"Garvey declared that both capitalists and socialists were capable of imperialist exploitation; his black nationalism held that white industrial powers could fleece colonial nations regardless of their particular economic system. Describing the western socialist movement in his ‘Black Man’ monthly, he wrote: ‘The people who make up the rank and file are of the lower and upper working classes. They organize, they agitate and they fight because they desire primarily to improve their economic status.’ In Garvey’s view, this was already an elevated status ‘enjoyed at the expense of the oppressed and suppressed darker and Black races who are ruthlessly exploited by the capitalist class in their respective colonies… If the Communist or Socialist in America or England receives $4 or 16s a day as his average wage, that $4 or 16s is the result of the supply of the cheap raw materials of the native countries by the native populations of Africa, India and China. So to maintain the present wage scale in America and in England the native must be paid 2s a day and the coolies in INdia 3d a day. It means therefore, that a higher wage standard of the American or English white worker must result in a lower standard for the exploited natives in their country.’ Hence when white workers ‘inveigle darker peoples into Communism, they are only endeavoring to use them to gain a greater advantage in the economic scale…’ … Garvey’s attempt at such criticism went unanswered by his left-wing opponents, who found it most difficult to make analytical rebuttals to his ideological position. His consistently ‘color-first’ viewpoint seemed to the theorists of class struggle to be an intellectual morass of contradictions and hypocrisy; since the white socialists of Garvey’s day could not understand the meaning of or the need for black power, they could not fathom Garvey’s economic views. Garvey, in turn, saw nothing of benefit to the black nation in the programs of American and European leftists. ‘Fundamentally, what racial difference is there between a white Communist, Republican or Democrat?’ he asked. For posing such questions, Garvey was called a narrow-minded racist, just as black power spokesmen today are labeled reverse racists for similar remarks."
Black Power and the Garvey Movement by Theodore G. Vincent (1970)
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
![dreams-from-my-father:
Review:
Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, edited and with overview essays by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, is a landmark in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) / Queer Studies, for its groundbreaking exploration of same-sex life in Africa, both past and present.
I pored over this book with unflagging interest. It seemed to open not one new world but many, reflecting the “multiple Africas” which the authors discuss. The diversity of African cultures was breathtaking. Focusing on same-sex experience was not only intrinsically fascinating, it provided an evocative entry to understanding the entire continent from the defining perspective of human intimacy.
Through the essays in this book, we explore woman–woman marriages in their many forms, transgendered spiritual leaders who for centuries guided their tribes, female warrior “kings,” alternative gender identities among the Swahili, the regulation of sexuality in colonial Zimbabwe, the evolution of male homosexuality in modern West Africa, and much more, reflecting the astonishingly diversity of African GLBT experience. Below I have included the complete table of contents.
This book provides both scholarly insights and intimate human details about the wildly contradictory nature of GLBT experience in sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from the increasingly brutal persecutions, and sometimes murder, of “sodomites” in Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe to the triumph of equality in South Africa, the first country to protect sexual orientation in its Constitution. This book is dedicated to the intrepid group “GALZ [Gays and Lesbians in Zimbabwe] and African people everywhere whose lives and struggles are testimony to the vital presence of same-sex love on the African continent.”
However, Murray and Roscoe are social scientists first and foremost. They provide thoroughly researched and balanced information on African sexuality, as they place same-sex experience in a much broader cultural and historical context. There is, of necessity, some speculation: for instance, that the great Zulu chief Shaka, who formed a vast empire during his rule (1816–1828), may have been homosexual, since he had no wives, fathered no children, and preferred the company of an elite regiment of warrior bachelors. Even when looking at such historical possibilities, I never felt that facts were being twisted for an agenda. On the contrary, this book revealed the enormous diversity of African GLBT experience, with complexities intact.
