Africa’s Science & Technology Education: “Walking On Two Legs”
Into the New Millennium

S. E. Anderson


Abstract:

In order to bring the peoples of Africa out of perpetual underdevelopment and stifling dependency, Africa’s societies need to embark on a 20-year plan to have a population of young people who are grounded in all current and cutting edge the science, math and technological knowledge available. In addition, this particular knowledge will be counterbalanced with those very same young people being knowledgeable about Africa’s multi-millennia relationship with mathematics, science and technology. They will work on developmental projects that will consciously link contemporary science & tech with Africa’s vast reservoir of traditions in math, science and technology and apply their projects to specific community needs. But, for all this to successfully happen Africa’s math, science and technology education curriculum and pedagogy must break from its constricting Western-centered moorings. For the past 200 years, Africa’s educational systems- without exceptions –have been either carbon copies of Western education systems or vague shadows of African and Muslim traditional educational systems. This has help to make the peoples of Africa the most dependent folk on Western scientific and technological knowledge while simultaneously being the least knowledgeable of today’s science & technology. This paper will offer a general way forward and a few examples of what an African-centered approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics, science and technology offers to Africa’s advancement of humanity.

(for samples of African Fractals, visit: )

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When one looks at Africa’s current and vast education systems, we see that they are is inextricably bound up with Western Education in the deformed and retarded form of “Education for Underdevelopment.” This process of underdevelopment manifest itself thru an ahistorical view of science, technology and mathematics that deliberately leaves Africa and its peoples out of evolution of humanity’s science, technology and mathematics. This process of intellectual, economic, social and spiritual oppression and repression is passed off by the powers that be as “products of developing societies.” As a result, our remoteness from the knowledge and positive advances of science and technology has increased since those heady days of a generation ago that were filled with anticolonial struggles and the talks and socialistic dreams of an United States of Africa.

In order to bring the peoples of Africa out of this perpetual underdevelopment and stifling dependency, Africa’s societies need to embark on a 20-year plan to have a population of young people who are grounded in all current and cutting edge the science, math and technological knowledge available.

In addition, this particular knowledge will be counterbalanced with those very same young people being knowledgeable about Africa’s multi-millennia relationship with mathematics, science and technology. They will work on developmental projects that will consciously link contemporary science & tech with Africa’s vast reservoir of traditions in math, science, engineering and technology and apply their projects to specific community needs.

But, for all this to successfully happen Africa’s math, science, engineering and technology education curriculum and pedagogy must break from its constricting Western-centered moorings. For the past 200 years, Africa’s educational systems- without exceptions –have been either poor carbon copies of Western education systems or vague shadows of African and Muslim traditional educational systems. This, in turn, has helped to make the peoples of Africa the most dependent folk on Western scientific and technological knowledge while simultaneously being the least knowledgeable of today’s science & technology. (images are of Lusona Math out of Angola by way of Mozambique)

All one has to do is to go into any of Africa’s schools- be it elementary or university –and see that the books, curriculum and pedagogy is of Western origin. No history of science and math out of Africa. No references to technological traditions in architecture, mining, metallurgy, agriculture, medicine, transportation, etc. This means that we have for three generations created postcolonial societies where our youth were some of the most ignorant of- yet dependent upon – the West’s for-profit science & technology. These three generations have very little or no knowledge of the African presence in the developing of science & technology as well as current African contributions (as sparse as they may be).

In the new Millennium, national development and growth at the level of ordinary African is of central importance. However, at this moment ALL of Africa’s growth and development is outer-directed: for the imperial powers of the West and East. This means that Africa’s continental education system is structured to feed these imperial needs- not to help eradicate all the negative legacies of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism. In addition, it also means that this educational system of dependency is shaped to re-enforce institutionalized racism by erasing Africa out of the history of science, mathematics and technology. Now, more than ever, in Africa and its Diaspora the science, mathematical and technological fields mean “whiteness” and “Asian-ness.” At the same time, what little science, technology and mathematically savvy Africans there are have been educated to either leave their homeland or try to replicate Western-style science & technology within their nation… furthering the dependency upon Eurocentric forms of mis-education.

These negatives are part of the reality of the current relentless pillaging of Africa’s resources… part of the reason why Africa (and its Diaspora) has some of most unhealthy people on the planet.

We have come to a point where Africa faces multiple crises that its present educational system is designed to only feed these crises.

I am proposing that thru the African Union, African universities and primary school systems, Historically Black Colleges in the US and UNESCO as well as concerned wealthy citizens (preferably of African Descent) join forces and develop a 20-year Science & Tech Education Plan (SaTEP) that develops the necessary comprehensive elementary/secondary/university science, math & technology curriculum, the teacher-training component as well as the texts for all levels.

SaTEP- at its very foundation –would be structured in such a way that it would develop an African Science & technology education system that (as the Chinese spoke of during Mao’s time) “walks on two legs:” one leg in the present/future knowledge/practice and one leg in the traditions of the past knowledge/practice.

SaTEP will not ignore aspects of Western/Eastern education. It will determine what are the best aspects NOT based on the notion of “catching up”, but on the notion that Africa and its people have dire needs to first reverse the underdevelopment and mounting ignorance, then start in on Africa’s and its peoples’ advancement of not only the Continent, but the world. For it is in Africa that Humanity originated… and it is in Africa that Humanity and the Earth can be saved from the impending environmental holocaust resulting from 500 years of capitalist raping of Mother Earth.

SaTEP will be designed to focus on creating the African Man and Woman of Science as healers of and caretakers of Nature. There is nothing “neutral” about SaTEP. Its success will have a direct impact upon African nations’ political economy: it will strike a powerful blow against today’s imposed Eurocentric education systems that re-enforce capitalism’s underdevelopment of Africa.

What would a libratory science and technology education system look like for all of Africa?

• It would mesh traditional sciences and mathematics with some of the best science education techniques and curriculum forun in the West—such as The Algebra Project www.algebra.org and works found in Rethinking Schools . There are many more websites from different parts of the world that would be tapped into as resource/research cites.

• It would utilize the latest in internet and computer software developments to encourage the creation of a Pan African Internet & Software Technology Institute that taps into not only what exist in Africa and elsewhere, but consciously and systematically recruit and nurture young Africans to become the leaders in these fields.

• Hence, Distance Learning techniques will be integrated into the traditional face-to-face ways of learning. All Distance Learners at some point during their school year will gather and work together for at least a two-week intensive.

• This also implies that thru the AU or UNESCO or a combination of collaborations, every African child will have a self-powered computer that will be wirelessly linked to the internet. See: <> for more details.

• SaTEP will have an African Traditional Science, Math & Technology Research Dept. (ATSMTResearch) that will seek out all the relevant traditions and knowledge bases documenting the rich and complex contributions Africans made to science, math and technology. (ATSMTResearch) will work closely with the curricula development and pedagogy people within SaTEP to help in the integrating of traditional knowledge with the contemporary.

• SaTEP’s immediate education strategic emphasis will be placed on “Education for Development & Self Determination”:

(a) developing ways to arrest and cure AIDS and other diseases currently ravaging the Continent and Diaspora;
(b) more generally, developing a new Continental FREE healthcare system grounded in a synthesis of contemporary and traditional medical practices;
(c) revitalizing & advancing the traditional food and nutrition structures;
(d) building solar, wind, water/wave, geothermal energy systems;
(e) arresting and reversing the myriad of ecological disasters unfolding all over Africa;
(f) building inexpensive housing based on the synthesis of the traditional with the eco-friendly concepts of the present;
(g) building a Continental Communications Infrastructure that links Africa to the World but not dependent upon the whims of Global capitalism;
(h) building a transcontinental road/rail/air transport; system that respects nature and peoples’ traditions;
(i) creating Africa’s first environmentally sound cars, trucks and buses (i.e. electric, steam/hydro, biofuel);

This means that African Science & technology education will be focused on helping research and development of all those things necessary to rebuild societies, people’s lives and the environmental and ecological systems of Africa.

SaTEP will NOT be concerned with the profit-maximization needs of global corporations. SaTEP will put African people and Mother Nature before profits.

More than 40 years ago, Revolutionary PanAfricanist, Frantz Fanon, said, “Each generation out of relative obscurity must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”

This generation of Africans- and their children’s children -have the biggest burden of all: saving Humanity and Mother Earth from the unbridled ravagings of late imperialism and white supremacy. Science out of Africa of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is key.

Our duty is to help Africa’s Children to fulfill this mission.

