the death of our own humanity in terms of how we relate to others and the world we live in.

 

Life is a contradiction, and as such, isn’t it wonderful for us to realize that one of the most insistent prophets, preachers and poets of love was a queer, black man standing against the homophobia, standing against the misogyny (and surely hating women also means hating the earth), standing against the racism, and all the other -isms endemic to the place and time within which Baldwin was born.

 

James Baldwin. Clearly modeling for all of us what it meant to be a man, and more importantly what it meant to be human and live in a time of institutional war and inhumanity.

 

I love James Baldwin.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

[The first version of this essay, essentially most of part 1, was originally published in Mosaic Literary Magazine, Spring 1999. The second version of this essay, part 1 & part 2, was originally published as part of the booklet accompanying the 1999 reissue of A Lover’s Question.]

 

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

-Y-

 

         ONE ON ONE.

 

            Tarzan is dying.

            In the long run, it's about what we do with each of our own little individual steps. The singular soul facing the void, the chaos, the problem, the opportunity.

 

            The skull speaks: "You know I went into those jungles alone? I faced..."

            He pauses. His voice a weak whisper. I can barely hear him. I am forced to draw closer.

            No. Nobody is forcing me. I'm curious. I want to hear what he has to say.

            "I faced..."

            He draws a difficult breath. Perhaps he faced the animals. The loneliness.

            "No, none of that. I faced..."

            At first I am surprised that he has read my thoughts and then I remember that Tarzan is in my head.

            "I faced myself and learned to live with the people, live with the land. I did it. I jolly well did it. I lived. They loved me. I think. Maybe not as much as you love me. But, me, by myself. In the bush, I did it."

            "And now?" I ask him.

            "And now? Don't leave me." He says.

            And then. Silence.

 

***

 

            When the plane arrived in Ghana we needed a visa -- US$50 each for Nia and me. Very official stamps are inked into our USA passports: Visitor's Permit Form F. Valid for  30 days.

            Three centuries ago when I left, the trip required neither visa nor passport. Just survival. If I endured, I went butt naked, headfirst into the new world.

            Our heads were literally our bags. Everything and the only things we could take on this journey, we carried in our heads. In our hair. Social ideals and okra seeds. An indelibly black sense of soul and sound. But I did not need to come to Ghana to know this.

            To return to Ghana on this trip required a yellow fever shot and a weekly regimen of malaria medicine. When we got here we had to avoid the water and our stomachs were too weak to eat all of the food. Again, I did not need to come to Ghana to know that. So why did I need to come to Ghana?

            I didn't really need to, I could have lived, struggled and died without ever having made this trip. But I wanted to kill Tarzan.

            I really, really wanted to kill Tarzan. So, I signed up. I volunteered for the job.

            Once here I have found that the only way to kill this alien is to get in touch with myself. To feel. To taste. To smell. To hear. To see. Myself. To choose to be cleaved, grafted, bandaged, stuck, pressed back into the earth of my origin, into the very mud and dust of my history. To kill Tarzan I must choose to grow Africa within me and create me within Africa.

            The Tarzan in me only dies when the Africa in me arrives -- otherwise I never grapple with all the psychosis of my African American upbringing. I never confront a major part of me: what I think, what I feel, my limitations, my potentials. Tarzan will never die unless and until I confront and secure the history of my existence -- including the trauma of birth.

            No one can be born for me.

            No one else may feel the need for birth completion that I do.

            No one else may volunteer to put the knife in Tarzan.

            But what others do or don't do in no way dictates the road I will travel.

            I will fear no evil, for Africa is within me.

 

***

 

             I know that London Bridge is falling down, falling down, that Babylon time a come, that the eagle can't fly forever, that indeed there is an end to his story. The wheels of the West are rusting.

            The reality is that we can not continue to live in America with the social deterioration, mean spiritedness, and crass materialism which is polluting our individual and collective lives. We are literally a nation of drug addicts (alcohol and tobacco chief among our drugs of choice, with over-the-counter pain killers and headache remedies running a close third). We are suffering horrendous rates of violence and disease. There is a widening economic gap at a time when many of our major urban centers teeter on the brink of implosion: aging physical infrastructures such as bridges, sewer systems, housing; corrupt political administration; and increasing ethnic conflict. Something has got to give.

            Shine, Shine, Shine, my sweet brotherman. The last time the ship went down you swam back to America. This time as the Titanic goes down on the last go round, some of us will swim back home again, only this time we'll be recrossing the Atlantic, each of us cutting our own stroke, forward into an ancient place our spirits know as Africa.

 

***

 

            Should Black people go back to Africa?

            Yes! And NO.

            Yes. We in the diaspora should make the pilgrimage at least once in our lifetime. Christians go to Bethlehem. Muslims go to Mecca. Jews go to Israel. The diaspora should go to Africa. To know and learn, sense and experience from whence we came. To touch the essence of our future. Future because to the degree that Africa is strong, the whole of the diaspora will also benefit, and to the degree that Africa fails to develop, the conditions of those of us in the diaspora will continue our spiraling descent into social, material, and spiritual despair.

            NO. We in the diaspora don't need to give up any of our hard won benefits, meager as they may be in comparative terms. Besides, most of us are addicted to the West. It is senseless to advocate a mass movement prior to preparations being made both by the host to receive the diaspora, and by the diaspora to embrace Africa.

            To return unannounced and unexpected is to court disaster. Numerous are the tales and stories of those who romantically returned to Africa only to end up "returning back home" to the industrialized West discouraged and disillusioned.

            Yes, we need a mental return and a spiritual return. In fact, rather than a return it might make more sense to think of what we need in terms of linkages.

            We need to actualize linkages with the continent -- linkages that would facilitate not just the movement of people, but also the movement of ideas, of resources and responsibilities, and, most of all, facilitate the uniting of history, identity, purpose, and future. The real transition will not be a return back to Africa but a stepping forward with Africa, moving into the 21st century with Africa the continent and Africa the diaspora united.

            I don't think the majority, or even a significant minority, of us can or will make this transition at this time. But as the 90s expire, more of us will seek other venues within which to live, work, struggle and die.

            On the other hand, as Marcus Garvey demonstrated, millions of our people are ready to move. Millions of us recognize the bankruptcy of the West.

            What it took in Garvey's time and what it will take now is simply one person striking when the conditions are right. Individuals standing, and in standing, inspiring others to rise.

            Given the ripe historic moment, it only takes two: me and the other person I encounter. That is how history is made, how babies are born.

            It only takes two you know. It only takes two.

            I am one and Africa is another. I the diaspora. Africa the motherland.

            I am Africa. And every African I encounter is the diaspora. Conversely and dialectically, every African is Africa and I am the diaspora seeking union.

            Africa and I. Africa is I.

            I and I.

            Is all it takes.

            Two.

            I am one. And Africa is the other.

 

 

 

-Z-

 

         CAN I ARTICULATE A NEW LANGUAGE?