Besides its historical and anthropological interest, this book directly addresses a key issue in contemporary Africa, namely, the existence of same-sex oriented people in historic African cultures. This has become a central debate not only among Africans but the many members of that continent’s diaspora, including African-Americans. Antigay leaders, in both politics and religion, claim that there were no indigenous same-sex relationships, which they believe were “alien” and “evil” practices foisted upon Africans by colonialists. They even assert that the original languages of Africa contained no words for gay or lesbian, therefore concluding that they did not exist. The authors counter these myths with facts:
The contributions to this volume unequivocally refute claims that African societies lacked homosexual patterns and had no words for those who desire their own sex. Evidence of same-sex patterns has been reported or reviewed here for some fifty African societies, all of which had words – many words, with many meanings – for them. These societies are found within every region of the continent, and they represent every language family, social and kinship organization, and subsistence pattern. There is substantial evidence that same-sex practices and patterns were “traditional” and “indigenous.” While contact between Africans and non-Africans has sometimes influenced both groups’ sexual patterns, there is no evidence that one group ever “introduced” homosexuality where it had not existed before. Since anthropologists and other observers have rarely inquired systematically into the presence of homosexuality in Africa (or elsewhere), absence of evidence can never be assumed to be evidence of absence. Considering that this collection represents the first serious study of the subject, undoubtedly future research will identify many other groups with distinct patterns of homosexuality….
Yes, more research will be welcome, but that in no way diminishes the importance of this groundbreaking, and endlessly fascinating, first study.
The real-world implications of this “debate” could hardly be more important, in the face of Africa’s catastrophic AIDS crisis. Gay-hating cultures refuse to recognize GLBT sexuality, and as a result they will not even consider it in any AIDS-prevention strategy. As with Zimbabwe’s benighted AIDS program, the fear is that if one were merely to mention homosexuality, it would ‘take hold’ of a person and instantly convert them: hence silence, hence mass deaths. How different conditions might be, not just for GLBT Zimbabweans but for all members of the society, if instead of such hateful myths the country’s once gay-inclusive history were recognized.
Murray and Roscoe organize the book geographically, according to four broad regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and include concise background information on the peoples, climate, economy, and history. Part I encompasses the Sudan, Horn of Africa, and East Africa; Part II covers West Africa, including coastal areas and the interior sudanic region; Part III includes Central Africa, from the equatorial tropical rain forests to the Congo basin and east to present-day Tanzania; Part IV focuses on southern Africa, from Mozambique and Zambia to South Africa and Namibia.
One of the book’s most useful features is that each of the regional sections begins with a lucid survey of historical and anthropological reports of same-sex patterns. Murray and Roscoe provide revealing commentaries on both the articles in this book as well as a wide range of documents, not included, from both ethnographic and literary sources, some dating back several centuries. The volume concludes with a review of the literature on woman–woman marriages throughout Africa, a general intrepretive essay on “Diversity and Identity: The Challenge of African Homosexualities,” and an appendix analyzing the correlations between same-sex patterns and other features of African societies.
Even with its methodological rigor, I found Boy-Wives and Female Husbands compulsively readable. I liked Murray and Roscoe’s crisp and compelling style; only if you burrow deep into the statistical analyses in the appendices do you come across phrases, which may send a shudder through former Literature majors, such as “single trichotomized dependent variable” (yes, they do ‘translate’ all technical jargon). There was an excellent balance, in the overview sections, between broad but well-argued integrative comments and a focus on representative individuals or groups. My only quibble with the book is that I wish I could have contained photographs depicting at least some of the different peoples discused, although I understand the sometimes insurmountable problems, in terms of native customs, in allowing pictures to be taken. And the many individual portraits as written gave the book immediacy and, at times, enormous emotional power.
Another of the book’s strengths is that its fifteen individual texts could hardly be more diverse, from Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi’sGanga-Ya-Chibanda (1687), which Murray and Roscoe interpet through a “strategy of double reading” (in an attempt to separate historical data from cultural biases), to a wide range of contemporary anthropologists. The authors’ introduction, overviews, and conclusion succeed in tying the book together, providing a consistent methodological, and philosophical, frame of reference, and – perhaps most importantly – opening up the implications of the often tightly-focused ethnographic studies. In other words, the whole of this book is of even greater interest, and resonance, than its constituent parts.