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Multicultural Science Curriculum Ideas

A Multicultural approach to the science must be, at its base, antiracist. This means that it has to address the following:

o The historical roots that undergird the normalcy of racism.
o Contemporary Racism’s direct impact on “distancing” Science and Technology from people of color.
o The systematic devaluation or trivialization of non-Western cultures.
o The concepts of development and underdevelopment in relation to social and economic needs of a people or nation.

In developing the learning material needed for this multicultural approach to the Sciences we to consider:
o The linkage between social context and curriculum content.
o Highlighting the advantages of interdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of the science.
o The necessity of developing learning materials and classroom strategies, which encourage collaborative and individualized learning as well as small group work (3 to 5 people).
o A critique of the present school setup with particular emphasis on the way the Science are typically taught and the hierarchical way classroom learning is presently structured.
o A critique of the language of a textbook that normally renders science knowledge in accessible to students and affirms the dominant ideologies of racism, sexism and social class.


Science content

Science From Many People
For Grades 11 & 12

A) What is Science?
1. - Who does science today and why?
2. - What is science’s place in Society, Economics, and Culture?

B) What are the historical origins of Science?
1. - Science out of Africa: Early Humanity and “science”
2. - Early science and religion: Trying to understand the unknown
3. - out of AL-Kemet: The Non European Contribulations to science
4. - The split: Science, Capital and European Christianity
5. - Science-For-Profit: The Evolution of Science as we know it today

C) Details of Multicultural science History?
1. - Science in Africa from early humanity (3,000,000BC) to 1442
2. - Science in India up until British Colonialism (18th Century)
3. – Science in China
4. - Science in the Americans up until 1492
5. – Science in Australia/Maori (New Zealand) and the South Pacific

D) The impact of nonEuropean Science upon European Science

1. – Stolen Legacies: Theft of Ideas
2. - Understanding the Science Acculturation Process

E) Science Contribulations made by people of color to Science

1. – Slave and Free Black Contributions
2. - Colonial Era Contributions
3. – 20th/21st Century Contributions

Each student is required to do a team paper (typed) on some aspect of achievement Science: individuals, analysis and description of some scientific achievement…Each student will participate in a class trip at the beginning of the course. This trip will either entail going to a science museum or convention or laboratory (corporate or university), park, zoo or factory. This will be the anchor for the entire fundamental questions raise above.
Each student is requiring doing a book report (no more than two type written pages) on some subject within Multicultural Science. This will also be presented orally. This Science sections of international and nation nespapers will be required reading/discussing. This helps in placing the advances and language of science in its proper social/cultural context.
Every attempt should be made to get Scientists/engineers of color to come and talk to the classes. A videotape project could be organized by the students to go out an interview these folk on their job.

Science From Many People
A One Semester Course For Grades 11 & 12 & College Freshman
15-Week Overview

Fall

Week 1
a) General introduction to course and museum/ filed trip
b) Why do we study Science?
c) Who does Science today and why?
d) What is science’s place in the 21st Century Society, Economics, and Culture?

Week 2 What Are The Historical Origins of Science?
a) Science Out of Africa: Early Humanity and “Science”
b) The development of Agricultural techniques: the science of cultivation and animal husbandry
c) Africa Women, the physiology of pregnancy and childbirth and hierology
d) From stargazing to menstruation to astronomy/astrology

Week 3 Egypt’s Scientific and Technological Gifts to the World
a) The inclined plane
b) Gravity
c) Buoyancy/the technique of flotation
d) The power and natural significance of the “Golden Ratio”
e) The techniques of massive construction
f) Architecture
g) Surgery and other medical sciences
h) Highly accurate astronomical techniques
i) Land surveying
First Report back on Class Wide World science project

Week 4 Navigation and sophisticated large shipbuilding techniques
j) Mining technique
k) City planning
l) Agricultural sciences
m) Weaponry, the martial arts and military science
n) Various mathematical concepts and techniques

Week 5 The Babylonian, Phoenician and Pre-Islamic Scientific Contribution

a) The Egyptian connection to early Middle Eastern scientific and technology
Development.
b) Summary of the Contribution
c) The Middle East as center of science cross-fertilization between Africa, Asia and Europe (Greece)

Week6&7 Ancient India and China’s Science & Technology

a) The inclined plane
b) Gravity
c) Buoyancy/the technique of flotation
d) The power and natural significance of the “Golden Ratio”
e) The techniques of massive construction
f) Architecture
g) Surgery and other medical sciences
h) Highly accurate astronomical techniques
i) Land surveying
Second Report back on Class wide World Science project

Week7&8 Indiana and Chinese Science cont’d

j) Navigation and sophisticated large shipbuilding techniques
k) Mining techniques
l) City Planning
m) Agricultural sciences
n) Weaponry, the martial arts and military science
o) Various mathematic concepts and techniques

Week 9 Science out of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific Islanders
a) The Africa and Asian Connection: Tracing Roots
b) The Importance of Pre-Columbian visits to the Americans and the pacific Islands by Africans and Asians
c) Great Agricultural Skills
d) Great and Unique Navigational Skills

Week 10 Science and Religion: A Comparative Analysis

a) Does science have to be antagonistic towards religion and vice versa?
b) Pre-Christian Era Science: a time of Spiritual Compatibility. Why?
Capitalism, Superstition, Old Wives Tales and Science Fiction: From Metaphysics to Physics: Creating the mystique of Western Science
c) The Split: Science, Capital and European Christianity
Third report-back on Class-wide World-Science project

Week 11 The Moors and Arab Science: Precursors to European Science
a) Who were the Moors?
b) The Arab World: 700AD to 1492
c) Science is encouraged by Islam
d) Great Scientific and Technological Achievements during the so-called “Dark” Ages (Medieval Period)
e) What science, Math and technology the Moors brought to the European continent

Week 12 Science-For-Profit: the Evolution of Western Science Because of the Destruction of Non Western Science

a) The impact of Non-European Science upon the development of European Science
b) Capital and Science- the evolution of interdependency in Europe
c) Slavery and the creation of “Race” as a pseudoscientific Concept
d) Slavery and the evolution of Hydrodynamics, Weapons Science and Cash-crop Agriculture


Week13 Science and the Third World Today: Towards a World science

a) Ecology, Environmental Racism and the struggle to reclaim Mother Earth
b) Alternative and “appropriate “technologies in Africa, Asia & Latin America: Towards Self reliance
c) Computers, information technology and the Third World-liberating
Or further Dependency?
d) A look at the positive contributions to science and technology by people of color in the 20th Century
e) Western Science finally (but reluctantly) coming around to a holistic understanding

Week14-15 Consolidating the science projects, working on the video documentary, researching for individual student paper attending college and community seminars relating to multicultural science. The teacher(s) works as a mentor advising and guiding the research teams and individual students. Students finalize their work for the public presentation of the class –wide Science project or exhibit.

Last Week: What can we learn from Multicultural Science? A Summation.

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Suggested Reading List
Theoretical Works (primarily for teacher, but not exclusively)

African Fractals- Ron Eglash. Rutgers University Press

Multiculturalism in mathematics, Science and Technology: Readings and Activities (with Wall Chart)-Thom Alcoze, et. Al.Addison-Wesley, Boston: 1992

Multicultural Mathematics- David Nelson, et.al.Oxford University Press, New York: 1993

Antiracist Science Teaching- Dawn Gill & Les Levi Dow. Free Association Books, London 1987

The “Racial” Economy of Science- Sandra Harding. Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1993

The Crest Of The Peacock: Non-European Roots Of Mathematics- George Joseph. Penguin, New York. 1992

Multicultural Math Posters- Key Curriculum Press: Box 2304, Berkeley, CA 94702-9983

Nurturing At-Risk Students in Math & Science- Randolf Tobias. National Educational Service, Bloomington: 1992

Journal Of Negro Education, Vol. 59. No. 3 (1990): Special Issue an Mathematics and Students of color

The Demise and Possible Rise in Serious Black Reading

Reading for Black America historically has been for Liberation. Blackfolk found all kinds of ways to learn how to read and read (if they already knew) when it was illegal because of Slave laws. Immediately during after the Civil War reading was a goal that almost every Black person in the US struggled to achieve. Black initiated public schools and colleges were springing up everywhere- North and South. This quest only grew as we entered the 20th Century years of Jim Crow. The NAACP's Crisis Magazine, dozens of Black newspapers and Marcus Garvey's newspapers not only reported news, but were places people could read great black literature. The Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement of the 50-70's produced phenomenal quality and quantity of Black literature that also spread thruout Africa and the Diaspora helping to fuel the already growing African/diaporic literary movement.

