Thursday, January 9, 2014

Affirming Beauty in the African Stories

Anais Zanotti 


When Dr. John Henrik Clarke said, "The African Man is the greatest fighting machine God ever created!" he was speaking into the past about our past. His words are now a memorial to a glory and a fact now in the bygone, in our collective pasts. The African today is not the same. Africa isn't the the same Africa I traveled and lived in a few decades ago. Today African's fighting spirit has created a culture where Africans fight each other in business, politics, and regard the white man as a God. Africans on the continent are increasingly bleaching their skins, and many African women are looking as much like a white woman as chemically possible. Too many Africans living in the United States harbor lofty views about Black Americans whites taught them, and the two communities (Africans and Black Americans) are not bed partners in terms of business. One cannot trust the other for the contempt the other feels for the host brethren.

In daily life the tone of late great African thinkers and historians are not capturing the life struggles and changes amongst descendants of the great African fighters. This a dangerously broad subject predictably seldom discussed between Africans from the continent and Black Americans from the US. Not intelligently dealt with the Africans who come to the United States to live or become citizens will find their lives and destinies intertwined with the historic realities and struggles Black Americans face daily, and struggle to overcome to become whole. Here, in the good ol' US of A by the second generation African children will have to make choices of identity their ancestors will not necessarily agree with, or to just to survive as African Americans!

Ubuntu. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 1.9.14



jada fire's classic beauty is dark and alluring. It and the stories behind what Black Americans look like is contradictory in nature and desperate in the struggle to become whole. - Dawn Wolf




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