I give this revelatory study my highest recommendation.”
________________________________________________________________________
African Terms for Same-Sex Patterns*
kimbanda, diviners; esenge (pl.omasenge), man possessed by female spirit; eshengi (pl. ovashengi), “he who is approached from behind” —Ambo/Ovambo (Wanyama)
wändarwäräd, “male-female”;wändawände,“mannish women” —Amhara (Amharic)
jigele ketön, reciprocal anal intercourse —Bafia (Fia)
mzili (pl., inzili); buyazi —Bagishu/Bageshu, Gisu
kitesha (pl. bitesha), male and female —Bala/Basongye/Ba-songe/Songe
mokobo, tongo, sterile men —Bambala/Mbala
akho’si, lagredis, court eunuch; gaglgo, homosexuality —Dahomey (Fon)
m’uzonj’ame katumua, male lover;m’ndumbi, “podicator” —Gangella/Ovigangella
onek, active male —Gikuyu/Kikuyu
’dan daudu (pl. ’yan daudu); k’wazo/baja, older/younger men; kifi, lesbianism —Hausa
okutunduka vanena, anal intercourse;epanga, lover; oupanga, erotic friendship (male or female) —Herero (Damara)
mwaami, “prophet” —Ila
mudoko dako —Lango
sagoda —Konso
londo, nonmasculine males —Krongo/Korongo/Kurungo
ashtime —Maale/Male/Maalia
kiziri —Maragoli/Logooli
mugawe —Meru
tubele, nonmasculine males —Mesakin (Ngile)
mke-si-mume, “woman, not man,” male and female homosexuals; mashoga (sing.shoga), male; basha (pl. mabasha), partner of mashoga; msagaji, msago (pl.wasagaji, misago), “grinders,” lesbians —Mombasa (Swahili)
soronés, pages —Mossi (More)
tinkonkana, boy wives —Mpondo/Pondo (Pana)
koetsire, sexually receptive males;soregus, friendship bond; ôa-/huru, /huru, mutual masturbation; /goe-ugu, “tribadie” —Naman/Hottentot/Kaf-fir
agyale, “friendship marriages” (sex denied) —Nzema
eshenga, gender-mixing male shamans —Ondonga (Ndonga)
a bele nnem e bango, “he has the heart [aspirations] of boys” —Pangwe/Pahouian (Fang)
umuswezi, umukonotsi, “sodomite”;kuswerana nk’imbwa, kunonoka, kwitomba, kuranana inyuma, ku’nyo, male homosexuality; ikihindu and ikimaze(Mirundi), “hermaphrodite” priests —Rwanda/Ruanda (spoken by Hutus and Tutsis)
nkhonsthana, tinkonkana, nkonkana boy wife; nima, husband —Tsonga (Thonga)
chibadi, chibanda, chibados, jimbandaa, kibamba, quimbanda —Umbundu/Mbunda/ Ovimbundu
omututa, (male) homosexuals; eponji, “lovers” —Wawihé/Viye
gor—digen, men—women; yauss, insertors; oubi, “open,” insertees —Wolof/Woloff
ndongo—techi-la, boy-wives —Zande/Azande/Sandeh
inkosi ygbatfazi, “chief of the women” (diviners); amankotshane, izinkotshane, inkotshane, boy-wife; skesana, cross-gender males; iqgenge, masculine partners—Zulu *The names of most African groups in the historical and ethnographic literature are language names. Language appears in parentheses in the case of groups whose names are not language names. Variants of group names are separate by slashes.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwmddvhEOd1r0ck00o1_400.jpg)
Review:
Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, edited and with overview essays by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, is a landmark in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) / Queer Studies, for its groundbreaking exploration of same-sex life in Africa, both past and present.