By the mid80s to the mid90s, books were being bought at a higher rate among Blackfolk than white (per capita). These were times when Black book street vendors (selling at deep discounts) were seen on all the major and minor city streets thruout the US... and Black bookstores were more plentiful than now. This coupled with public lecture series thruout Black America where the 2nd generation of Black college educated folk and their children were able to get some analysis of current events, Black-centered spiritual guidance and Black history helped spur the reading movement. The Cosby Show (extremely popular thruout Black America) was another contributing factor to this phenom (doctor and lawyer as parents and education was a natural fact of life on the show. It had subliminal messages via Black paintings, books, and people sprinkled thruout its years on TV. And a spinoff was a comedy series set at an historically Black college "A different World".)

The books sold then were, for the most part serious books of fiction and nonfiction. Black classics were very popular as well as Black children's books. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" was in its 27th printing by 1990! Random House (its publisher) and a couple of the other big publishing houses began to realize the tens of millions of dollars potential among Black readership and began to first sell slick covered reprints of Black classics that they had in their archives (Zora Neal Hurston, WEB DuBois, Toni Morrison, Wole Sonyinka, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright...). They also began seeking serious Black young fiction writers and began to tap into Skip Gates and Cornell West and other "Ivy League" Black scholar types for material not only demanded at colleges & hi schools, but also from the street vendors and Black bookstores.

By the early to mid 90's a new thing came into the general publishing world in the US: Barnes & Noble/Borders/Amazonization of bookselling. Between the megachain stores and the internet independent bookstores got the shaft bigtime... and Black bookstores suffered immediately: the mallization of bookstores couple with a major demographic shift in Black professionals (petty bourgeoisie) into suburbia meant- in just a few years -a loss of gauranteed revenue. Black suburbia went to the malls to buy books and clothes (afterall, it's a sign that you have "arrived" if you get your stuff at the mall instead of going to the "hood."). Black bookstores began to close up all over he US including right here in NYC. Those that remained open were/are under constant threat of gentrification's hi rent and a whiter clientele.


Simultaneously, the megapublishers were concentraing and centralizing and depending on the megabookstores' likes and dislikes of potential books. In other words, these big publishing houses were sending unpublished manuscripts to B&N and Borders to review them to see whether or not they'll sell! Never before in book publishing history have publishers done that. This shows the power of these megabookstores to control what's in print AND their visibilty within their store.

Another thing that happened was the institutionalization of "shelf-life" into bookselling.

In the past, you could go into a bookstore and find books published 20, 30, 60 years ago. But those bookstores are now exceptions to the rule. The Barnes&Nobleization of bookstores has made bookbuying equivalent to buying a monthly magazine. THE AVERAGE SHELFLIFE OF BOOKS NOWADAYS IF 30-45 DAYS. Then, if it's not a bestseller, it gets kicked to the curb. So Black Classics began to disappear from the Black sections of these megastores... Then the Black section disappeared or blurred into vague sections called "contemporary urban lit" or ethnic studies.

So it is in this context that we see the quantitative and qualitative downfall of Black books and Black readership. By the mid90s Barnes & Nobles became the GOD of books. And they helped to render the more serious reading trend among Black readers "obsolete." The Black Classics" were old school and not relevent to today's "urban realities." Hence, sex and ghettolit/gangsta lit became the "in thing" for both B&N and the white publishing world (note: adding to this is the phenom of Black selfpublished ghettolit or streetlit that- like in the early days of HipHop and Rap -was selfpromoted via the streets and transportation systems thruout Black America. These books were produced via selfpublishing houses or the writer actually getting the book produced him/herself.)

These Black schlok-type books were/are nonthreatening pacifiers hat were/are loved by some of the Big publishing houses: they can now get their hands on millions of $$$$ more by selling ghettolit/gangsta lit.

So they proceded with a vengeance: driving out the independent Black bookselleres and their respective store all over the US. Hue-Man Books now located in Harlem), for example, is one of the oldest Black bookstores in the US was driven to close their original Denver store because Blackfolk were buying their books at the mall. Once the big white pub houses got dominance over what Black books will be printed (and, therefore, distributed), they- like the white dominated recording industry -began defining ghettolit/street lit as the ONLY true Black lit because it's sensational and simplistic and often poorly written.

Hence, Blackbook Lite: less filling, more fun.

Another wrinkle added to this demise of Black book publishing and readership is that of the institutional dumbing down of our People. Compliments of the public school systems, the children of those who were reading good to great Blacklit back in the 80's and 90's are now the New Functionally Iliterates at the whims of whitefolk and capitalism. For hundreds of thousands of these youngfolk, they have not a clue as to who is, for example, Harritt Tubman. Black America is now officially part of the noirmalized antireading culture of the US (in the past, ALL generations of Blackfolk were encouraged to read and did, in fact, read).

Today, the booksellers dominate Black publishing's lucrative market of ghetto/gangstalit fueled and defined by the white-directed multibillion dollar Gangsta HipHop industry. In addition, public schools are now formally producing young Black illiterates with parents' passive acceptance of this reality.

Class and gender now defines the BlackBook market more than ever. Black Chicklit is rising because the New Black Reader is typically an under 40 workingclass Black women who aspires to be among the ranks of the Black Bourgeoisie. She reads Essence magazine and shops at the mall. She mingles/socializes with her equally superficial white office counterparts... and watches the same inane TV shows and movies (in addition to the various minstrelsy WB Blacksitcoms). She is bombarded with hype of all types and has no knowledge of the beauty and depth of great traditional and contemporary Black Lit because she never sees or reads about it or even hear folk talk about it- not even on Oprah. So a Tannarive Due or a Colson Whitehead novel will never be seen or talked about within her circle of friends. The exception are the few Black reading clubs around the country. They haven't- as of yet -come to a political place to see the importance of replicating themselves thruout the Black community. That is, they are not organizers. They are friends who like to meet and discuss good Black books. Period.

One possible good sign is the phenom of Tavis Smiley's "Covenant With Black America." Yes, it's a lite book with very safe reformist suggestions. But it's a Black published work of nonFiction that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies thruout Black America via the big House bookstores such that it's been on the NY Times nonfiction paperback bestseller's list for several weeks.

If the Third World Press publisher- Haki Madhabuti -can translate this financial windfall and free publicity into producing even more serious Black books of fiction and noinfiction geared to helping to recover Blackfolk from the intellectual coma besetting the nation, then "The Covenant" will be well on its way to help positively settle some of the work outlined in the book of selfdetermination and selfsufficiency.

Black Reading Circles are necessary to help combat functional illiteracy and Black consciousness underdevelopment. We need to consciously creating these Reading Circles to revitalize the grassroots intellectual work that helped shape not only the Black Liberation & Civil Rights Movements of the 50's/60's but also of the "New Negro Movement" of the earl 20th Century and the Black Abolishionist Movement of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

A Literate People is an Armed People.


In Struggle,

S. E. Anderson

Humanity Requires Black Youth Involvement in Eco-Science + Tech

Brothas & Sistas,

The 21st Century is not only the continuance of the "Color Line" that WEB DuBois so accurately laid out. It is also the pivotal century for the existence of Humanity on this planet. Capitalism's unbridled bumrushing of the Earth's natural resources and its spawning of all forms of environmental havoc has left us no choice but to find immediate solutions to stopping and reversing this process of making Earth unlivable for Humankind.

I know it's hard to imagine, even harder to actualize, but our next generation of African children must begin to concentrate their intellectual powers more and more on science & technology- wherever they may live. Our children and their children are the saviors of the Planet- if and only if they are engaged in finding and developing solutions to the enviromental ills five centuries of capitalism has brought forth. I am suggesting that we consciously generate thousands of African-descendent scientists and engineers who are concentrated on working on all aspects of the environmental crises. We cannot rely on the GM-Exxon-Chase-Microsoft-Sonys of the world in collaboration with their governmental offshoots to come up with solutions to stopping and reversing the growing environmental disasters: they profit from disasters.

This means we Blackfolk need to create a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, a twenty-year plan and a thirty-year plan... because that's all the time we have left to keep earth habitable for Humanity. Enviroonmental degradation is an exponential development- not a linear one.

An African Diasporic (PanAfrican) Social Forum on Starting the Process of Real Environmental Justice is needed for 2007 or 2008. Our Reparations and antineocolonial Struggles must embrace this issue as a central part of it work. We want our children to inherit a habitable Earth- not one where they die after victory over white supremacy because their Earth is enviromentally jacked up.

It is a monumental challenge when we look at the power of racist capital's continual normalization of the myth of Black youth as the icon of anti-intellectualism (some of us enlightened Blackfolk even believe it... and most of our children revel in it). It is a monumental challenge when this nation is hellbent on dumbing down everyone for profit's sake.

