Africoons sez "U Americoons keeps yo blak hisssss-tree munth!"
Ward Cleaver
The Times of
Zambia (Lusaka)
February 24, 2000
By Sam Kaseba
Lusaka - "If a race has no
history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in
the thought of the world, and it stands in the danger of being exterminated."
This line from Carter G.
Woodson is the thought in the minds of commemorators of the "black history
month" of February as well as observers of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on
January 16. Woodson spoke of race - clearly meaning the Africans and African-
Americans and other 'blacks' in diaspora perhaps the more reason the American
Centre in Lusaka named after Dr King celebrates the works of African-Americans
this month annually.
The father of black history, as Woodson is also called, "saved himself for
the history he saved and transformed," wrote Lerone Bennett Jr. And that is to
say the black history month is also the personal history of the Woodson, though
he is only a pawn in the vast chain of events which exceed his recollection. But
argued Bennett Jr. that "one could go further and say that systematic and
scientific study of black history began with Woodson, who almost single-
handedly created the association for the study of Negro life and history (now
the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) and the
prestigious Journal of Negro History."
Although this is a long story which cannot hastily be told, we can say in a
few words that after several years of struggles in ridicule, scorn, sometimes
admiration and recognition he published The Negro in Our History.
That was not the end as he later organised the first Negro History Week on
February 7, 1926. This was the start.
That history recalled and chronicled for instance that January 1863 Abraham
Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation and definitely affected a major
change to the course of black history. Almost as result, today many remember
August 1963, when Dr Martin Luther King Jr. standing under the shadow of
Lincoln's statue proclaimed to a quarter-a-million marchers his immortal "I have
a dream" speech. Luther's dream, like Woodson's dream, like Lincoln's, like JF
Kennedy's was an American dream - a black dream, but most of all a global dream.
Furthermore, those who follow Malcolm X, soon realise that the sharing of the
dream with the rest of the world is the foremost similarity between Dr King and
Malcolm X.
According to Jackie E. White in the TIME magazine cover article The Beauty of
Black Art, "So often, the news from black America seems to be all bad: Crime,
broken families, failing schools, abject hopelessness.
"Yet amid the bleak circumstances that envelope so much of the African-
American community, a singularly heartening piece of good news has been
overlooked. "Black artists are now on one of the most astonishing outbursts of
creativity in the nation's history.
Never before - not even during the legendary great Harlem Renaissance of the
1920s or the bristling Black Arts Movement of the '1960s - have black artists
produced so muchfirst -rate writing, music, painting and dance." But such a
statement is not absolutely right. Ebony magazine, which for most of its
existence has chronicled achievements of African-Americans in different fields,
can dismiss the thought that African-American arts are just emerging.
What is true is that they are only getting recognised at long last! And that
is because the standards have 'shifted.' Above all for how many years have
'blacks' fought to be recognised and accepted in Hollywood or its Oscars. In
fact some historians such as Lerone Bennett Jr. - author of Before the
Mayflower: A history of Black Africa would take this debate to the time far
before the days of slavery, a time before African arts were muddled up with the
American influence. This is where Black History Month should help matters,
assist the people, black people, tell their own history in ways that suit them.
Or as Malcolm X would put it, to make the tree (African-Americans) love the
roots (Africans). So the month too opens blacks to self-criticism.
Can we still say Phyllis Wheatley was the best poetess ever? What of
Gwendolyn Brooks? And Langston Hughes? What of the writing of Black Boy Richard
Wright? And the Invisible Man Ralph Ellison? And Nobel Literature Prize laureate
Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Margaret Walker and her Jubilee? What of
achievements of sportsmen like Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson or Joe
Louis, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson. And also to be remembered are Marcus Garvey,
Martin R Delany, George Washington Carver, James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, W.E.B
Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Bill Cosby and many others. This black
history month, unfortunately, records the history in the western hemisphere
only.
And in so doing puts a wedge between (the race of) Africans and African-
Americans. It is unfortunate, but so because many African-Americans unlike Alex
Haley have failed to trace their roots - through seven generations or so - to
black Africa. According to James Baldwin, the experience of the blacks in the
western hemisphere cannot be compared to any other experience in the history of
mankind.
This stranger in the western hemisphere, observed Baldwin then himself a
stranger in a Swiss village in the essay Stranger In the Village that "one of
the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other
people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice
versa. "The fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that
the history of the American Negro problem is not merely
shameful, it is also something of an achievement." Somewhat
Baldwin's call for respecting the differences should accord us perhaps, one
lesson to learn which is to have our own Africa History Month under the
Organisation of the African Unity (OAU).
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