I pored over this book with unflagging interest. It seemed to open not one new world but many, reflecting the “multiple Africas” which the authors discuss. The diversity of African cultures was breathtaking. Focusing on same-sex experience was not only intrinsically fascinating, it provided an evocative entry to understanding the entire continent from the defining perspective of human intimacy.
Through the essays in this book, we explore woman–woman marriages in their many forms, transgendered spiritual leaders who for centuries guided their tribes, female warrior “kings,” alternative gender identities among the Swahili, the regulation of sexuality in colonial Zimbabwe, the evolution of male homosexuality in modern West Africa, and much more, reflecting the astonishingly diversity of African GLBT experience. Below I have included the complete table of contents.
This book provides both scholarly insights and intimate human details about the wildly contradictory nature of GLBT experience in sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from the increasingly brutal persecutions, and sometimes murder, of “sodomites” in Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe to the triumph of equality in South Africa, the first country to protect sexual orientation in its Constitution. This book is dedicated to the intrepid group “GALZ [Gays and Lesbians in Zimbabwe] and African people everywhere whose lives and struggles are testimony to the vital presence of same-sex love on the African continent.”
However, Murray and Roscoe are social scientists first and foremost. They provide thoroughly researched and balanced information on African sexuality, as they place same-sex experience in a much broader cultural and historical context. There is, of necessity, some speculation: for instance, that the great Zulu chief Shaka, who formed a vast empire during his rule (1816–1828), may have been homosexual, since he had no wives, fathered no children, and preferred the company of an elite regiment of warrior bachelors. Even when looking at such historical possibilities, I never felt that facts were being twisted for an agenda. On the contrary, this book revealed the enormous diversity of African GLBT experience, with complexities intact.
Besides its historical and anthropological interest, this book directly addresses a key issue in contemporary Africa, namely, the existence of same-sex oriented people in historic African cultures. This has become a central debate not only among Africans but the many members of that continent’s diaspora, including African-Americans. Antigay leaders, in both politics and religion, claim that there were no indigenous same-sex relationships, which they believe were “alien” and “evil” practices foisted upon Africans by colonialists. They even assert that the original languages of Africa contained no words for gay or lesbian, therefore concluding that they did not exist. The authors counter these myths with facts:
The contributions to this volume unequivocally refute claims that African societies lacked homosexual patterns and had no words for those who desire their own sex. Evidence of same-sex patterns has been reported or reviewed here for some fifty African societies, all of which had words – many words, with many meanings – for them. These societies are found within every region of the continent, and they represent every language family, social and kinship organization, and subsistence pattern. There is substantial evidence that same-sex practices and patterns were “traditional” and “indigenous.” While contact between Africans and non-Africans has sometimes influenced both groups’ sexual patterns, there is no evidence that one group ever “introduced” homosexuality where it had not existed before. Since anthropologists and other observers have rarely inquired systematically into the presence of homosexuality in Africa (or elsewhere), absence of evidence can never be assumed to be evidence of absence. Considering that this collection represents the first serious study of the subject, undoubtedly future research will identify many other groups with distinct patterns of homosexuality….
Yes, more research will be welcome, but that in no way diminishes the importance of this groundbreaking, and endlessly fascinating, first study.
The real-world implications of this “debate” could hardly be more important, in the face of Africa’s catastrophic AIDS crisis. Gay-hating cultures refuse to recognize GLBT sexuality, and as a result they will not even consider it in any AIDS-prevention strategy. As with Zimbabwe’s benighted AIDS program, the fear is that if one were merely to mention homosexuality, it would ‘take hold’ of a person and instantly convert them: hence silence, hence mass deaths. How different conditions might be, not just for GLBT Zimbabweans but for all members of the society, if instead of such hateful myths the country’s once gay-inclusive history were recognized.
Murray and Roscoe organize the book geographically, according to four broad regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and include concise background information on the peoples, climate, economy, and history. Part I encompasses the Sudan, Horn of Africa, and East Africa; Part II covers West Africa, including coastal areas and the interior sudanic region; Part III includes Central Africa, from the equatorial tropical rain forests to the Congo basin and east to present-day Tanzania; Part IV focuses on southern Africa, from Mozambique and Zambia to South Africa and Namibia.