 

            There is so much more to tell, but I've run out of words.

            The colonial alphabet is ended and I need another language to communicate the balance of my experiences, the connections which elude this vocabulary, the distances and disruptions so somber.

            I need a new language. Not more words in proper English. But a whole other way to communicate.

            Am I up to the task of relearning my ancestral tongue, of transforming my colonial tongue, of, perhaps, even creating a new tongue, creating a new language?

 

***

 

            I consciously resist romanticizing Ghana.

            My feelings, my thoughts, yes, even my dreams: I rein them in.

            We have had a guided tour. Given the limits of their resources, the planning committee has rolled out the akwaaba mat. We stayed in hotels and guest houses. We rode in private buses, vans and cars. We had major meals provided for us. And we had money in our pockets, and spent freely. This one was like riding with the training wheels on and an elder holding you steady.

            At the same time, I remember poet Jayne Cortez telling me I had a Ghanaian "vibe" and would probably like Ghana.

            We all came from somewhere(s) specific and those specific essentials remain embedded in the core of our personalities both collectively and individually. Stronger in some than others. Barely felt in a few, but the African seed resides inside. Whether wilted or blooming, seedling sprouting or torn out of the soil of us leaving a gapping wound, Africa is, nonetheless, in one way or another, Africa is in all of us. And that is our blessing no oppressor can permanently curse.

 

***

 

            Thinking back to the dungeon, I've been to the castle a number of times since that first night.

            In the day light it is different. When there is not a large group of emotionally charged people with inchoate expectations fueling your imagination, the recently painted castle looks different. When you are there for a music program in the courtyard. It's different. This is why we need formal pilgrimages: planned tours that put us in touch with the people, places and experiences of Ghana at a level that is impossible to reach on a chance, individual encounter.

            Another trip, even another conference in Ghana would be different.

            I know that if I come here alone and spend days and nights bumping into unplanned experiences, my trip will be different.

            I also know that time and distance will bring about a change.

            I remember Brasil and Barbados -- thinking how I could live there. Or literally sitting under a coconut tree at Oyster Bay in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania dreaming and scheming. Even the fierce lushness of Surinam. There are a lot of places I could live.

            The above notwithstanding, I am nevertheless thinking seriously about working in Ghana and living here at least part time. Time will tell and real world conditions will supply the motivation or discouragement.

 

***

 

            I can't just up and go back to Africa. Someone else, maybe. But me. Every move I make needs to count in the computer I carry in my heart, and if I don't really feel it, I won't do it. Besides, there is so much work to be done in the States, so much is needed. But then, the truth is, neither the work nor the need has anything to do with the United  States. Everywhere our people are there is so much work to do, so much is needed.

            Each of us who wants to work for our people has the option, indeed, has the responsibility of choosing where we can most efficiently and effectively contribute. Not a mandate to be here, there, or any specific where, but a choice to be continuously evaluated and exercised as local and global conditions change, as doors of opportunity in various spheres are pried open and/or sealed shut.

            Finally what will make the ultimate difference is the luck of the draw. Do I decide to hold or to fold. To move or to hang, even if only for the time being. I will sleep on it. Who knows what will inspire me, or anyone, to go one way or another. Each African minute is explosive.

            It's been over a week since I received, or sought, any information about what is going on in the States. Perhaps when I recross the Atlantic back into the new world of the same old same old, perhaps the conditions will inform me.

            We'll see.

 

***

 

            Meanwhile, I know this much: Nia loves it here.

            Nia blends in so well. The children love her, and she they. They ask her to write and give her their addresses on small scraps of paper, fervently hoping that she will not forget them. People spontaneously talk to Nia on the street. Once, in the township just outside Elmina, Nia stopped to dance in the street and later as we walked around, a woman sitting by a streetside stand pumped her arms in rhythmic motion and softly called to Nia, "you dance. You dance."

            There is something in her that clicks in this environment. My habit of aloofness, observing from a distance in loud silence is harder to integrate into this reality. I'm comfortable but very little of me immediately blends with anything. I am the outsider by temperament and by choice. Many writers tend to be that way. But Nia connects on another plane. Perhaps it is Nia's calmness and quietness, her unhurried walk and her patient softness, so much like a Ghanaian.

 

***

 

             My son Tutashinda is a master at working jigsaw puzzles, at figuring out which piece goes where. What fits together. How to work on different clusters simultaneously, a little here, a little over there.

            I've seen him pick up a piece and somehow correctly sense what pile to put it in. He can see that way. And he is quick.

            Can the puzzle that I am ever be put together -- indeed, was my puzzle ever whole?

            How can the various pieces of Africa be fitted into one -- do the Pan African pieces fit without being forced? Or must the pieces be reshaped? Is Pan Africanism possible? What prosthesis -- artificial limbs, manufactured parts; what organ donations and heart transplants will be necessary; what long term therapy to make the body whole and healthy? Can it be done -- especially given we were never together in the first place? Africa has a need for, but no history of, unity.

            This father needs his son. All parents need their children. We Africans seeking wholeness, need our children far, far more than our children need us.

            I need him to guide me. Indeed, he is my guide, my compass, one of my certain ways of knowing if what I'm doing will mean anything beyond my own personal desires.

            Whatever we find in Africa will be futile if it does not enrich the lives of our children, our grandchildren, the whole of our future, at the same time and to the same extent that the search honors the lives of our ancestors -- to investigate the possibilities of this aspiration is why I went to Ghana.

 

                                                            Accra & Cape Coast, Ghana

                                                            New Orleans, LA, USA

                                                            December 1994/January 1995

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

-W-

  

         FLIGHT LT. JERRY JOHN RAWLINGS, PRESIDENT OF GHANA.

 

            "Commitment!"

            He looks like Larry Fishburne. The jutting jaw. The cinnamon brown. The beard. The muscular frame.

            "What do we do with armed robbers?"

            Our second day in Accra, a crowd caught a thief and killed him.

            "We execute thieves."

 

            "These people driving these cars irresponsibly. Accidents? No. It's manslaughter. It's murder they're getting away with. Let the courts convict one of them. I will sign the execution."

 

            He had a script and he had some deeper stuff he wanted to get off his chest -- and brother man did go off. In addition to the prepared script he talks about family planning, sanitation, and some things in a language I don't understand but which delights the crowd.

            When he speaks, I look at the people.

            The shine of their eyes. The smiles set to break into laughter as the punch line is delivered.