But we have no choice- if we want to re-inherit Planet Earth as humane Humans that our Ancestors had taught us to be.

Think about how Black youth can be directly involved in making environmentally friendly technologies a normal function within the daily lives of our descendents 75-100 years from now....

Our youth are at the cutting edge of new prison technology AND new environmental-friendly technology. It is up to US with our youth (once again) in leadership fighting for the latter and destroying the former.

In Struggle,

Sam Anderson

Build the Black and Brown Alliance for Justice and Human Rights!

NOTE: This is a collective statement linking the new Immigration struggles with that of Black America's rejuvenating Black Liberation Movement from the Gulf Coast to New York City's Transit workers' (and hundreds of thousands of other workers') struggle for dignity, power and living wages. One can visit our online petition and endorse this effort to forge Black/Brown Unity in the 21st Century.
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Build the Black and Brown Alliance for Justice and Human Rights!


Hurricane Katrina was a 21st Century snapshot of the genocidal direction of the US government. It exposed the reality of conditions faced by working class African Americans and peoples of color under US style democracy. It also creates a new sense of urgency to mobilize power outside of the electoral arena to challenge racist and repressive legislation like HR 4437. There has yet to be a massive upsurge that expresses the deep outrage of the African American masses against the US government for this crime against humanity.

The US government’s cutting of funds to repair Gulf Coast levees led to hundreds of avoidable deaths of working class African Americans and poor people and massive destruction of homes, personal belongings and social institutions by the flood waters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Now the government wants to enact legislation to allocate funds to construct a 700-mile wall of death along the US-Mexican border and racist policies to keep Mexican and Latino workers out and to further marginalize them within the US economy and political system. These are two sides of the same US imperialist system of national oppression.

At the heart of the conditions faced by the African Americans in the Gulf Coast and throughout the Black Belt South, is the role that the South has played for centuries as a center for US exploitation; super exploiting Black labor and squeezing super profits out of every aspect of Black life leaving little to no resources for healthcare, education, housing and other infrastructure for addressing human needs. The rapidly growing immigrant Latino population in the South also suffers and is oppressed by these long standing and racist conditions that are further intensified by language and cultural oppression.

The upsurge among Latinos throughout the US against the criminalization and attacks on undocumented Mexican and Latino immigrants and the political tone of resistance it is setting, must be seen as a direct challenge to the Bush led government and corporate agenda that left thousands of African Americans to die in the Gulf Coast—and who tried to make them the scapegoat for the governments deliberate neglect and failed evacuation. The Reconstruction movement developing in the Gulf Coast and among African Americans nationally must embrace and unite with this mass upsurge as a call to action for all of the oppressed to boldly resist repression and genocide.

Let’s be clear. The corporations want to super exploit immigrant workers. They just don’t want to be responsible for paying them the value of their labor or to provide social services and basic democratic rights that enable them to survive and raise their families. They are using the anti immigrant legislation to mask the truth about the massive unemployment and the crises facing US workers and the huge financial debt of the government that has been caused by corporate bailouts, restructuring and imperialist wars—trying to make immigrants the scapegoats for the crisis. This criminalization is also aimed at creating a xenophobic (hate of foreigners) against the rising tide of change developing throughout Latin and South America that challenges US global policies.

The efforts by the US government and corporate media to divide African Americans and Latinos are no accident and should not be ignored. They try to make each community feel that it is more deserving than the other of the crumbs and political status given them by the two major political parties and US government. By centering all politics on elections, one community is played against the other by projecting them as voting blocks. Witness the media mantra over the past 4 years: “The rising number of Latino voters threatens to end both GOP and Democratic courting of the black vote and could push concerns specific to Blacks to the sidelines.” (Pacific News Service April 10, 2006, Earl Ofari)

Yet, the wages of workers of both communities are the lowest; and their institutions and public services are the most neglected by local, state and federal government. The regions where the majorities of African Americans and Latinos have lived since the founding of the US—the South and Southwest are where the working class are most economically exploited, politically oppressed, systematically disenfranchised and suffer the most brutal racist treatment. The unity of these two communities would constitute a major political force for human rights and global justice.

US corporations have closed hundreds of plants in the US and moved them to Mexico to exploit cheap labor and have impose economic policies on the Mexican government like NAFTA that has caused massive unemployment for many agricultural workers and small farmers in Mexico. These plant closings have created massive unemployment in the North and Midwest especially among African American workers causing the deterioration of major urban inner cities. This has fostered a reverse migration of many Black workers back to the South since 1970. Both migrations result from US economic oppression in the US and Mexico.

The dispersal of thousands of mainly African Americans throughout the US from the Gulf Coast was a racist act using the disaster to carry out a form of ethnic cleansing—trying to eliminate the Black majority in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the interest of white political rule and corporate profits. The evacuees are experiencing government abuses—forced evictions, voting rights obstacles and racist treatment from FEMA with no organization or political base to resist from without the support of activist forces within the African American liberation and progressive social movements in the various cities.

Like the undocumented Immigrant Latino workers, the media has criminalized Hurricane Katrina and Rita Survivors, labeling them as “rapists”, “drug dealers” and “con artists” “invading” other people’s cities and communities. This criminalization is done to take attention off of the government abuses and corporate corruption and to try and justify government repression. African American evacuees from the Gulf Coast have become internal US “immigrants” with an uncertain future.

Forced migration has been part of the reality of oppressed nationalities in the US, beginning with the Native Americans who were forced off their traditional lands and African Americans many being forced out of the South where they lived and worked for more than 300 years. The “illegal” label placed on undocumented immigrants by the US government and white supremacists should be rejected in the vocabularies of all oppressed nationalities in particular and all working people in general.

It is important to point out within the African American community the important role played by Mexico in the struggle against slavery. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it banned slavery throughout its country. Thousands of runaway slaves went into Mexico to escape slavery. This angered Southern plantation owners and the US government who declared that white supremacy should be the law of the land—promoting “Manifest Destiny” as its imperialist slogan. Mexico’s opposition to slavery was a factor leading to the US government’s military invasion of Mexico in the 1840s and its annexation of 1/3 of Mexico’s country. Even in defeat, Mexico refused to include a provision to return runaway slaves in the peace treaty following the US and Mexican war. African Americans must also support the right of Mexican and Latino immigrants to cross the US border without repression and criminalization in search of work and social needs to support their families.

The struggle against the US system of oppression is not a competition between the oppressed to declare themselves as the leaders of the struggle. The initiative from any sector of the oppressed must be seen as an opening for all of the oppressed to come forward and intensify their struggles.

Yes, there must be recognition that these are two independent movements with their own demands and leaderships. However, there must also be a conscious effort to develop an understanding and practical work to build the political and strategic links and interdependence of these movements as a force for progressive social change throughout the US and for global justice. Workers and pressed peoples throughout the world have been desperately hoping for such a powerful interconnecting movement to develop inside of the US.

Reconstruction in the Gulf Coast must not be just a physical rebuilding project, rebuilding institutions and social relations as they were prior to the disaster. It must be a movement to build people’s democratic control of resources, policies and institutions based on self determination that involves the Black majority and working class masses in deciding the terms and conditions of their Reconstruction. It must fight for democratic rights and worker protections for undocumented immigrants and must include them in the discussions and mass decision making processes of the Reconstruction movement in the Gulf Coast and among the dispersed Survivors.

This Reconstruction movement in the Gulf Coast must help to point out the need for the complete Reconstruction of the whole of US society and contribute to the building of such a movement. This will help people to better understand the importance of the struggle against racism and for African American self-determination in bringing this about.

This Reconstruction movement must draw on one of the most progressive periods in US history – the African American and white progressive led Reconstruction era in the South after the Civil War. These governments were the first to assure free public education for all people, gave women the vote and built public institutions that were open to all without discrimination.

As the two largest and super-exploited nationally oppressed communities inside the US, the fate of African Americans and Latinos are connected, especially under a system that is rapidly eliminating democratic rights and labeling all peoples of color as potential “terrorists.” Black and Brown unity will help to expose the deep racist nature of US democracy and raise the bar of the struggle against racism among those who really want radical change.

The call for a May 1st national boycott of jobs, businesses and schools is a protest against the US government’s repressing of people’s human rights and relegating them to needs to racism and corporate greed. It is a call to action for people to boldly challenge a government that criminalizes people for trying to work to support their families; that would leave its people to die in the Gulf Coast, and that spends billions for wars to kill and dominate the world.