One of the book’s most useful features is that each of the regional sections begins with a lucid survey of historical and anthropological reports of same-sex patterns. Murray and Roscoe provide revealing commentaries on both the articles in this book as well as a wide range of documents, not included, from both ethnographic and literary sources, some dating back several centuries. The volume concludes with a review of the literature on woman–woman marriages throughout Africa, a general intrepretive essay on “Diversity and Identity: The Challenge of African Homosexualities,” and an appendix analyzing the correlations between same-sex patterns and other features of African societies.
Even with its methodological rigor, I found Boy-Wives and Female Husbands compulsively readable. I liked Murray and Roscoe’s crisp and compelling style; only if you burrow deep into the statistical analyses in the appendices do you come across phrases, which may send a shudder through former Literature majors, such as “single trichotomized dependent variable” (yes, they do ‘translate’ all technical jargon). There was an excellent balance, in the overview sections, between broad but well-argued integrative comments and a focus on representative individuals or groups. My only quibble with the book is that I wish I could have contained photographs depicting at least some of the different peoples discused, although I understand the sometimes insurmountable problems, in terms of native customs, in allowing pictures to be taken. And the many individual portraits as written gave the book immediacy and, at times, enormous emotional power.
Another of the book’s strengths is that its fifteen individual texts could hardly be more diverse, from Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi’sGanga-Ya-Chibanda (1687), which Murray and Roscoe interpet through a “strategy of double reading” (in an attempt to separate historical data from cultural biases), to a wide range of contemporary anthropologists. The authors’ introduction, overviews, and conclusion succeed in tying the book together, providing a consistent methodological, and philosophical, frame of reference, and – perhaps most importantly – opening up the implications of the often tightly-focused ethnographic studies. In other words, the whole of this book is of even greater interest, and resonance, than its constituent parts.
I give this revelatory study my highest recommendation.”
________________________________________________________________________
African Terms for Same-Sex Patterns*
kimbanda, diviners; esenge (pl.omasenge), man possessed by female spirit; eshengi (pl. ovashengi), “he who is approached from behind”
—Ambo/Ovambo (Wanyama)wändarwäräd, “male-female”;wändawände,“mannish women”
—Amhara (Amharic)jigele ketön, reciprocal anal intercourse
—Bafia (Fia)mzili (pl., inzili); buyazi
—Bagishu/Bageshu, Gisukitesha (pl. bitesha), male and female
—Bala/Basongye/Ba-songe/Songemokobo, tongo, sterile men
—Bambala/Mbalaakho’si, lagredis, court eunuch; gaglgo, homosexuality
—Dahomey (Fon)m’uzonj’ame katumua, male lover;m’ndumbi, “podicator”
—Gangella/Ovigangellaonek, active male
—Gikuyu/Kikuyu’dan daudu (pl. ’yan daudu); k’wazo/baja, older/younger men; kifi, lesbianism
—Hausaokutunduka vanena, anal intercourse;epanga, lover; oupanga, erotic friendship (male or female)
—Herero (Damara)mwaami, “prophet”
—Ilamudoko dako
—Lango
sagoda
—Konsolondo, nonmasculine males
—Krongo/Korongo/Kurungoashtime
—Maale/Male/Maaliakiziri
—Maragoli/Logoolimugawe
—Merutubele, nonmasculine males
—Mesakin (Ngile)mke-si-mume, “woman, not man,” male and female homosexuals; mashoga (sing.shoga), male; basha (pl. mabasha), partner of mashoga; msagaji, msago (pl.wasagaji, misago), “grinders,” lesbians
—Mombasa (Swahili)soronés, pages
—Mossi (More)tinkonkana, boy wives
—Mpondo/Pondo (Pana)koetsire, sexually receptive males;soregus, friendship bond; ôa-/huru, /huru, mutual masturbation; /goe-ugu, “tribadie”
—Naman/Hottentot/Kaf-firagyale, “friendship marriages” (sex denied)
—Nzemaeshenga, gender-mixing male shamans
—Ondonga (Ndonga)a bele nnem e bango, “he has the heart [aspirations] of boys”
—Pangwe/Pahouian (Fang)umuswezi, umukonotsi, “sodomite”;kuswerana nk’imbwa, kunonoka, kwitomba, kuranana inyuma, ku’nyo, male homosexuality; ikihindu and ikimaze(Mirundi), “hermaphrodite” priests