            When he talks about executing irresponsible drivers, these people who spend a large part of every day walking -- walking with water on their heads, with food on their heads, with trays of vegetables, boxes of canned goods, chewing gum, walking, a load of firewood, maybe a baby on the back, oranges, pineapples, walking, bolts of fabric, walking, a sack of rice, walking, roasted corn, walking, walking, walking, through dust, down miles and miles of dirt road, walking, to the market, walking, pausing and backing up for speeding cars, the drivers leaning on their horns, walking, bus broke down, walking, car broke down, pushing and walking, waiting to sell to tourists coming out of the castle, standing, hoping to get closer to the president, standing, walking, sandals, walking, bare feet, walking, hopping cross open sewers, walking, legs bruised, open sores, walking, pants the wrong size, walking, lacy dress soiled, worn and torn, walking and then waiting, waiting and then walking, standing, silent, glancing at us up and down, whispering something to each other, teeth missing from big beautiful smiles, laughing, standing, shyly touching your hand, hello, akwaaba, welcome, siss-taa, braaaa-thaaaa, eyes looking up from the smoke fish fire, bread on the side of the road, walking straight up like some mothers used to make girls do with books on their head for posture practice, walking, pausing while suckling child, hawking wares, standing, looking, waving, bending, walking, lifting, working, sleeping, walking, eating, walking, eating and walking, walking to eat, walking, braiding hair, those dark skinned people, little girls with close cropped hair and their hands hiding the hope light of their smiling lips, walking, children and elders everywhere, walking, these people, these people, my people, walking, me, when he talks these people listen, and cheer, and clap.

            Execute irresponsible drivers.

 

            "Commitment." He says we have knowledge. We have skills. We need commitment. He says in the States a Ghanaian away from home wanted to know what the government was going to do to help all of the people who are moving from the rural areas into the cities.

            Rawlings encourages the brother to come home. Encourages all Africans to come home. Whether continental or diasporan, come home.

            In terms of development, it can be said that Africa is the rural area and the West are the cities. We need you in the rural areas to help us develop. Together we can develop our rural areas. Leave the cities. Come home.

            "Commitment."

 

             What do we do with thieves?

            This is Ghana. The streets are safe at night. And the people whom dark finds three hours walk from home, can set down their load and sleep where they are, wherever they are in Ghana.

 

            It's murder these people driving these cars irresponsibly.

 

            The people who walk love the President. The people. Who walk. Love. The President.

 

            When the President arrives he walks onto the field. He walks around the field and greets each king who has been carried in the Durbar procession of the kings, carried in these boats held aloft on the waves of muscular shoulders. Boats shaded by umbrellas. Preceded by the court. Followed by drums. The chiefs rode in waving and dancing. The President of the country walked around the soccer sized field and greeted each king individually. The President walked.

 

            The people who walk love the President who walks.

 

            Walking is the Ghanaian way.

 

            Commitment!

 

            Surely there are those who hate this man. The wheelers have different values from the walkers.

 

            Commitment!

 

            The people who walk.

-X-

  

         IN THE HINTERLANDS OF OUR SOULS.

 

            I have been to Africa before so I am prepared. I know that I am not going to visit an unspoiled land, and unsullied people. I know that I will encounter more than Africans in Africa. I know that I will also meet Tarzan there.

            He will be there to greet me. I know this. I know this because even though I am African, a descendant of those Africans who were enslaved, I know that I, like every African, especially we Africans in the diaspora, we carry Tarzan within us. Indeed, a major part of our value to the motherland is that we have African souls and Tarzan personalities, with all the positives of skills and technology that implies, and all the negatives of individualistic material and moral decadence it also implies.

            Tarzan will arrive at the same time I do, if and when I am frustrated in my search for hot water to bathe or angry about the unavailability of iced, chilled drinks to consume. Or when I am turned off by dust and dirt everywhere, repulsed by hot sun and daily heat. Tarzan will be gleaming in my eye as I am aroused by all the opportunities I spy to run the con games and hustles which are the daily fare of life in the industrial world, especially when my schemes and dreams are clothed in the brotherly cloak of helping my people to develop the motherland. We could put up a hotel there. Open a specialty restaurant here. Put an import record store over there. Import this. Start up that.

            I can not help it, I was reared in America to be like Tarzan. My brothers and sisters on the continent were reared to believe they need a Tarzan.

            Tarzan, as the big White man can not revisit Africa, but I am coming weighted by the terrible knowledge that we all have a Tarzan to expel from the interior of our African souls.

 

***

 

            After the Revolutionary War when the American colonialists beat the British, some of us vanished from these shores. Thus, Sierre Leone, a british colongy in West Africa which was partially colonized by American born Africans reintroduced into Africa. Some of us had fought against the colonialists, had sided with the British. Had been promised freedom. When the British lost, we won a return trip to Africa.

            As has ever been our history, we African Americans always seem to be on both sides of the battle line. Crispus Attucks the first to fall, martyr defending American freedom. On the otherside, unnamed others boarded English ships fleeing America's freedom.

            Sierre Leone was our first major return. British subjects reinserted into Africa.

            The second coming was Liberia -- and a bigger mess could not possibly have been made. Tarzan was in full effect.

            The bible and the gun. Liberia. The so-called first Black republic. Liberia declared itself sovereign on 26 July 1847. From jump street it was a colonial missonary state.

            We went there (or more accurately, were sent there) for the expressed purpose of establishing a Christian colony. We were literally pilgrims in Black face. And true to our Christian creed, true to our God, true to our "native land" (i.e. the U.S.A. who sponsored us), we came, we saw, and we conquered. Committed all sorts of unspeakable cruelties.  Wallowed in all sorts of corruptions.

            Meanwhile, the American Colonization Society, peopled and funded mostly by Whites, acted on their conviction that the way to respond to the slave question was to take Lady MacBeth's advice: "out, out damn spot." In Historical Lights Of Liberia's Yesterday And Today, author Ernest Jerome Yancy, writing in 1954, breaks the history down. 

            ...Liberia is a by-product of the complex conditions of American society resulting from the American Negro slavery.

            A careful study of the American economic, political, and social conditions beginning in 1619 at Jamestown, VA.--a nursery of slavery--to the organization of the American Colonization Society in December 1816 at Washington, D.C., avails one the opportunity of knowing the conditions under which the colonization society was organized and that the founding of Liberia was an attempt to adjust those conditions. In this respect, Sir Harry Johnston wrote: "Its inception" (the American Colonization Society) "grew out of the institution of slavery and represents an endeavor on the part of early statesmen and philanthropists to solve a vexing situation in America which was confronting them."

            Historical data show that at this time there were free men of color in America and it is claimed that they had an evil effect on the slaves and menaced the institution of slavery. Many criminal acts were charged to these freemen of color and Negroes, and in some instances, we are informed, they were guilty of these charges. Under these two-fold conditions it became necessary for something to be done in order to save American society and the institution of slavery.  Therefore, with these dual motives, statesmen, philanthropists, and former slaveholdres joined in devising means by which they could solve the problem. As a result of these efforts, the American Colonization Society was organized for the purpose of assisting free men of color to return to the continent of Africa.

 

            The first president of the American colonization Society was Judge Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington, and among the founding organizers was Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner." Their exclusive aim was to remove free folk of color from America.

            Back on the block, Negro leaders, principlely Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, were intransient in their opposition to colonization. Wasn't going nowheres. Saw no future in it. No win. Wanted their piece of the rock. Insisted on making a home of where they were born.