May 1st – “May Day” – is celebrated by millions of workers throughout the world to express the need for worker solidarity in the struggles for workers rights and human rights. It began based on a struggle by US workers in the 1880’s for the eight-hour day and in opposition to government repression against the labor movement. The May 1st Boycott must also be a mobilization that calls for a major campaign to build Black and Brown unity as an anchor for the unity of people of color and workers in struggling for human rights and global justice.


Boycott Against Immigrant Repression and for Gulf Coast Reconstruction!

Black America & the Immigration Issue

Black America & the Immigration Issue

Who are the "WE" many of us Blackfolk speak of when we whine on like Rush Limbaugh we we talk of "immigrants taking our jobs and services? Blackfolk born in this country are not the people who are making these national policies... are not the richfolk setting salaries at their lowest possible levels... are not the richfolk defining economic realities in Africa, Asia and Latin America that helps drive people from these nations to this mythical "land of opportunity"... are not the vast majority of politicians creating these racist anti-immigration "laws"... are not the corportate media heads setting the myths of "immigrants" sapping jobs and services from Blackfolk.

The US Education system and news media has made sure that folk in the US have no historical knoweldge of all the various kinds of anti-immigration policies, acts, laws that permeates the history of this nation: The Chinese Exclusionary Act, The Irish, Italian, Jewish, Caribbean, Arab/Muslim, Japanese, Phillipino, Korean...exclusionary/limitation rulings....

The real sapping of job opportunity and higher salaries are the rich and superrich who are overwhelmingly white due to the continuing legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism. Look at the ridiculous supersalaries of the megacorporate execs: billionaires with free medical care and fantastic tax loopholes. These millionaires and multibillionaires
have allegiance only to the dollar. Just look how their patriotism to the dollar has exported tens of thousands of jobs out of the US. They have promoted US patriotism among the US citizenry while snatching the economic rug from under our feet because their profits need to be maximized by any ruthless means necessary.

These rulingclass people use the US government in such a way that benefits their interests while syphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from national social development for an imperial war for oil and global dominance.

Objectively, Blackfolk have never been part of the "WE" the hundreds of thousands of misinformed and dis-informed among us speak of.

Blackfolk in this country have always been the foundational "OTHER."

We were never asked whether we wanted to be citizens of this racist nation after slavery. Citizenship- of sorts- was imposed upon us by white decree... and then a series of Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutional racism became the norm of this nation. It, in turn, became the way all 19th, 20th and 21st Century immigrants into the US were/are defined.

Divide and conquer is the order of the day around this immigration issue: Black against Brown and Yellow. Us-born Africans against those born elsewhere. The white workingclass against ALL people of color... and ignorantly blaming all of us various shades of "niggers" for their financial, psychological and moral woes- not the Trumps, Bloombergs, Kleins, Bushes, Martha Stewarts, Bill Gates... WalMart/MacDonalds/Exxon/Enron execs.

The real issue is that this nation has enough wealth and enough work to do to employ everyone here right now -AND hundreds of thousands more- for a lifetime at an average living wage rate of at least $20/hr. Our fight is to make this real
by fighting for the redistribution of the wealth and, therefore, people power control over what is made and how it is distributed.

"Our" borders span the globe- not those defined by racist slave owners who committed genocide as they "immigrated" into this continent. However, if you support the basic tenets of capitalism and its cohort- racism, then you can
perceive of yourself- your Black self -as being part of the "WE" that includes Bush, Cheney, George Washington, Custer, Lester Maddox, J. Edgar Hoover, the Klan, The Minutemen currently "patrolling" the US-Mexican borders, the white babblers on Fox,CNN,NBC,CBS,ABC, etc as well as those who write anti-immigrant nonsense in the print media.

A United Front of People of Color right here in the US is an essential organizing effort if we are going to have a revolutionary victory over Capitalism and Racism.

In Struggle,

S. E. Anderson
Native Brooklynite Veteran activist/educator and author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners".

Some of the BNYEE folk on the steps of TWEED (NYC Dept of ED)

A Black Education State of Emergency
Engulfs New York City

By S. E. Anderson
Activist-educator and founding member of
Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence

Brothers and Sisters,

Our children, our community… WE are facing Education Genocide! Our children are rapidly becoming our third generation of mis-educated drones destined for either, jail, the grave or low paying dead-end jobs. The longer WE as parents and concerned remain inactive in our children’s educational life the more horrendous the problem becomes. It’s time we rebuild our struggle for Community Control and Fight Back!

The Bloomberg-Klein “Children First” education policies have merely re-enforced institutional racism in our public schools while selling off chunks of the system to their privateer friends. Our children are “first” to be kicked to the education curb… winding up dropping out in their middle school years resulting in less than 10% of our children receiving a Regents Diploma by the time they are 20 years old!

The Problems

• Parents Left Out of School Decisions
The erosion of and then the elimination of local school boards have left our communities without a forceful voice and policy-making ability within the school system. Bloomberg-Klein have created a corporate type top down management system that does not tolerate criticism or debate or parental input.

• White Supremacist Curriculum
Bloomberg-Klein have re-enforced the racist ideas that relegate Black people and other people of color as incidental in the evolution of humanity and its civilizations. They do this by way of their high stakes tests, their institutionalization of white supremacist curriculum, and their deliberate violation of the 1997 and 1998 laws mandating the teaching of African American and African Diaspora history.

• Underground Railroad School Rejected
The Bloomberg-Klein gang of non-educators have rejected a school proposal that is designed to uphold the state and federal mandates regarding the teaching of Black History. A proposal that was created by some of New York City’s finest and most experienced educational professionals from our schools and universities.

• Regents Exam Asked Racist Questions
Let’s be perfectly clear: Jewish teachers and parents would NEVER allow a regents question to have students discuss the “merits” of Hitler’s Nazism! But, in 2006 Black children faced on the Regents Exam this statement from British racist imperialist Lord Lugard:


“. . . Let it be admitted at the outset [beginning] that European brains, capital, and energy have not been, and never will be, expended [spent] in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy [goodwill]; that Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; that the benefit can be made reciprocal [equivalent], and that it is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfil this dual mandate. By railways and roads, by reclamation [recovery] of swamps and irrigation of deserts, and by a system of fair trade and competition, we have added to the prosperity and wealth of these lands, and [have] checked famine and disease. We have put an end to the awful misery of the slavetrade and inter-tribal war, to human sacrifice and the ordeals of the witch-doctor. Where these things survive they are severely suppressed. We are endeavouring [trying] to teach the native races to conduct their own affairs with justice and humanity, and to educate them alike in letters and in industry. . . .”

WE have allowed this white supremacist atrocity to happen because of our INACTION!

• Black Teachers/Principals Forced out
We hear of Black teachers being harassed and drummed out of the school system everyday. Black principals have faced increasing pressures to be super-principals while their white colleagues get rewarded for mis-educating and criminalizing our children. Bloomberg-Klein have overtly been recruiting white teachers over Black teachers. They have continued the Giuliani policy of going overseas (to Australia, for example) to find white teachers rather than recruit and train the thousands of Black and Latino citizens right here in New York City who are ready and willing to become teachers.

• Schools Health Hazards for ALL
The Bloomberg-Klein policy of privatizing school maintenance has accelerated the environmental hazards our children face everyday they go into their schools. In addition, the “MacDonaldization” of school food has helped hasten the rise in our children becoming malnourished and obese. This bad diet directly results in poor thinking!

• School “Safety” = Prison–style Methods
Walk into any of our neighborhood schools (with only a few exceptions) and you will be walking into a prison-like institution. Metal detectors, a lockdown atmosphere, teachers-as-wardens attitudes coupled with drab prison colors throughout the building and you see some of the reasons why our children loathe going to school.

• DOE unable to Stop Gun Violence
Bloomberg-Klein’s response to gun violence erupted around our schools is to bring in more of a repressive army of cops instead of creatively getting to the root causes of gun violence through forming community and youth taskforces that directly address the issue. In addition, Bloomberg-Klein refuse to support the “Fight-Free” or “Peace Zones” concept that have successfully reduced youth violence elsewhere in the nation. We can only conclude that the present school leadership WANTS the violence to continue in order to help boost the NYPD budget and guarantee that the upstate prison beds be filled.

These are just a few of the terrible problems our children and our communities face everyday in regards to the education of our children. We have not even discussed the NY State department of Education’s incompetence… or George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act’s guaranteeing that OUR children are left behind to rot holding pens of mis-education.

We have but one choice- if we are about making sure that our children excel now and in the future: WE MUST ACT NOW! We must act now as a powerful united force that we know we can be.

Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE) is that Black militant force that can help lead us to victories in our war to capture and develop our children’s minds. We urge you to join with us to implement our Action Plan--

Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE) Action Plan

• Build BNYEE into a Militant Mass Membership Organization
We cannot expect to defeat the powers of Bloomberg-Klein with mere talk. We must be mobilized. Mobilized even more powerful than we were a generation ago within the battles for Community Control. Black Education Power is real only when we have Black New York ORGANIZED. BNYEE is here to do that: to be our central activist organization that is not afraid to take on millionaire school chancellors or billionaire mayors.

• Hold Local Black Education Forums
Through BNYEE we can hold regular Black Education Forums to help educate and mobilize all of our neighborhoods to help stop the educational genocide.

• Join the Underground Railroad Curriculum Petition Campaign
We still need to put pressure upon the elected officials and the dept of Education to actually implement the state and federal mandate to teach Black History in all grades. The ongoing petition campaign is a way to inform everyone that NYCDOE is in violation of this law.

• Join the Campaign to Make Black History Mandatory
for High School Graduation
Every child of every race and nationality should know about the centrality of people of African descent to the development of humanity, civilizations and specifically to this society. Making Black History a mandatory graduation requirement helps establish a K-12 Black History Curriculum as well as help NYDOE graduate young people who are well rounded and grounded active citizens.

• Hold BNYEE Black History Youth Workshops in Your Neighborhood
BNYEE has successfully held Black History Youth Workshops in the Bronx and Queens. These workshops give students and their families a taste of what could happen in their respective schools and grades. The Black History Workshops are led by dedicated Black public school and university educators FREE of charge.

• March on Tweed/City Hall May 17th
BNYEE is planning a major Black Educational Excellence march on May 17, 2006. May 17th is the anniversary of the historic brown v Board of Education Supreme Court school desegregation decision. We envision thousands of students and parents surrounding both Tweed and City Hall. In order for this march to be a success at that level, we need everyone’s support who is reading this.

• More Details at March 23rd Town Hall Meeting
We encourage all to come out to the State of Emergency Black Education Town Hall meeting on Thursday March 23 at 6pm at Brown Memorial Baptist Church’s Fellowship Hall located at Washington and Gates Avenues

Sisters and Brothers!

We cannot depend on others whose only interests are containing and stunting our youth while maximizing their profits by any means necessary. If we want to see that our children and our race have a future of freedom and excellence, then we must be active NOW!

S. E. Anderson can be reached at: or 240.208.6443.

Critiquing Tavis Smiley's Covenant with BlackFolk-Part I

So far, these events have been large turnouts. In early March 2006, Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church had an overflow room... and that was not enough. This means that there were at least 3000 folk who came literally on a couple of days notice.

Our people are hungry for social action. Hungry for comradeship in the midst of multiple states of emergencies. Hungry for a Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or a Marcus Garvey to lead us out of blinding oppression. Hungry for Organized Social and Political Action. Hence, they will come out to a celeberty-filled EVENT that's a talkfest to look for leaders and answers. They'll go away mixed with a sense of upliftment & racial solidarity coupled with frustration due to lack of putting talk into action by the talkers.

My issue with Tavis Smiley is that he has systematically excluded nationally and locally known Black revolutionaries/radicals from being part of the dialogue. He merely blackens what corporate-controlled media and academia does: render Black revolutionaries/radicals/PanAfricanists invisible or "old school." So his Town Hall meetings wind up being discussions between reformers and accomodationists who are incapable of (and not interested in) mobilizing their offices much less Black communities. They objectively and subjectively work on setting up Black America for the whims of the Democratic Party's presidential candidates and various NGO-izing foundations that suck the revolutionary spirit out of community organizing and morph our militancy into polite begging for some nanocrumbs.

I would support a sitdown with Tavis to try to convince him that wherever he has his Town Halls, that Black revolutionary/radical forces be equally on stage (at least 2). I also think we should do a written critique of Tavis's Covenant. It should not be left to float to th e surface as our 21st Century Black Manifesto.

I also recognize that we are in this terrible space where our people are hungry for social action and the traditional Black Resistance Fighters are far and few between among the under 40 folks but many among the 55 and older folk: the AARPs (Aged African Revolutionary Persons). Never before in our 500+ year history in the Americas have we had such a dilemma: where the Revolutionary Center is found among elders & near-elders. (I'm NOT saying that there are no Black young revolutionaries in the US. I know there are. I'm saying that the qualitative and quantitative center of this Black Revolutionary force is located amongst the older activists and praxtioners.)

The question of rekindling our Black revolutionary youth force is OURS to answer- not Tavis or Cornel or Sharpt on... and time is definately running out between mounting US fascism and so many of us aging out of struggle in so many ways.

In Struggle,

Sam

Scholars Undo the “Whitening” of Egypt

Scholars Undo the “Whitening” of Egypt

Ft. Lauderdale Forum Critiquing the King Tut Traveling Exhibit
By S. E. Anderson

What most of know of Egypt has been filtered through Hollywood films, TV dramas, “documentary” programs, visiting museums or by looking at the National Geographic Magazine over the years. We wind up with the belief that:

(1) Egypt is not in Africa. Or if it is in Africa, its ancient civilization was founded by either Europeans or beings from outer space—
(2) The Ancient Egyptians looked more like whitefolks than Africans
(3) Greece was the cradle of Western Civilization--
(4) Africans played only minor servant-like role in the thousands of years of Pharaoh rule—
(5) Egypt is always separated from Africa (i.e. “Egypt AND Africa”; African Art/Egyptian Art depts. in Museums)

Besides these lies, distortions and racist constructs, we have all grown up with crazy images of mummies and evil pharaohs constantly pillaging frightened bug-eyed Africans and frail pale white damsels in distress… only to be saved by dashing and daring white men who- somehow –are able to kill the unkillable… to outpower the all powerful pharaoh/mummy. In other words, Egypt becomes this super-mythological place where white supremacy reigns over exotic evils, sciences and beauty that constantly needs to be “tamed.”

Most of us never get a chance to hear Black and progressive white scholars and activists scientifically refute these deliberate distortions of Egypt because that would undermine the very foundation of Eurocentrism’s notion and policy of white supremacy. Besides, billions of dollars are being made off of these racist fabrications in the West’s cultural industry… and psychological dominance prevails through these myths.

Well, an historical breakthrough happened in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on 16-17 February: hundreds of Blackfolk got a chance to listen to the exposure of and the unraveling of the “whitening” or “Europeanization” of Egypt from Black Scholars and one brave British Scholar. The priceless Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit on loan from Egypt is currently installed at Ft. Lauderdale’s Museum of Art.

The images and history being promoted by these Eurocentric Egyptologists, archeologists, anthropologists, historians and forensic scientists tells us that King Tut was a whiteboy who reigned over a vast kingdom that had its familial and cultural roots somewhere outside of Africa. After all, all this splendor, architectural wonders and scientific knowledge existing 6000 years ago COULD NOT BE CREATED BY BLACK AFRICANS.



Florida International University’s Africa New World Studies hosted a full day learning experience with one of the foremost African scholars on Egypt: Dr. Theophile Obenga currently of San Francisco State University. On Feb 16th students and ordinary folk from the South Florida area got a chance to spend a whole day interacting with Dr. Obenga culminating in a 3-hour evening presentation on the proving the African roots of ancient Egypt. Since, Dr. Obenga is fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin as well as being able to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics he was able to reveal Egypt’s Africanity through primary documents.

Then on Friday Feb 17th, the splendid African American Research Library and Cultural Center of Ft. Lauderdale hosted the symposium: “Egypt: Africa’s Glorious Daughter”. It was a collaborative effort within a new consortium call the Florida Africana Studies Consortium… and it was standing room only in the library’s auditorium. The panel included:


Dr. Theophile Obenga- author of Ancient Egypt and Black Africa; A Student Handbook and African Philosphy During the Period of the Pharaohs 2780-330 BCE
Martin Bernal- Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (3Vols)
Asa Hilliard- The Teaching of Ptahhotep and The Reawakening of the African Mind
Manu Ampim- Egypt as a Black Civilization and Modern Fraud: The Fabricated Ancient Egypt Statues of Ra-Hotep & Nofret

Babacar M’Bow, the symposium convener and Broward County Library executive, set the context with his essay: “The Rationality of African History”. He was followed by the panelists who –with the aid of visuals- outlined issues that focused on demystifying the Eurocentric dominance over Egyptian scholarship and research and definitely laying to rest King Tut’s African roots.

Dr. Obenga led off with a visual presentation on “Beauty” from African antiquity to today. He pointed out how the ancient Egyptians were masters of the science and spirituality of beauty which was passed on over the millennia to all of Africa and Europe.