—Rwanda/Ruanda (spoken by Hutus and Tutsis)nkhonsthana, tinkonkana, nkonkana boy wife; nima, husband
—Tsonga (Thonga)chibadi, chibanda, chibados, jimbandaa, kibamba, quimbanda
—Umbundu/Mbunda/ Ovimbunduomututa, (male) homosexuals; eponji, “lovers”
—Wawihé/Viyegor—digen, men—women; yauss, insertors; oubi, “open,” insertees
—Wolof/Woloffndongo—techi-la, boy-wives
—Zande/Azande/Sandehinkosi ygbatfazi, “chief of the women” (diviners); amankotshane, izinkotshane, inkotshane, boy-wife; skesana, cross-gender males; iqgenge, masculine partners
—Zulu
*The names of most African groups in the historical and ethnographic literature are language names. Language appears in parentheses in the case of groups whose names are not language names. Variants of group names are separate by slashes.
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“Reduced to its biological preconditions, the insular structure of the producer’s family announces and fortifies the rupture of the human community of producers. In this sense, the family is essential for the ideological reproduction of capitalist society as a whole. Yet, in the course of reinforcing the alienated relations crystallized in the commodity, the family—and more specifically, the woman—must also respond to real human needs. “Bourgeois civilization has reduced social relations to the cash nexus. They have become emptied of affection.” With due consideration of the factor of sublimation, the human need for affective bonds cannot be eliminated beyond an absolute minimum. If these relations were divested of all immediate expression, human beings could hardly survive the desperate struggle for existence. Love and interpersonal emotions in general are needs which cease to demand at least minimal fulfillment only when human beings have long since ceased to be human. In capitalist society, the woman has the special mission of being both reservoir and receptacle for a whole range of human emotions otherwise banished from society. This mission is directly related to her confinement, in labor, to the production of use-values.”—
Angela Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation”
Angela Davis, y’all. If more Feminists read Angela Davis, Feminism wouldn’t annoy me so much. This was in 1977, when she was in jail.
Anyway, this passage may be dense and hard to get through but last night it almost made me cry because I’ve been trying to articulate something like this, about the work that love and feelings are, the way that work becomes women’s work too often, the way people can simultaneously shut us out and beg us for help. The way I take all this work on myself, and the way, lately, I’ve learned to let a few people help me with it.
This whole essay…it’s brilliant.
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"Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I’m pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I’m also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now."
Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto’s Fist Fight in Heaven,” was on the banned curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program.
http://progressive.org/sherman-alexie
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guerrilla mama medicine: why we write/fight
i had someone recently tell me that they would not want to write or publish anything about the arab spring until they were sure they were making a unique and interesting contribution.
that is such self-centered bullshit. we do not write because we want to show how ‘unique’ we are, want to show…
guerrilla mama medicine: White folks I'm gonna have to ask ya'll to have a fucking seat using "but Africans had slaves too" as your weak ass...
Africans had slaves, but as part of a workforce. Most if not all slaves were prisoners of war, and even then, the slaves assimilated to the tribe in which they were held, and had a chance to marry and have children and earn a place among the tribe given a chance. Also, in…
The Year of Frantz Fanon
Indeed to Fanon we owe the idea that in every human being there is something indomitable which no domination – no matter in what form – can eliminate, contain nor suppress, or at least completely.
Fanon tried to grasp how this “something” could be reanimated and brought back to life under conditions of subjugation.