            Of course, there was always a current that wanted to return to Africa, a current whose water level rose and fell at various junctures in history. The biggest problem was simple, most of us didn't know precisely where to return to and there was no welcoming committee specifically prepared to receive us.

            All other American immigrants could return to specific countries. Specific cities, towns and villages. Specific familes and friends. A church where they used to worship. A field where their fathers and mothers worked. A farm house where they were born. Or something specific.

            Most of us couldn't hit our nativity marks with a blunderbus at point blank range, i.e. land us in Africa, anywhere we wanted to go and we still couldn't find home. Once we got back to Africa we were literally lost.

            So much of Africa had been cut off from us. Amputated. When we went to scratch the Africa itch, we rubbed bare air. The nerve endings were tingling but the aching African leg had long ago been shot off.

            Amputees are we, dumbly trying to utter something sensible with the muteness of tongueless mouth. Our African tongue had been callously severed. The resultant loss of language was one of the major, literally unspeakable traumas of chattle slavery. Instead of a dark mother tongue, a mutant mulatto tongue grew and spoke an Africanized English. Which didn't do us a whole lot of good in Wolof, Akan, Fulani, Twi, etc.

            We wanted to return but... and those of us who went back? Well. Tarzan was with us. Even the most supportative of chroniclers had to note that we acted White, acted arrogant, inflicted on the indigenous "savages" the same indignities that had been heaped on us. For example, in Liberia the indigenous peoples were not considered citizens and could not vote. Sound familiar?

            Even the official and sympathetic chronicler Yancy notes:

            These backward conditions and slow progress as were found in Liberia prior to President W.V.S. Tubman's administration, in our opinion, may be attributed to the following four major causes or shaping forces, namely: (1) the lack of pioneering spirit and initiative to migrate on the part of the earliest colonists, (2) foreign aggressions, intrigues, and the absolute disregard for Liberian authority, (3) tribal or primitive problems of all types and complexities and (4) financial difficulties and entanglements. These four causes in the aggregate have been the shaping forces of Liberia.

            The pilgrim fathers being removed from the injustices of "the land of the brave and the free" found solace and repose in their new home and gave themselves to leisure, self-indulgence and little constructive work. They reclined, as it were, in the arms of relaxation, freedom, supremacy and authority; they concerned themselves chiefly with those things which they thought would demonstrate one's ability and capacity to govern himself, and those things which exhibit one's power and authority to rule and govern others. Whereas, they very sparingly attacked those things which are essential, and indispensable in any national sub-structure.

            The spirit of pioneering, self-initiative to migrate and the spirit of ingenuity akin to the spiritual equipment of the pilgrim fathers of the United States and those of other countries were apparently lacking among the first group of settlers of Liberia. This may, however, be accounted for when one considers the educational, cultural, social, economic background and preparedness as well as the purpose and philosophy of these settlers.

 

            Yancy believed that the Tubman administration would correct nearly a century of ineptitude and political backwardness.

            Therefore in 1944 the Tubman administration embarked upon an extensive Five-Year Economic Development Program, the like of which had never been attempted in the history of the country. It also undertook to make fundamental changes in the national structure and policies of government. Thus the indigenous element of the citizenry was granted representation in the national legislature; women were granted suffrage; election laws and practices were revised and tribal customs and traditions were given more consideration.

            The present administration, knowing that additional aid and zest resulting from new blood are very necessary to put over its policies and program, instituted an open-door policy for immigrants form all parts of the world.

            The early settlers found in Liberia thirty-three tribes with their several and different philosophies, customs, habits, practices, religious beliefs, forms of government and languages or dialects. These in themselves have presented many problems of baffling nature; the problem of lack of uniformity in language, customs, habits; the problem of education, and the problem of injecting into these tribes the spirit of the Western civilization.

            From the very beginning of the Republic there have been territorial fueds, disrespect and disregard for Liberian authority on the part of white aliens who, for the most part, were and are merchants.

            These problems, happily are being resolved by means of a vigorous national literacy campaign; universal education, economic developments and humane and liberal policies of the present administration.

 

            If you want the specifics, in all their gory and embarassing details, you'll have to piece it together. Although the whole story has yet to be told, an excellent place to start is African Americans And U.S. Policity Toward Africa 1850-1924, In Defense of Black Nationality by Elliott P. Skinner, an African American scholar and Franz Boas Professor of Anthopology at Columbia University and former United States ambassador to Burkina Faso.

            In any case, there is a reason that returning is so hard. Africa doesn't want Black face Tarzans swinging through it. I mean, why accept an imitation of oppression when the real deal is always waiting in the wings? One of the reasons that Africa has been so reluctant to reach out for the diaspora is because the diaspora can act so un-African once it gets back to Africa.

            Just to give you an example of how bizarre it can get, consider this. After the Civil War, the Liberian government thought it was an affront to them that the United States would send a Black ambassador. These transplanted Negroes wanted a White ambassador so that they could feel that they were being respected like other countries.

            The monkey jumped up with tears in his eyes. "My people, my people" the monkey cried.

            What can you said? You can't say nothing.

            So when the Liberian orgy of savagery kicked off in the eighties.  Charles Taylor's people hacking up Samuel Doe's people. Prince Johnson's people cutting off penises and ears. Doe multilated on video tape. Broadcast to the nation. Most of us didn't hear a mumbling word about it, nor see it. The few of us who did notice. Sort of recoiled in horror and wished it would go away. But the various peoples of Liberia, from the enclave of Negro colonialists who sold the country to Firestone and other moneyed interests, to the peoples of the interior who were mired in continuous wars against each other, to the ubiquitous military and mercenary types who wanted to assure themselves a line or two in the annals of iniquity commenserate with their heritage of being slave merchants, to the foreign diplomats and business people who feigned innocence and repulsion as if their respective nation states and corporate employers had no interests nor involvement in the Liberia entanglement, all of the parties contributed to the melange of African madness. A melange which makes it hard for any sensible African to naively advocate the return of African Americans to Africa.

            This is an ignoble aspect of our history. The diasporan fishbone that sticks in our continental craw. The mark of pestilence blighting our body politic. This is our closet and we've got to deal with these bones rattling around.

            At every juncture of my self-education, I reach a point where I think I have some sort of understanding of the meaning of my life. I step off, moving in a direction I consider forward, step off with knowledge, or so I think. And then I run into reality, run into a thick block of ignorance which lets me truly know just how much I don't know.

            If I hadn't gone to Ghana, I probably would never have learned very much about Liberia. And that's the whole point of a pilgrimage to Africa: If nothing else, Africa will teach you just how ignorant you really are.

             Just go. Go. GO!

            Whether you dig it or hate it, fall in love or get repulsed by dirt, dust, disease and underdevelopment. Go as a hustler looking to get rich off a business scheme, or as a romantic dreamer seeking ancestral roots; a committed Pan Africanist seeking to participate in development, or a tourist looking for a unique travel experience. It really doesn't matter how you get there, cause Africa will touch you. In one way or another. Touch you to the core.

