Readings in African Popular Culture Book

Eerily relevant today, Wole Soyinka writes in 1999 of the scourge of racism in South Africa and around the globe, along with the unguents of forgiveness, reconciliation, and restitution.

The world may be forgiven for exuding a sense of euphoria when prison gates, which once appeared to enclose the entirety of a nation, give the appearance of being suddenly flung open, but the task remains for us to ensure that they are never again slammed shut! Let us hope therefore that peoples and nations that are yet weighed down by the memories of a recent past understand this. Perhaps the debate that is intended in the following pages may lead to the evolution of mechanisms for the accompanying mission of healing, of reconciling, but also of restitution.

David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan --

What is remarkable about Mr. Duke and his bid to represent the Republican party as a presidential candidate? Simply that many Americans were startled to learn that he was a prominent and still active member of the Ku Klux Klan. He lost at the primaries of course, but his loss in the governorship race was a narrow one, and the fact remains a frightening reminder of the yet unconcluded business of racism, not only in the United States, but in much of Europe and the recently desegregated society of apartheid South Africa. After Mr. Duke's political setbacks in his own country, he cavorted briefly with the neo-Nazis and skinheads in Germany but found that the Germans, eager to renounce and distance themselves from any glorification of their shameful past, wisely kept him -- in the main -- at arm's length.

Now, the country of which Mr. Duke is a citizen -- and president manqué [manqué or manquée: 'used to describe what a person could or should have been but never was; past participle of the French verb manquer (to miss, to fail, to lack)] -- has a discriminatory list of human types to which it would not grant entry through its borders -- such a list once included communists (also apartheid South Africa's bogey). Today the list includes drug traffickers, hard-core criminals, and terrorists. Would one exaggerate by claiming that the Klu Klux Klan can be classified as a terrorist organization? Mr. Duke preaches a less virulent form of Klanism, we are informed, but the difference is one of those subtle shades that must be considered lost on actual victims of racism anywhere.

Now, we often hear the United States referred to as a christian nation. What, however, does that religio-cultural parlance disguise within that very nation? The claim may be true, of course, given the fact that the majority of US citizens are indeed christians - practicing or nominal. It is also a fact that this dominant religion is being given a good run for its money by yet another well organized religion - islam - especially among the black, and the black prison population. Both religious facets of a contemporary reality, however, have bonded together to obscure one historical accusation - that the indigenous beliefs of the landmass known as the United States are neither christianity nor islam. Today, the original belief systems and worldviews of the autochhtones (indigenous) exist, for the majority of the inhabitants of the United States, as mere curios, relegated to anthropological studies within protected reservations, and treated just as marginally as the humanity that still observes them.

From the point of view of the Sioux, the Apache, or the Cheyenne, both christianity and islam are alien religions on the land, and it does not surprise them in the least that their adherents interacts with their environment in a way that is, at best, nature-indifferent, or at worst, nature-defiling. The Sioux, Apache, or Cheyenne suffer, however, from the disadvantage of having been turned into a minority on their own continent.

Memory: Conflict and Healing

Every landmark is a testament of history, and in our own indelible instance - from Gorée through the slave forts of Ghana to Zanzibar - every fort and stockade, increasingly turned into museums, is filled with grim evocations of this passage of our history. They are indices of Truth, an essence and a reality that offer any peoples, however impoverished, a value in itself, a value that, especially when rooted in anguish and sacrifice, may dictate a resolve for redemption and strategies for social regeneration. To act in any way that denigrates the lessons, the imperatives of that Truth, for demagogic or other opportunistic reasons, is to pollute a people's Source, and declare a new round of exterior control of a people's heritage.

WEB DuBois:

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul... it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps in bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life...

The mockery of history is complete even down to the underground railroad on which hundred travel every day, this author included. Emissaries of this midget slavemaster, Sani Abacha, however, traverse the world in first-class comfort - at least to such places as still grant them audience - preening themselves as men of independent action, even conviction, but what in reality are they? Slaves into the 21st century, mouthing the mangy mandates of mendacity, ineptitude, corruption, and sadism.

Letter from the Birmingham City Jail[King, Jr]
when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering...
when you have to concoct an answer for
a five-year-old son asking in agonising
pathos: Daddy, why do white people
treat colored people so mean?


The Sosso-Bala [The sacred balafon instrument, known as the Sosso-Bala , has been perceived as the symbol of the freedom and cohesion of the Mandingue community] becomes an unsolicited metaphor for the near intolerable burden of memory, a Muse for the poetry of identity and that elusive 'leaven' in the dough of humanity - forgiveness, the remission of wrongs, and a recovery of lost innocence.