He was followed by Dr. Hilliard’s “Understanding of the Humanity of Africans: 18th Dynasty, Without Extreme Makeovers” which exposed the deliberate obfuscation of King Tut’s African bloodline.

Then Dr. Martin Bernal followed with a presentation revealing that 60% of the Greek language is attributed to having roots in Africa. And moreover, the key words describing complex philosophical, social, cultural, spiritual and scientific concepts are of Egyptian origin and not out of Greece’s Indo-Asiatic linguistic roots.

Finally, young scholar-activist Manu Ampim, through his international research of museums, archives, exhibits and travels to Egypt exposed the widespread fabrications and distortions within the world of Egyptology and exhibitions to make sure the general public sees a “whitened” Egypt.

Fortunately, for all of us, this presentation is webcasted at:
.

Officials from the Museum of Art’s King Tutankhamun exhibit were silently present- even though they were asked to be on the panel. This is typical of these “scholars” of Ancient Egypt: they do not engage in a public dialog with Black scholars of Ancient Egypt. The last time they did this was back in 1974 at a UNESCO-sponsored Cairo symposium when the late Dr. Chiekh Anta Diop and Dr. Obenga left these white Egyptologist “experts” speechless or stuttering after they thoroughly proved beyond a doubt the “African-ness” of the Pharaohs. Now, a generation later, we have to fight a similar battle, because these white supremacist scholars have regrouped and now try to use hi-tech smoke and mirrors approach to attempt to make Tutankhamun more “white” than he actually was. They have mixed CAT scan, DNA technologies with artist renderings of what the boy-king would look like and have presented to the world at least three different images! If it was truly scientific, their methods would have produced one image from three different approaches/interpretation of the data.

The pioneering work of Obenga, Bernal, Hilliard, and Ampim are joined with the works of Maulana Karenga and Molefe Asante … and other African scholars (and a tiny handful of white scholars) so that now we have for the world to see that Egypt is truly a glorious Black and Beautiful daughter of Africa. Your task is to make sure we get their works and views into our schools… and to be ever vigilant when the King Tutankhamun exhibit comes to a museum near you (Chicago and Philadelphia) bearing the likeness of whiteness.

The Continued Importance of a Militant Black History Month

Sistas & Brothas,

We need to put Black History month in the context of our Black Liberation Struggle. That is to say, Carter G. Woodson ASSERTED a Black History Week. He did not ask for permission from whitefolks. He ASSERTED it because there was a strong Black Social Movement underway; the New Negro Movement and... soon-to-follow the Garvey/UNIA-Harlem Renaissance Movement. Brotha Woodson promoted "Negro History Week" and the Black National Anthem ("Lift Every Voice & Sing") as both POLITICAL and CULTURAL acts within a violently hostile and deeply segrgegated nation. It was an effort to raise the consciousness and self-confidence of a racially oppressed people within the normalized world of white supremacy and imperialism. Du Bois and Garvery were on parallel paths with this very same thing in mind... along with thousands of young militant Black cultural workers thruout Black America evolving out of the "Harlem Renaissance Movement."

The February "Negro History" week was used not only to reflect and educate about our history of Struggle & resistance, it was also used to mobilize Blackfolk to fight against the daily racist terror and for true democracy and equity to prevail within the US borders. This purpose was nurtured and took on new more militant forms within the 1960's and 70's Civil Right/Black Liberation Movement(s). It was during this period that grassroots groups and individuals fought for setting aside the entire month of Februray for Black History celebration AND mobilization. Remember, during these decades, it was never about making Black History a government sanctioned event... or even a corporate sponsored one (that comes with capital's desire/need to pimp off every social/cultural attribute of its citizens).

For many decades, Black History Month was about bringing Black America's communities- especially its youth- together for reflection, renewal and action. From these Black History Month activities came, for example, the struggle to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday; to systematically continue to celebrate the power, life and legacy of Brother Malcolm X; to make the connection with the Wars the US was waging to our anti-imperialist stances to those wars; to hilite the prominance and power of our fighting Sisters in such a way that an aspect of Black History Month flowed into International Working Women's Month (March).

In Other words, Negro/Black History Week/Month was a way for militant/nationalist Blackfolk to POLITICALLY mobilize thruout Black America from the 1930s thru the 70s.

But white supremacy within late capitalism had a way to absorb these militant nationalist moves as our overall Black Liberation Struggle disintegrated because of COINTELPRO actions and our own errors. By the late 70s/early 80s Budweiser and other capitalist multinationals saw that they could make money off of the nationalist sentiments of Black History Month. Simultaneously, some liberal and conservative elected officials saw the value in embracing Black History Month AND trivializing it down to food, song and dance and 6 or 8 Great Black Leaders. Eventually, these were the primary organizers and definers of Black History and the month. Today, they are the prime movers and shakers with their Black petty bourgeois wannabes promoting their "We too are Americans" myths and prettifying the centuries of enslaving Africans.

Just try to find a Black calander (outside of the Black Fax one) that celebrates our history as one of Struggle and Resistance. In 2006, Black calendars are celebrating our beauty, our ability to produce pretty Black art. We rarely ever see a calendar depicting how we fought back, our runaways, our Nat Turners and Gabriel Prossers, our Harriets and Callie Houses, Ida B Wells, Our George Jacksons and Malcoms. Calendars that show the militancy of the Black Reconstruction/New Negro/Civil Rights/Black Liberation Movements are now nonexistent.... Where are the Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Ruby Doris Robinsons calendars...?

The point I'm trying to make is this: Black History Month (many of us used to call it "Black Liberation Month") should be seen as a month of reconsolidating and recommitting ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation- Just like we use to see May as African Liberation Month as doing just that. We should see February as a month of POLITICAL MOBILIZATION thru our culture and our powerful history. A month that helps bring our youngfolk into the struggle-mode. Black History Month should be seen as an ORGANIZING moment that WE define- in spite of what the rulers of this nation desire- in spite of what set of their negros and special sales and bogus TV programs they produce to pacify us in our misery.

Black History Month as an educational/mobilizing vehicle must be re-established. This can only be done by being actively engaged in our recpective communities. Not pontificators on the sidelines or in ebony towers.... Brother Carter G. Woodson envisioned his Week as just this: a consciousness-raising AND mobilizing vehicle.

Now more than ever, we need to continue Brother Woodson's vision.

In Struggle,

Sam Anderson

Reparations: More than $97 Trillion!

FROM...
http://www.harpers.org/HarpersIndex2000-11.html#3338174678170560

Estimated number of hours of labor performed by African-American slaves between 1619 and 1865: 222,505,049
SOURCE: Clarence J. Munford, Race and Reparations, African World Press, Inc.
(Trenton, N.J.)

Estimated value of the labor performed by African-American slaves between 1619 and 1865, compounded at 6 percent interest through 1993: $97,100,000,000,000
=====================

Sistas/Brothas,

The 6% interest may have been the AVERAGE interest rate for the US from enslavement days up to the year Brotha Mumford published his calculations.

Another important point: these calculations DO NOT include wages for child labor (enslaved African children started work at about 3 years old) and for enslaved African women's housework to maintain the hovels we lived in and raising the children (i.e enslaved childrearing = appreciating capital). These values would take us to well over $150 trillion!

These figures are so mindblowingly
large that they make no sense to us until we can visualize them with everday things.

Everybody can visualize a penny.... Just $10trillion in pennies would be a halfmile wide cube weighing 3 billion tons!! (go to: to see a rendering).

But the real value of these estimates for Reparations is to emphasize how central our ancestors were in creating capitalism and this now megapowerful country. It is also to show- in another way -that there's really no amount of money on earth that can compensate for the monstrous crimes committed against us (past AND present)... for hundreds of years 24 hours a day 365 days a year of every form of humiliation and spiritual degradation known to humans and animals.

In Struggle,

Sam Anderson
=============================

The Potential Goodness of Our Global Black Culture

Brotha Sam Johnson,

Very good point. Black culture is a central component to today's capitalist culture... and vice versa. This is not to deny the positive, antisexist, liberating aspects currently rising within "HipHop' culture. This is to contextualize that positive reality... and help us set the frames of reference for our Black Liberation Movement.

I posted the article primarily to re-enforce the reality that Blackfolk in the US in the 20th and 21st Centuries have become "very Diasporic." Forced Migration/immigration has help to shape a new African-centered culture that flies in the face of all the internalized negative slurs/assumptions we hurl at each other's forced (artificial/colonialized) nationalities. We are all "In Da Mix" --whether we like it or not! We must never forget that our African ancestors were randomly strewn thruout the Americas (and europe and Asia) during the rise of capitalism and Europenas nations. By chance, for example, one line of my ancestors wound up in North Carolina, another line in South Carolina, and another in Jamaica... and another in Barbados. There are millions of us that have similar intricate global family lineages... and we haven't even talked about our Native American ancestors! Or our forced-by-rape-European ancestors!