            And once touched? Then you will decide for yourself what to do with the transformed self you've become as a result of feeling Africa's caress of your inner soul. For some nothing substantial will happen. For others it will be a life changing experience. For most it will be somewhere in between, an uneven mix. But it will be something. Something will happen. Just go.

            Clap your hands. Stamp your feet. Swing on the vine. In the jungle. The jungle that is Africa in your mind, in your heart, in your gut, in your groin. The Africa you imagine and the Africa you experience. Scratch the itch and watch what happens.

            No one should deny themselves a chance to touch the womb of their being.

            What follows touch? That is your choice to make.

 

***

 

            I really believe the best way to experience Africa is in silence.

            Don't talk too much. Just immerse oneself and by osmosis, let Africa seep into the pores. Don't think. Don't discriminate. Just go with the flow. If you feel something, heed the stirring.

            Africa is both extraordinary and just another day in the life. Both special and eternal. At core always simply about taking life and tasting life one day at a time. Birth. Life. Death. Rebirth. Over and over. That's all. Just specifically ours. Our birth. A chance to live our lives. To die natural deaths. And be reborn again in the embracement of a home from which we have been long time gone.

 

***

 

            I hoisted Tarzan's carcass atop the funeral pyre. And then climbed astride. Dropped my torch and went up in flames. My weeping cleansed my skin. The white dirt washed away. I stood naked. And had to make a choice.

            Walk out of the flames or die with Tarzan's tongue in my mouth. Uttering all kinds of inanities about how much better progress was, how much better it was to be in the West.

            Our singed skulls, flesh burnt off, faced each other. My skull as white as Tarzan's skull. Tarzan's skull, blackened by soot and ashes, is as dark as mine. Two heads facing each other, in death indistinguishable one from the other.

            African Americans have an intrinsic African dream. We dream of flying. Literally flying through the air.

            Flying. Our birdness could be sankofa, but only after the rise. First we must be phoenix. Fly up out of the ashes and return to yard to pick ancestral corn. First we must fly up.

            Get up out of the ashes of Western demise. Beyond the smoke. Away from the fascination with flame. Fire is to temper us. Fire is to free us. But fire is not home.

            Tarzan burns. Colonialism burns. Inevitably festering areas of our acculturated consciousness simultaneously go up in smoke. The only question is what is left. And where do we go from here.

            From the flames a pale hand reaches out to me. The skull calls: "don't leave me here."

            Tarzan's last words. "Don't leave me."

            From the forest, comes calls in languages I don't understand. Soft Black voices I don't understand. Inbetween me and my ancestral people are all the contemporary horrors: from Black male gun runners shooting up our nights to junior Tarzans/Black politicians picking over the bones of our desert days. The trauma of containment within colonial culture tumors our brains. Western addictions and fantasies direct our desires.

            The funeral pyre burns. Will I turnaway or turn toward the fire, enchanted by the flames, too fascinated to feel the heat?

            "Don't leave me."

            Or will I fly outward seeking self by burrowing forward into Africa. The Africa inside myself. And the Africa outside myself. Africa the people. Africa the land. The Africa that calls "Join us."

            And that has always been our destiny. The one choice, in either ignorance or consciousness, by active commision or inactive ommision, the one choice each African American makes in her or his lifetime. Fully flying forward or returning backward. Vacillating between. Or committed and cleaving to one end of the spectrum.

            Tarzan: "Don't leave me."

            Africa: "Join us."

            One way or another, we respond.

            Acknowledging what we hear or ignoring the pleas. Acting one or both calls, or rejecting one or both. One way or another; a third way or no way.

            We respond.

 

***

 

            The essential problem of twoness is that every journey is made one step at a time. So even if we go one step forward and then one step backward, one step up and one step down, even if we stand and rock from side to side. It's all still just one step at a time. And at every point we must ask ourselves: which way? Which call will I heed? Which direction will I turn?

            One way or another, our inner spirits always respond.

            Geronimo would ask, "where is your heart?"

            The old folks would say, "where you gon run to, all on that day." Standing at the crossroads, which way should I go. Lord, lord, lord, what should I do, which way should I go? And how shall I get there?

 —kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

-U-

 

 

         OH, WHAT A FEELING. 

 

            Riding in a car or bus on the recently asphalted road up the coast from Accra to the Cape Coast Castle is rough enough. It is super hard to imagine being driven to the castle on foot, chains around your neck and your ankles, trodding barefoot through the bush. This is not "jungle" area, but heavy bush, rocky ground in some places.

            As we drive for better than two hours my eyes get tired and I doze. My ancestors herded like cattle, were force marched for hours beneath sun with whiplash licking their bare backs. They too were tired, but they were never allowed to doze.

            Standing in the magazine where they kept the powder and looking through the portal down into the dungeon where people are now standing with torch light in the very spaces where their ancestors were crowded, peering into those ancient spaces, I do not feel anger, I do not feel spirits calling me, I do not feel anything. I simply understand that we did not stand a chance. And that is a cold and helpless feeling.

 

***

 

            After one of the symposium I was talking to Kofi Anyidoho, complimenting his presentation, "Slave Castle, African Historical Mindscape & Literary Imagination".

            He touched my hand.

            I held his unforced touch.

            There are no words for all of this.

 

***

 

            My oldest child, my daughter Asante preceded me to Ghana. Back in August 1994 she went for six weeks. An opportunity to travel presented itself and she jumped on it. She and Jelsy, a Haitian born artist friend. The trip was important for Asante.

            Many, many years ago, in 1969, Tayari, Asante's mother and my ex-wife, spent a summer in Ghana with Operations Crossroads. And now I am crossing the sea to this place. What is it? Ghana calling? What?

            Asante laughs one day as we are talking about something and comments on how fragile men are. "Men are so fragile. They have this tough ego shell, but inside they're so fragile. They're just like all the shell creatures of nature. Without their shell, they can't make it."

            I am standing here holding a grown man's hand.

            It takes some getting used to.

            Reentry into Africa is an emotional strip search for self.

            Crawling out of my red, white and blue shell. Crawling out of my negro shell. Crawling out of my dominant male ego shell. Crawling out of my shell and wondering will I ever learn to fly -- where are my wings?

            Maybe.

            And that's all I can say right now. Maybe.

 

 

-V-

 

        

         THE WHOLE OF OURSELVES

 

            Our African identity, like all of life, is contradictory in nature. We have both great negatives and great positives that we must face. At certain periods of negritutinal reaction to racism and colonialism, we romanticize our positives. At other periods after fighting and sacrificing for so long, we wallow in the self indulgence of shams. Sham development. Sham socialism. Sham democracy. Sham capitalism. Sham nationalism.

            What we must face and embrace is the whole of ourselves and not simply those parts which are acceptable to Tarzan or those parts which make us feel big like Tarzan.