He argued that this irrepressible and relentless pursuit of freedom required the mobilization of all life reserves. It drew the human subject into a fight to the death – a fight he was called upon to assume as his own task, one he could not delegate to others.
Fanon was also convinced that colonialism was a force animated at its core by a genocidal drive.
To destroy colonialism could only be ensured by violent means, an “absolute praxis” whose goal was to produce life and to free the world from the burden of race.
Post-liberation culture and politics
His diagnosis of life after colonialism was uncompromising.
For him, there was a distinct possibility that post-liberation culture and politics might take the road of retrogression if not tragedy. The project of national liberation might turn into a crude, empty shell; the nation might be passed over for the race, and the tribe might be preferred to the state.
He believed that the liberation struggle had not healed the injuries and trauma that were the true legacy of colonialism.
After liberation, the native élite had been ensconced in intellectual laziness and cowardice. In its will to imitation and its inability to invent anything of its own, the native bourgeoisie had assimilated the most corrupt forms of colonialist and racist thought.
Afflicted with precocious senility, the educated classes were stuck in a great procession of corruption.
The innermost vocation of the new ruling class seemed to be part of the racket or the loot. It had annexed state power for its own profit and transformed the former liberation movement into a trade union of individual interests while making itself into a screen between the masses and their leaders.
Fanon was equally scornful of nationalization which he saw not as a genuine mechanism to build a national economy but as a scandalous, speedy and pitiless form of enrichment.
He warned against the descent of the urban unemployed masses into lumpen-violence. As soon as the struggle is over, he argued, they start a fight against non-national Africans. From nationalism they pass to chauvinism, negrophobia and finally to racism. They are quick to insist that foreign Africans go home to their country. They burn their shops, wreck their street stalls and spill their blood on the city’s pavements and in the shantytowns.
Surveying the postcolony, Fanon could only see a coming nightmare – an indigenous ruling class luxuriating in the delicious depravities of the Western bourgeoisie, addicted to rest and relaxation in pleasure resorts, casinos and beaches, spending large sums on display, on cars, watches, shoes and foreign labels.
In his post-liberation nightmare, he could distinctly see stupidity parading as leadership, patriarchy turning women into wives, vulgarity going hand in hand with the corruption of the mind and of the flesh, all in the midst of hilarity and demobilization.
The spectacle of Africans representing themselves to the world as the archetype of stupidity, brutality and profligacy, he confided, made him angry and sick at heart.
To read Fanon today means to translate into the language of our times the major questions that forced him to stand up, to break away from his roots, and to walk with others, companions on a new road which the colonized had to trace on their own, by their own creativity, with their indomitable will.
FREE PDF - Please buy the book to support the movement.
This is a book about fighting back. The dominant culture—civilization—is killing the planet, and it is long past time that those of us who care about life on earth began to take the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living being.
By now we all know the statistics and trends: 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, there is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed, amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations are collapsing, and so on. Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day. If we don’t know those statistics and trends, we should.
This culture destroys landbases. That’s what it does. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that comes to mind cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground? One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested (we’ve all heard of the cedars of Lebanon). Greece was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested.
We’ll say it again: this culture destroys landbases.
And it won’t stop doing so because we ask nicely.
We don’t live in a democracy. And before you gasp at this blasphemy, ask yourself: do governments better serve corporations or living beings? Does the judicial system hold CEOs accountable for their destructive, often murderous acts?
Here are a couple of riddles that aren’t very funny—Q: What do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun? A: Two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. Q: What do you get when you cross two nation-states, a large corporation, forty tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings? A: Retirement, with full pay and benefits (Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide, which caused the mass murder at Bhopal).
Do the rich face the same judicial system as you or I? Does life on earth have as much standing in a court as does a corporation?
We all know the answers to these questions.
And we know in our bones, if not our heads, that this culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. We—Aric, Lierre, and Derrick—have asked thousands upon thousands of people of all walks of life, from activists to students to people we meet on buses and planes, whether they believe this culture will undergo that voluntary transformation. Almost no one ever says yes.
