Auset – (Gr. Isis) – one of the earliest and most beloved representations of the Goddess was known both as the Giver of Life and the Divine Mourner. She is the sacred model of African woman-hood and matriarchal agency who is at the genesis of life itself and its passage into the afterworld. Read More
“You can speak another language. You can live in another culture. But to cry over your dead, you always go back to your mother tongue… You know who a person is by the language they cry in.”
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ABSTRACT ~ This article supports scholarly findings that BaNtu traditions are among the strongest civilizing forces in the United States. Positing pop music as a paradigm of proof, the author argues for a cultural decolonization and corrective understanding of this expression as a manifestation of Africa’s oral traditions and the global agency of the continent’s cultural custodians. Read More
“Everybody come… Everyone come together… / The grave is restless. The grave is not yet at peace…” (translation)
Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering African-American linguist, recognized the origin of these lines in a song he recorded in the 1930s on the south-east coast of America, sung in the Gullah dialect. Read More
“You went to school to learn, girl Things you never, never knew before Li-i-ike “I-before-E-except-after-C” And why “2-plus-2-makes-4” Na… na… Now… I’m gonna teach you, All about love…” (J-5)
Molefi Kete Asante, Ph.D. ~ Author
Over the past five hundred years or so Europe has been on a quest to destabilize and dis-establish the agency of African people. The assault has been frontal, sustained, and violent at physical and psychological levels using all dominative instruments of language, symbolism, and warfare. The consequences of this war on Africa have been profound, giving rise to doctrines of white supremacy and black inferiority, African servility, and the negation of African civilization. Read More
Desmond Tutu
“Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it UBUNTU… It means the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion and toughness. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” ~ Desmond Tutu Read More
Eli Nathan Bisamunyu
(RIP ~ May 6th, 2014)
My father, Eli Nathan Bisamunyu, was born into a poor family in 1928 in a remote region of Uganda before my district’s inclusion in Her Britannic Majesty’s Protectorate of Uganda. He survived childhood diseases such as dysentery and typhus that had killed 13 of his siblings. His unexpected appearance on the scene much later compelled his mother to wish for him a different existence from that which his siblings had not survived. In a pioneering experiment she sent him to school where he distinguished himself as a six-year-old pupil amidst a throng of 15-18 year-old boys. My grandmother Rebecca had hoped that that “modern education,” as it was known, would keep him out of harm’s way. Read More
In 2009, after weeks of frustration with my Chinese students’ inability to cope with simple English texts in a science course, I encouraged them to read the China Daily. It was not equal to the entertaining stories or Andy Capp cartoons I enjoyed reading as a child in the Uganda Argus (formerly a British newspaper) thanks in large part to bedtime stories like Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and Dr Seuss that my mother read aloud to help me overcome my own English reading difficulties. Read More
When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land. ~ Kenya’s post-colonial Father: Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Prime Minister of Kenya (1963-64), President (1964-78), and author of “Facing Mount Kenya.” These words are sometimes attributed to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Winner: Nobel Peace Prize, 1984; Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, 1986; Pacem in Terris Award, 1987; Sydney Peace Prize, 1999; Gandhi Peace Prize, 2005; and Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2009). Read More
This week James Bonnet explains that it’s not the historicity of the marvelous tales surrounding certain figures, but rather the “hidden truths” – which were maintained through their oral tradition accounts – that make these stories worthy… Read More
The old great stories, which really could change people’s lives, were not authored by individuals the way stories are today but were evolved naturally and instinctively by unconscious processes in oral traditions. And even if they started out as made-up or true stories, revelations or dreams, they still ended up for long periods of time in oral traditions and that became the principal dynamic behind their creation. Read More
Malaika Mutere 