            Emulating Tarzan is easy, but what does that lead to but one or two junior European cities per country, with mayors and presidents who, on an international level, exhibit the same impotence as did traditional tribal chiefs who, when confronted by European military might, were forced to "negotiate" with, and eventually capitulate to, the kings and presidents, generals and mercenaries, merchants and bankers of Europe.

            What we must do is extract the lessons of history from our historic encounters with Tarzan, and we must do so realistically rather than romantically.

            Tarzan is a difficult character for us to deal with because we both hate and admire Tarzan. We want to expel him from our lives on the one hand and yet, on the other hand, the cumulative effect of our desires and fantasies is to recreate ourselves into an idealized Tarzan. Our national bourgeoisie, they are Tarzan. Most of our elected officials and nearly all of our heads of state, especially the dictators, they are Tarzan. Tarzan in Black face.

            The rub is that Tarzan taught us that we were all Black but he also taught us that being Black was a bad thing. There are too many examples of our contradictions to even begin enumerating. Every African's mirror contains at least one major contradiction, if not more. But at least one.

            Unfortunately for us, we African Americans have internalized the psychology of the oppressed. After fifteen generations or more of subservience, Black inferiority is all we know. A major corollary of our inferiority complex, is a high tolerance for suffering. Indeed, our tolerance of downpression verges on an addiction to suffering.

            I am no longer a Christian. I do not believe in the redemptiveness of suffering. Oh how they oppressed us with that one.  Under Tarzan's religious tutelage, suffering became such a great part of our worldview that we were not happy unless we were unhappy.

            "Woe is me" became our daily bread.

            "Deliver us from evil" we asked of Tarzan's god while we looked forward to an almost certain lifetime of hell and fervently believed in a hoped for eternity in heaven.

            "Deliver us from Tarzan" is what we should have said. But we were so good at suffering. And Christianity taught us that we were born to suffer. That "man is born of sin" and that Jesus will redeem us in heaven.

            Meanwhile, down here on the ground, Tarzan rules. And when Tarzan is absent, Tarzan's flunkies and trainees stand in for the master and rule. And when neither Tarzan nor his flunkies are present, Tarzan's ideas rule and we create our own Tarzans as we await deliverance to arrive from outside ourselves.

            Our deliverance as a people, however, cannot be given to us by others, nor passively accepted. Deliverance must be fought for and seized. Deliverance is a birthing process requiring hard labor, rupturing of the womb, and the flowing of blood if new life is to be created. Some of us have worked for deliverance for a long time, most of us have been awaiting deliverance for an equally long time. But, to date, howsoever long it has been, deliverance has not come.

            How long has it been, 500 years? In all this time, for all his omnipotence, Tarzan has been unable to deliver us. Tarzan's failure has taught us well. If we want to be delivered, we will have to deliver each other. Give birth to ourselves. The kingdom that we create in the here and now is the only kingdom we will ever enjoy in this life on earth.

            And to kill Tarzan we must desire to be ourselves. A truly revolutionary behavior.

 

***

 

            On the second morning in Accra, we were bussed to Drago's Restaurant for a breakfast. We assumed that it would be a program of some sort. That assumption was a mistake. Not only was there no program, everyone didn't even get to eat. But it did afford us the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the people attending PANAFEST whom we did not already know nor know of.

            One of the people at our table recognized me and helped me remember him: Balozi Harvey. One of the early members of Maulana Karenga's US Organization. Present at the founding of Kwanzaa. Present at the Black Power Conferences of the sixties. The Congress of Afrikan People. We began exchanging stories and reminiscences about people, places and events. Behind all we talked about was an assessment of our failure to make revolution in the United States and our hopes for Africa in the future.

            Revolution.

            Today, in the nineties, revolution is such a lonely word. Discredited. Rejected. Some even declare that following the collaspe of the Soviet Union, that we have reached a period which wishful thinking calls "the end of history." Third World failures are sighted as evidence of the failure of revolution.

            They talk. The spread of democracy. The coming of the superhighway. The world becoming a free market.

            They whistle past their own graveyards. It's well past midnight.

            Revolution.

            Make fun of Castro. Bring out monster portraits of Mao.

            Revolution.

            At the breakfast table someone asked for papaya. The waiter nodded. Returned a little later and said, "papaya finished."

            That's what the Republicans want us to believe. Revolution finished.

            That's why "we're" in Haiti. In Somalia. Thinking about Rawanda. If-ing at Bosnia. Finished?

            A man is confronted by his wife. This man, it seems, was a philanderer. He would runaround. Cheat on his wife. And lie to her. Constantly. Her friends told her. People she didn't know, told her. At some point it became unbearable. She confronted him. He confessed his errors. Begged for another chance. She started to put him out but relented. Then one day she visited his office and caught him in a compromising position with his secretary. Before she could say a word he told her: "It's not what you think." She replied, "what do you mean, not what I think? I'm looking at you." He loudly protested that she was wrong and concluded with this challenge, "who are you going to believe? Me! Or your lieing eyes!"

            Who are we going to believe? Our downpressors or our lieing eyes?

            Revolution, finished?

            One of the colloquium participants, in a bold self critique, noted that apparently Nkrumah was wrong when he said "seek ye first the political kingdom and all things will be added thereto." Political kingdoms absent economic revolution has proven to be bankrupt. Those of us forty and over, still alive, halfway sane, and with even a modicum of strength and stomach left for struggle, we know. The real deal is to figure out how to economically sustain and develop ourselves.

            The real revolution is self development. What we used to call "Kujitegemea" -- economic self reliance. Balozi runs the Harlem, New York based Third World Trade Institute. We talk about effecting trade and economic development in Africa.

            Finished? We've hardly just begun. There are questions of the environment. Questions of affordable and appropriate technology. Questions of mass transit and urban development.

            In the West there's a mess. Every major urban center of the United States has problems. The really big ones have really big problems. In Brasil there are horrendous problems: in the Amazon, the lungs of the world are being burnt up and children are systematically slaughtered in Rio. Jamaica is Hollywood: the "wild, wild west" but with real bullets, real death and real destruction. Eastern Europe is a cauldron that no detente can hold together. The end of history? Who are we going to believe: the West or our lieing eyes?

            The end of history? No. The end of his story? Yes. At last. Yeahhhh booooyyyyyeeeeee! It is really now our time to decide how to live our lives.

            Revolution.

            To try to figure out how to get it together and move forward. And part of moving forward must be leaving a bunch of our badness behind. Jettison the European model. Fanon told us oh so long ago. But we did not really understand. Now with Paris looking the way it does. With London, with New York, with Moscow, Berlin. With all of that being what it is, which is not us. No map for our space. What we are faced with finally is a fight within ourselves to determine which way forward. And that's revolution.