To point out the Caribbean/Latin/South American contributions to HipHop is not about narrow nationalist one-upmanship... not about rendering HipHop into a Caribbean creation. It's to reveal that from now on African and African Diasporic culture will become even more intimately intertwined with each other... blurring borders and languages (i.e. Reggaeton). This will be a good thing IF WE control its CULTURAL and ECONOMIC developments.

If capital (and therefore, white supremacy) dominates, we will homoginate into the bleached blandness of a Fiona Apple/Kenny G-in-brownface capitalist cultural reality concerned only with mega bottomlines and a zombified Black consumer oblivious of politics, racial knowledge & pride.

For over 500 years, we have been a globalized people struggling to hold onto/reconstruct/define our "Africanness." Now that we are only hours away physically from each other anywhere on the planet.. now that we are instantly connected with each other anywhere on the planet, our cultural transformations will accelarate exponentially.

Are we strong enough (politically aware/globally informed), united enough (organized/mobilized) to define and direct that transformation for the betterment of Africans everywhere?

in Struggle,

Sam
===============================

I would never describe Hip Hop as "one of the
greatest creations we descendents of African
captives have produced". Too much of this
culture defame black women, especially some of
those rappers on this list. You cannot measure
"great" solely by the amount of money or wealth
generated by this culture. The ideas of some of
the original creators of the music of this
culture have been hijacked by the unquenchable
greed for money at any cost [nothing new in
western culture].

Have a Peaceful Day

Sam Johnson
Build wealth by starting your own business at:
http://www.deliveringonthepromise.com/JohnsonBusiness
Fax: 1-208-379-0388

Out of Barbados2002: The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress

An S. E. Anderson DOCUMENT

November 2002

Out of Barbados: The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress
by S.E. Anderson

Over the past few weeks much has been discussed and debated about the African/African Descendents Caucus post-Durban gathering in Barbados from Oct. 1 to 6. This is, in part, an indication of the historic importance of the gathering.

Let’s be clear from the outset: despite a frustratingly negative start and a blow to PanAfrican-Cuban solidarity that needs to be immediately rectified, the African/African Descendents Caucus-sponsored conference achieved one of its primary goals.

We – more than 600 Sistas and Brothas from all regions of the Black World – established the Global Afrikan Congress (GAC). It is a necessary work-in-progress of a developing united front of African/African descendent organizations. About two years from now, GAC will hold another international conference to democratically ratify its constitution, sum up its work and plan for future struggles towards the liberation of African peoples everywhere. By the end of the conference, the vast majority of us recognized that this is a monumental task that requires us to be principled, open, united and in it for the long haul.

Now, about that frustratingly negative start

As many people have written and spoken of recently, there were mixed messages sent out by the key conference organizers about whether or not non-Africans should attend. To a veteran radical activist white American documentarian and his Asian activist wife - who have been, with their own monies, documenting the global rise of the Reparations Movement - were told by the conference organizers up to the Sunday before the conference that it was OK to attend. These two documentarians were only interested in filming the open plenaries and doing individual interviews of Sistas and Brothas active in Reparations struggles outside of the U.S. They were not interested in filming any of the 15 working groups because they understood the sensitive nature of the content of these sessions.

When the need for interpreters was raised during the planning months, the organizers opted for a Barbados-based professional translation service that had the technical apparatus - wireless headphones - and personnel to do simultaneous translation in at least four languages. Their staff included three or four white Barbadians.

In addition, there was a young Asian male student within the Canadian delegation and a young Lebanese activist woman who had planned to deliver a solidarity message from forces within the Palestinian Intifada. There might have been about four to six other whites and other non-Africans present during the hours of debates about whether or not non-Africans should attend.

These were the non-Africans that the British delegation initially objected to. After heated debates - unfortunately, I was still en route to Barbados - and a vote carrying 70 percent in favor of expulsion, subjectivity took over. This meant that you had “security” checking you out to see if you were “African” enough to enter the plenary meetings. If Bob Marley had showed with his pops along with Adam Clayton Powell during these moments, they would have been kicked out!

Fortunately, the working group leaders encouraged the delegates to stay the course and make real the reason they came to Barbados.

Political and economic fallout for Barbados

Another aspect one needs to take into consideration: the use of the conference center was underwritten by the Barbados government, which had openly invited the African/African Descendents caucus to hold its founding meeting in Barbados. The government has a nondiscriminatory policy that we as guests of the government should have respected. In addition, because the major corporate media focused only on this issue of expelling non-Africans, it can have a direct impact upon Barbados’ tourist-dependent economy as well as its relationship with a U.S. government hell bent on smashing all support for Reparations.

Anticipating some of this wrath, the delegates passed a unanimous resolution stating that there should be no reprimands placed upon Brotha David Commissiong and the semi-governmental Pan African Commission he heads up because of the terrible mis- and dis-information being spewed out by the international corporate press.

CIA presence

Speaking of the U.S. government’s rabid anti-Reparations policy, you can rest assured that they want to kill this growing movement before it matures into a powerful global force challenging white supremacy and imperialism’s crushing globalization. Of course, there were at least three CIA agents present in Blackface.

The Cuban delegation

The Cuban delegation – and, therefore, government – was not and is not in opposition to the formation of a global PanAfrican organization or of Reparations. They were and are opposed to the expelling of non-Africans when there was publicity saying this was an open meeting for those interested in being in solidarity with and helping to form the united front of Africans and African descendents.

We need not go into Cuba’s solid credentials of supporting with their own lives and medical and technical expertise African Liberation causes on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora. We don’t need to point out that Cuba has stood behind our Sistas Assata Shakur, Nihanda and other Black U.S. Freedomfighters for over 20 years - providing political asylum for them in spite of U.S. economic and military threats and bribes. We also need not point out that it was Fidel at the Durban UN World Conference Against Racism last year who laid out to the UN delegates the logic and moral necessity of Reparations. No other head of state took such a bold and clear positive stance for Reparations.

It is absurd for some of us to think 1) that Fidel and the Cuban government have been opportunistic in their steadfast support of African Liberation as it struggles to endure a 42-year U.S. induced economic blockade and psychological, chemical and germ warfare. Remember, tens of thousands of Cubans volunteered to go and Fight and Die alongside Angolan, Namibian and South African Freedomfighters during the 1970s because they understood their African roots and the evils of imperialism grinding Africa and Africans into horrendous poverty and illness.

2) that Cuba is a “white” or “Latino” nation like Argentina or Paraguay. Cuba’s 11 million people are overwhelmingly of African descent and a very mixed group of folk. The majority of the “white” Cubans now reside in Miami and northern New Jersey. The spiritual base of the Cuban people is Santeria, a Yoruba-based religion. Cuba’s overall culture has an explicit African base that they no longer deny, but openly embrace.

Brothas and Sistas, we, as the Global Afrikan Congress, will get absolutely no respect from many of those African/African Descendents we are going to try to join us in the monumental task of building the Congress if we do not immediately rectify our mishandlings with Cuba. It will haunt the Global Afrikan Congress and render us globally isolated as a bunch of narrow-minded super-Black nationalists seeking to unite only with the mythical “pure” African.

The birth of the Global Afrikan Congress

Through the various working groups deliberating over three days, the Global Afrikan Congress began to take shape. Keep in mind, the work was being done by hundreds of African people coming out of a very wide range of ideological and levels of activist experiences. The working groups were very open, lively and democratic in their deliberations, which rolled over to the final hours of plenary debates and discussions on structure and name.

Reparations for the crimes of slavery, slave trade, colonialism and the lingering vestiges of these through white supremacy has become our centerpiece, which all our work informs and is informed by. There was no debate on this.

The task now is to

1) immediately plan out the regional meetings so that they all occur within the next three to six months working towards a Global Afrikan Congress constitutional convention sometime in 2004 or 2005.

2) find ways to heal the wound between those Sistas and Brothas who chose to leave the conference after the vote supported the exclusion of non-Africans and bring them into the work ahead.

3) disseminate the working groups’ tasks and all the plenary resolutions to as many African/African Descent organizations as possible.

You and I, Sistas and Brothas, along with countless millions of our brethren and sistren imbued with a lot of hard work and principledness are the only ones who can make the Global Afrikan Congress the real thing: powerfully Black and victorious for us, our ancestors and our future.