Been thinkin a lot lately about Africa, partially because I spent a lot of time catching up on sleep, and as I let my mind wander while lying in bed my eyes tend to fly over my Bob Marley hangup thing that says "AFRICA UNITE" and it's got all the flags around and Marley in the middle next to the continent and almost everyone who's ever seen it asks me why Bob Marley cared about Africa Uniting (and clearly that can't be avid listeners in the first place since Africa Unite's a really well known Bob Marley song, but besides that). So then I go into a mini-rant about how the Rastafari understoof the connection to Africa no matter where they were in the world and how Bob Marley yearned for a United Africa, much like many of the African revolutionaries during the times of African countries gaining their independence from the conquistadors.
That will of course prompt the second part of my miniangerrant which is anger at African-Americans seperating themselves from Africa and not seeing why there's a need to not do that. Or the danger that comes with seperating "Africans" from "African-Americans"
When I was a kid my parents never referred to any of us as anything other than African and that helped me more than I realized but it's constantly been a source of confusion for people I talk to about it. It's kinda odd to not know the ancestral connection, because you can't claim a country like second generation kids can. I try not to look at that as a downside, because whenever I think about Africa as a whole I see it all as a place where I'm from, but it's not the same thing as kids who are Ghanian or Nigerian or Egyptian, etc.
And so then you're left with claiming America, which I've really never had any sort of desire to. I was talking to Bryce about that the other day, national pride, and my opinion of America's unaffected by the rest of the world's views, but has merely formed as a result of disagreeing with the way that the country is run, has been run, its history of action towards others, and ultimately everything that it's built upon. So I'm not quick to claim.
But but but, what does any of this have to do with anything I've sort of forgotten what I was ultimately talking about. Maybe it was this idea of a united Africa and how that's necessary. Or perhaps the notion that I consider myself African even if that's as specific as I can be. Or that the hall smells really bad when the rugby guys get back after their games. I'm not sure.
Maybe the point is that I wish Brown people of all shades and ethnicities were more united. The other day Tarit asked me why Deshi doesn't do things with SOCA or SASS or SASA on campus since India has more in common with eastern Africa than the rest of Asia.
Thinking about India always makes me think about the ridiculous nomer of "the Indian subcontinent"which then makes me remember the completely political move to seperate Africa into 'North Africa' and 'Sub-Saharan Africa'. It's so quiet and so unheard of but it means so much and it's going to mean more down the road.
So Africa is a continent, and "scholars" tend to focus on "North" Africa for "culture" and "history" of early civilizations. I use so many quotation marks because it's all absurd and bullshit and I'll never understand why everyone in The Prince of Egypt looked like they were British people who'd spent the day tanning on the beach.
Anyway, so that's the first seperation. THEN the clever move was made to ever so quietly re-define the "White" race and declare (on census forms and all sorts of applications) that "White" includes people of "Middle Eastern and North African descent"
WHAT. Since we know that the concept of race has nothing to do with our genetics and everything to do with it being a social construct then it's safesafesafe to assume that such a move has been made not because North Africans all of a sudden look more like the Nordics than the Nubians but because people credit so much to the region of Africa called 'North' and now everything in that region will no longer be part of a Black History because it's all White. Even Black and White should be in quotation marks but I've gotten sick of pressing the shift key.
And of course Sub-Saharan Africa keeps Africa mysterious, stupid, and unable to save itself. At least, that's the implication. And I'm sick of the color hierachy. Even in Africa. In Egypt, you'd try to ask the tour guide if skin color was ever an issue and he claimed no but then why was it that everyone who worked on the boat just so happened to be Nubian while all the tour guides I saw in the country were clearly more of Middle Eastern desent.
For Bob Marley's 60th birthday, there was this hugenormous celebration in Ethiopia and his kids came and all these people performed and celebrated his ideas and hopes for the continent and there's a documentary about it called Africa Unite and I think everyone should watch it.
I'd like to make a documentary about that seperation within the race, and what do Afro-Latinos think? and Afro-Caribbeans. etc..
My people need another Bob Marley.
1 comment:
But really, then, aren't you both African AND African-American? Because ultimately, of course, it's all a question of perception (that is, the way you are perceived by others), which has far more with the way others choose to perceive you than the way you wish to present yourself to others. For to someone born and raised in an African country, an African-American is not in the same way "African." Alternatively, to the majority of white Americans, African-Americans are not in the same way "American."
Then again, can there truly be said to be one, quintessential way in which to be "African" or "American?" Or even "African-American?" And, furthermore, then, is the idea of One Africa United sort of an artificial construct? Historically the continent was never united. Indeed, it is those divisions that allowed Europeans to perpetrate the imperial/colonial evils whose effects are seen all too clearly to this day.
This, of course, could be all the more to your point that Brown People ought to be more united. I hear a little of Ngugi wa Thiong’o in that. If you haven’t already read Decolonising the Mind, you should. The thing is, just as there was not a unified, existentially African “oneness” before colonization, there is not now and I see no reason why there would be. The postcolonial condition which the vast majority of Brown people across the world are subject to (and, if I may say so, certain pockets of pinkish-brown people, too) is hardly uniform: in my opinion, the question of a national identity is often one imported by the colonizer, stimulated by the persistent invention of the proverbial “Other,” who, upon attaining independence, is left with The Question (“What ish [sic.] my nation?”), having faced the colonizer’s perceivedly concrete idea of national self for the past years of subservience.
What am I arguing? I don’t think I even have a point. Don’t worry about it.
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