            Why should anyone want to recreate the United States, England or France? How could we. Whom could we enslave by the millions? Which continents would we kill the indigenous inhabitants, remove most of the accessible mineral wealth, colonize, industrialize, pollute and declare to have reached the end of history? We have only ourselves and the spaces we occupy. The Caribbean isles are too small to sustain us. The West to covetous of what they have built up to share. We have only that which is yet to be developed.

            We have the dirt roads of Ghana. We have the hinterlands of Africa's West Coast. We have war weary central Africa. And the industrial jewel of South Africa. We have ourselves. We have a future. But it will take a revolution to actualize our dreams.

            A future for us requires a revolution in our lifetime. The real battle will be to overturn ourselves and become Black again, moving at our own pace, in our own space, in directions of our own choosing.

            And this is what we wrestle with at a breakfast without a purpose. We had the breakfast because that is what one does at conferences. Maybe we needed something else. Maybe what we need is to stop.

            Stop doing what has already been done. Create what does not now exist.

            Stop emulating the end of history. Honor the lives of our ancestors. Make and build a space where their spirits can be blessed by the smiles of future generations, walking in rhythm, living in harmony, enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of a revolution that we accepted responsibility to wage.

            A revolution is more than simply a change of mind. Revolution is conscious engagement with the forces of history, the discarding or overthrowing of a dominating social order and the institution of a new social order. Every revolution fights two phases. First, the struggle (generally violent) to gain control of the productive forces and defend oneself from outside control and/or domination. Second, the struggle for social reconstruction and instituting the new social system.

            So far we have had no successful revolution of the second phase. From Haiti onward to independent Africa and the Caribbean, all of the revolutions which have succeeded in phase one have failed in phase two. In cases such as Mozambique or Grenada, phase two was aborted because they were not able to defend phase one against external aggression (Mozambique) or internal conflicts (Grenada). But the deal is to learn from, rather than be discouraged by, the mistakes and failures of our predecessors. Moreover, regardless of the outcome in the past, revolution is still what we need to built a secure future.

            One reason we need revolution is Euro-supremacist imperialism has no intention of leaving us alone. We can not simply withdraw into ourselves because they won't let us.

            Our oppressors and exploiters, our ex-masters and economic creditors, Western social engineers and scientists, dominate us even without their physical presence by actively seeking to incorporate us into the web of their influence either directly or through proxities and stand-ins. Without a revolution of our own making, we fight phase one and then simply end up with new masters trading places with old masters. The dominant and dominating systems staying in place, modified only in so much as necessary to accommodate the newly ascendant, and generally less competent, "native/petit bourgeois" ruling class.

            Western dominance is not simply a matter of ideology but also of institutions and individual behavior. Dominance is structural and behavioral. This is why Black faces in high places do not necessarily raise the level of life for the majority. Whether as heads of state and government functionaries for newly independent countries or as mayors and legislators in Western countries, more often than not, this new ruling elite ends up being caretakers of crumbling and disintegrating societies which are dependent on aid from the West. A flag and military don't make a country. Indeed, the maintenance of government bureaucracies and militaries often impoverish developing countries.

            To be real, a revolution must be able to improve the quality of life for its people by bringing about positive change at all three levels: ideology, institutions and individual behavior. This then is why and what a revolution is. A revolution of two phases leading to real power to define, defend, develop and respect our lives.

            Then, and only then, will we truly be able to know, taste, love, hold and procreate the whole of ourselves.

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

-S-

 

 

         WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

 

 

            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 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 wellbred 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 cam 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 intransience 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. 

-T-

 

 

         ROLLING ON A RIVER OF RHYTHM.

 

            In Cape Coast we go to a Durbar. All the chiefs in the central region are carried in procession to a program in an open field near the sea. They are all dressed like something Ebony Fashion Fair has yet to attain. Gold for days. Kente and brocade, weaves and prints in colors so vibrant every movement is a dance. Drummers everywhere.

            But what is most impressive to me is that these are elders lining up, patiently waiting until it is their turn to march in. There are young, strong men carrying the chiefs. There are young strong men beating the drums. But the elders are also there. Linguists with staffs. An occasional master drummer. Queen mothers sheltered under beautiful umbrellas, stunning as gigantic butterflies.

            Nobody pushes. Shoves. Or complains.

            The procession starts and for fifteen minutes shy of two hours they parade around the field. Each king has an assigned area. Nothing is running on time but everything is in order.

            A duo of athletic young men parades with twirling flags. Huge flags embroidered with signs and symbols. They strut. They jump. They squat, drop, duck walk, kick spin, lay on their backs in the dust, always keeping the flags flying through the air so violently fast they seem to stiffly stand straight out as if they were made of wood instead of fabric. As they pass you hear the rough flutter of the flags bull roaring through the air. Later in the program they dance before the kings and the president. The announcer explains that they represent resistance. The people would dance. The colonial police would try to stop them. The colonial powers would try to jail them. But they danced. They danced. All of this was acted out. Here was the cakewalk turned inside out. They danced.

            A real brass band comes strutting in. Young men, swaying, dipping, dancing as  they play trumpets, bugles, a flugalhorn, trombones, euphoniums, even a French horn, and of course snare drum, a bass drum and cymbals. They remind me of their counterparts in New Orleans, the same vitality. They even do a number with a one drop incorporating reggae into their sound the same way young bands are doing in the Crescent City.

            Then there is the procession of this group of sisters playing instruments, singing and dancing. Instruments that are traditionally played by men -- a cylindrical shaped horn patterned on an elephant's tusk, held horizontal and blown at the small end. The Mmenson Group are one of the musical highlights. I remember them from the castle procession. To hear them. To see them. They move with a graceful, syncopated gait, blowing their horns, beating their drums, and dancing as they parade. They are young, vital, a clear female compass for Ghana's future.

            At the rear of the procession comes what we would call a secondline. A band of poor folk beating on boxes, makeshift drums, and an old drum or two which has definitely seen better days. They parade around the whole field and then off the field. The police did not stop them. They laughed, and drummed, and sang, and danced. They had no king, but they were swinging.

            At one point there must have been four or five different drum things happening within twenty feet of each other. Each kept its own beat flowing. The sonorous cacophony of rhythm was astounding. A chaos of order.

            In this swirl of humanity, swirl of colors, swirl of sounds, within the sandaled procession of chiefs and elders, the vibrant ebullience of strutting youth, the amazement of visitors, amid all of this there was room for everyone. Everything was in order.

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

-Q-

 

 

         ABANUM.

           

            The castles were the seat of colonial government.

 

            The Ghanaians never had nor needed a word for jail or prison.

 

            The castles were where the prisons were.

           

            The Akan word for fortification is Aban.

 

            Along the coast where the castles were, the Akan coined a word for both the colonial government and for prison: Abanum.

 

            Literally, "inside the fortifications".

 

            Prison: the government has you.

 

            We have a hell of a lot of castles in America.

 

 

-R-

 

 

         FAMILY VALUES.

 

            There is something about this man thing.