If you care about life on this planet, and if you believe this culture won’t voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of resistance?
Most people don’t know, because most people don’t talk about it.
This book talks about it: this book is about that shift in strategy, and tactics.
This book is about fighting back.
We must put our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on this planet. We must start to fight back. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men resisting in alliance with the natural world—are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They’re not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it,” or “It’s too big and scary,” or “I’m too busy,” or “But those in power will kill us if we effectively act against them,” or “If we fight back, we run the risk of becoming like they are,” or “But I recycled,” or any of a thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see. They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.
They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, but if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter.
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
The Seven chakras and their corresponding Orisha
1st (root) chakra: Shango
Goals:
1. Relax tensions in order to reduce karma and worldly entanglement.
2. Refine sense organs so the confusion and pain do not follow the seeking of temporary satisfaction
3. Guard against polluting sensory organs though over-indulgence.
4. Begin to act wisely and with moderation
5. Seek liberation from lower realms.
6. Guard against violent behavior based on insecurity.
7. Be motivated towards self-improvement
2nd (reproductive organs) chakra: Yemoja
Goals:
1. Observe and study the effect of the moon upon the emotions
2. Monetary wealth should precede fulfillment of sensual desires and sexual life
3. Be free of base emotions such as anger, envy and greed
4. Remember that a negative mind brings disaster
5. Guard against over possessive
6. Regulate primal needs in order to maintain your health
7. Elevate the consciousness through fine arts and crafts
3rd (navel) chakra Oshun
Goals:
1. Recognize that using anger to control others leads to failure
2. Reflect more on the consequences of actions
3. Guard against vanity and false pride
4. Motivation is stimulated by the need for recognition, immortality, and power
5. Seek to develop a positive ego and identity
6. Give and selfless service
7. Let love and compassion radiate within
4th (heart) chakra: Ogun
Goals:
1. Develop a higher sense of awareness and sensitivity
2. Emphasize a sense of purity, innocence, and magnetism
3. Reflect upon inner sounds
4. Strive to become independent and self-emanating
5. Strive to attain wisdom and inner strength
6. Seek to control breathing and heart rate
7. Purity of relationships comes through the inner balancing of female and male energies
5th (throat) chakra: Obatala
Goals:
1. @urify your sound to affect listeners in a positive way
2. Awaken the dawning of awareness of eternal knowledge
3. Supreme reason must
overcome emotions of the heart
4. Use psychic energy and clairvoyance to communicate 1
WITHOUT W0RDS (try it)
5. Guard against negative thought and use your knowledge wisely
6. Become master of the entire self
7. Concentrate on the cooling mechanism (the throat)
6th (3rd Eye) charka: Orunmila
Goals:
1 Meditate on the 3rd eye to eradicate transgressions and impurities
2. You reveal the divine within, you reflect divinity within others
3. practice austerity to about cosmic oneness
4. Maintain proper balance through spiritual devotion
5. Become one-pointed. Become beyond the negative forces that pull one in many directions
6. You may interpret the inner meanings of cosmic laws, you may generate scriptures
7. You have the ability to induce visions of the past, present and future
7th (crown) chakra: Ori:
Goals:
1. Strive to reach the guru within. Through the consciousness one is able to attain oneness with the all
2. Strive to lose the illusion of the individual self. Realize that the cosmic principles that govern the entire universe are within you also
3. Strive to feel the divine and fully realize the divinity within.
Oya “corresponds” to the respiratory system and Eshu that of central nervous system culminating at the medula oblongata (I,e, the crossroads of the twin fires) in the human body
If we look closely we can see how the fundamental interaction between the the brain and the central nervous system, serves as a micro-cosm of the connection between the 6th and 7th chakras and Eshuvia jacksta
(via seaoftinyflames)
"Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure than women have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—-and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires."
bell hooks (via dirtylibrarianthoughts)
when you’re doing it right…
(via ethiopienne)
(via seaoftinyflames)