 

            Tarzan was a man. Tarzan left his woman behind. Eventually they sent Jane, but Tarzan still dug Cheeta, the monkey. Tarzan and Jane didn't have any children. Then they sent boy. One child. Tarzan. Jane. Cheeta. And boy. Never a girl. The classic European nuclear family.

 

            Most Ghanaian men don't look or act anything like Tarzan. I'm closer to...

 

            Me, Tarzan. You, Jane. I'm in charge.

 

***

 

            I worked in my office literally until the last minute and there was almost no time left to return to the apartment, grab my unpacked bags, throw some clothes in (I'm sure I left something), stop to pick up my son who is caring for my car, and drive like crazy to get to the airport on time. Nia had already called me to let me know that I was late. This is her first trip to Africa. This is my first trip to Ghana. We make the Delta flight. With maybe two minutes to spare. No, I'm exaggerating. It was something like five minutes to spare.

            The plane stops in Atlanta. Stephanie Hughley is going. Steve Browser meets her there. He has recently returned from Ghana and gives her some pictures to take back to share with folk. Gives us both some good advice. I start feeling really, really good about this trip.

            Ghana Airlines is in the same terminal we arrive in on Delta. Everything goes smoothly. I've been up all night, so I slept from New Orleans to Atlanta. Slept from Atlanta to New York. And plan to sleep on the way over from New York to Accra.

            And then this Ghanaian brother gets on. He has on a big black coat. A big black hat. He's got all kinds of bags hanging off him. A little girl in tow. As he settles in, I see that one of the "bags" is actually a baby cradled against his stomach. The baby is two months old. Her older sister is 18 months old.

            Brother man carefully unstraps. Unpacks with precision. And for the next nine hours takes such loving care of those kids that everybody complements him. He wasn't the only one with kids on the plane. He wasn't even the only man accompanying kids. But he was so beautiful to watch.

            He says he loves his kids. He must. And they must love him. He fed them. Changed them. Rocked them to sleep. They were quiet.

             I mean when I first saw him coming down the aisle I almost passed him off as a hip cat dressed all in black with a felt hat cocked to a bad lean. After we got off in Accra, there was no doubt in my mind. This was a hip cat. A Ghanaian man. And his lean was straight and tall.

 

***

 

            To know the pear we must taste the pear. Knowledge is not the result of simply and solely thinking but rather the result of sensing and reflecting on our experiences. Regardless of whether the tasting is a result of our own direct experience or a vicarious tasting as a result of the experiences of others, some mouth has to taste the pear in order to fully know pearness, in order to fully conceive of the pear as a pear.

            There is a world of difference between thinking of (or imagining) how a pear tastes and knowing how a pear tastes. Obviously, it is both necessary and important to think, but thinking alone is insufficient. Moreover, if we start off any social investigation simply with thoughts then we have misled ourselves.

            We should start with "what is" (i.e. our social realities) and think of ways to either maintain or change reality. Maintain reality when it befits us and change reality when it is necessary. So while we argue that the battle is for the hearts and minds of our people, we also understand that ultimately that battle is a battle to influence the behavior of our people and to understand and celebrate the historic and hereditary aspects of our culture and ourselves, historic and hereditary aspects which are beyond our control to fundamentally change.

            The fact that many of us (including some of our most notable celebrities) have spent big bucks, long hours and suffered painful operations in order to physically change our appearance (e.g. the shapes of our nose and lips, the color of our skin, the texture of our hair) does nothing to alter the basic fact we are of a specific ethnic heritage. Genetically, we are still what we are, and, if we have children, they will not inherit our surgically changed features, but rather will inherit the features dictated by our ethnic DNA. The basic fact is that individual thoughts and actions, no matter how bizarre or deviant from the norm, do nothing to change our essential make-up. Our ethnic identity remains intact, regardless of how we alter our physical image. The same applies to our history.

            In order to influence how people think, we must first "recognize" and analyze our realities. Ignorance of our social, historical and ethnic realities is the biggest obstacle to our individual and collective development. After surveying the field, then and only then are we able to move forward with some degree of certainty in terms of influencing both "how" and "what" people think.

            The surest way to change one's mind is to engage in behaviors which indicate and reinforce the contemplated change. In fact, we have not actually changed our minds until we change our behavior, otherwise we have merely only "thought about" changing our minds. This is why the slave master is more concerned with controlling behavior than with controlling thinking.

            Among many of us it is popular to quote and misapply Carter G. Woodson's observation about educating a man to go to the back door and that once so educated, the man will always seek the back door, and if he does not find a back door, he will work to create a back door. This backdoor observation is used to illustrate the power of brainwashing the mind, but the truth is not to be found in the power of the mind, but rather the power of miseducation.

            We must realize that miseducation is not simply a thought in the master's mind put into the oppressed person's mind by osmosis, but rather is transferred through the process of dominant culture education which is itself a real practice designed to institutionalize specific behavior. The critical aspect of the backdoor theory is not what the backdoor man "thinks" but rather the "process of teaching" him to think the way he does, "and the social reinforcements" which make sure that he continues to think in backdoor ways.

            None of the above is to deny the power of the mind, the power of positive thinking (to use a well-worn catch phrase). However, the real question is what does it take to reach the hearts and minds of our people? How do we change people's mind? How do we change our own minds? Obviously, we must educate ourselves and reinforce the education. Education is process, a learned behavior.

            Moreover, from a philosophical standpoint, all thought should start with an assesment or appreciation of reality, then move to a critique of reality, then an application of the critique, and then an assessment of the success, or failure, of the application. This is not a linear process in the sense that everything happens sequentially, one, two and then three. Rather it is a dialectical process in the sense that starting with what is, we think about reality, move to change reality and/or change our behavior in response to reality, and then reevaluate reality in light of our "new thoughts" which thoughts are actually our new behavior and our new reality. So forth and so on.

            The Ghanian brother caring for his children is engaged in true revolutionary education. His thoughts about what it means to be a man, about the relationship of fathers to children, about the division of labor along gender lines, about nurturing as a male activity, all of that is profoundly affected by his behavior of actually caring for his kids on the plane from New York to Accra.

            Those of us who saw him were also affected. It may have caused some of us to reexamine our ideas, or seeing him may have reinforced some ideas we had. In any case, for him, for his children, for all of us who witnessed him, and for the future of the Pan Africa world, his social behavior was the critical intervention altering reality.

            On one level I don't know what brotherman thought about what he was doing. On another level, I know that his thoughts were profoundly human, profoundly caring, and ultimately inspiring. In fact, his thoughts were revolutionary, not because of what he thinks, but rather because of what he does and how his doing informs and reorders the social world. We need revolution in terms of social change, not simply philosophical conjecture about what was, is and could be. We need more brothers like brotherman, a baby strapped to his stomach, showering his daughters with nurturing attention that inculcates into them in particular, and all others who observe him, a new and revolutionary concept of African manhood.

            Did you ever see Tarzan feed boy, change boy's diaper, rock boy to sleep? Well?

 

—kalamu ya salaam