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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3187
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 - 05:55 pm: | 
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Hmmm..
I thought it would be interesting to know what our African board members think about this article. (Of course, all comments are welcomed and would be helpful.)
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OK, you're black, but do you have the identity of an African?
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Rebranding of Africa: A critical conversation was the theme of the International Media Summit held in Accra, Ghana, last week.
If a conference with that theme had taken place in East Africa, half the participants would have bemoaned the fact that Africa is portrayed unfairly by the Western media as a continent of famine, wars, poverty, corruption, and insane rulers.
The other half would have argued that that image is accurate, and that if Africa wants to get be viewed more favourably, then it had better clean up its act. Also, the Western media doesn’t owe us anything. There would a draw.
In West Africa, such a thing wouldn’t happen. There tends to be general agreement that the Western media’s coverage of Africa is still heavily informed by a history of racism.
Unlike in East Africa, in West Africa the debate inevitably dwelt on the big identity issue - what does it mean, in the first place, to be African?
That question was central at the Accra summit partly because of one of the legacies that the Pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah bequeathed his country. When Nkrumah became president, it became policy that any descendant of African slaves could return and become a Ghanaian citizen.
Many African-Americans have done so over the years, and they played a key role in organising the media summit. Also present at the meeting was Africa’s first female head of state, Liberia’s Ruth Sando-Perry (she was chairperson of the Council of State of the Liberia National Transitional Government), the Ashanti king and, perhaps most significantly, Jamaican ambassador Dudley Thompson.
Thompson had a distinguished career as Jamaica’s ambassador to various countries. However, history knows him as an old Pan Africanist soldier and a champion of reparations for slavery. Nearing 90, his voice still envelops a room like a thunder. Dudley was Jomo Kenyatta’s lawyer when he was tried for collaborating with the Mau Mau, and was a lifelong friend of Nkrumah.
THE COMBINATION OF THE ABOVE factors ensured we had to clarify "which Africa" needed rebranding. Those who are more eloquent on these matters, argued that you are not African because you are born in Africa. You are African when Africa is born in you, meaning all black people wherever they are in the world are Africans.
Though these matters don’t exercise us as much on the east coast, by the end of the first day, we were beginning to feel fidgety. On the Monday evening a banquet was held to honour Africa’s Living Legends (Nelson Mandela, Wole Soyinka, former ADB president Babacar Ndiaye, Kofi Annan, Dudley Thomas and Ruth Perry, and some younger new faces like former CNN anchor Tumi Makagbo and the impressive Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, director of the African Women’s Development Fund).
At our table, the two of us from Nairobi were the only ones in Western suits. In the banquet hall, besides us and some Accra-based diplomats, everyone else was in African dress.
If you accept that the hue of our skin isn’t enough to make us Africans, then our dress, our food, our folk tales, and history become even more critical in signposting who we are. In East Africa, we don’t sweat this question the way the West Africans do. We can postpone it, but I sense it’s a conversation we must have one day.
For today, perhaps the most colourful elaboration of this question is to be found in South African President Thabo Mbeki’s now famous I am an African speech, which is available on the Internet. He made it on the occasion of the adoption of his country’s Constitutional Bill in 1996.
That was 10 years ago, but many still wake up to it as their morning inspiration. It’s said that if you’re an African, you'll know why after you listen to it.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for convergence and new products.
E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke
http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/current/Opinion/Opinion2509200611.htm |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 742
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 - 09:25 pm: |
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Yawn...........................! |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3190
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 4 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 08:58 am: |
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Ntfs, why must you harass me on every thread I go? Do you think that that's appropriate behavior, to harass me on every single thread I go? What makes you think it's alright to harass me ON EVERY THREAD I GO? I come to this site to share my views on Black issues, not to be harassed by you. And this is a site where I THOUGHT such expectations were realistic. That a person could give her view without being harassed by certain posters at every corner. Maybe I was wrong for just assuming that. I mean, it's not written anywhere that I know of. But of course it could be written SOMEWHERE...maybe somewhere in small print. (Hmmm) Do you know where I can go to find that information? You know what; that's alright. Forget I asked. I'll just ask Troy the next time he comes back on the board. |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3191
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 10:09 am: |
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But..listen..if you can provide this information before the next time he comes, since he doesn't come often, that would be nice too. I'd appreciate it. 
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Dahomeyahosi
Regular Poster
Username: Dahomeyahosi
Post Number: 88
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 07:35 pm: |
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It seems like the author is contrasting the Pan-African definition of African (African born in you) with the cultural/citizenship definition (born in Africa). I don't consider everyone to be born in Africa an African. That would make those of Indian, Arab, and European ancestry African. I think an African is someone who can trace her ancestry back through a specific ethnic group or groups who are indigenous to the continent, tell the stories of that group, and know that they are a part of those stories. It takes more than blood....it requires a connection and a sense of belonging and reciprocity because we are our ancestors.
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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3205
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 08:22 pm: |
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Dahomeyahosi, thanks for responding.
So, would that disqualify someone like me from being an African?
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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3207
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 08:29 pm: |
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Oh, and I was able to find Mbeki’s riveting speech. I guess, according to the saying Onyango-Obbo recited ("...if you’re an African, you'll know why after you listen to it"), this would not disqualify me from being one:
I Am an African
By Thabo Mbeki
Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa
I owe by being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.
At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.
I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.
I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.
I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as (word not readable) of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.
There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!
Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.
I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.
The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.
It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal.
It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.
It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.
Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!
Today it feels good to be an African.
It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe - congratulations and well done!
I am an African.
I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.
The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.
The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.
The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.
This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.
This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes.
Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now!
Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!
However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!
Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!
Statement of Deputy President TM Mbeki, on Behalf of the African National Congress, on the Occasion of the Adoption by the Constitutional Assembly of “The Republic of South Africa Constitutional Bill 1996.” Cape Town, 8 May -- Issued by: Office of the Deputy President
http://www.nathanielturner.com/iamanafrican.htm |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 762
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 01:48 am: |
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"Ntfs, why must you harass me on every thread I go? Do you think that that's appropriate behavior, to harass me on every single thread I go? What makes you think it's alright to harass me ON EVERY THREAD I GO? I come to this site to share............... You know what; that's alright. Forget I asked. I'll just ask Troy the next time he comes back on the board."
Oh, stop it Tonya. I was just having a little fun teasing. Sometimes you take a little ribbing too serious. But I'll stop. Dang........ |
Renata
Veteran Poster
Username: Renata
Post Number: 1348
Registered: 08-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 03:01 pm: |
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Good topic....
I have no idea why, but all of my life I've actually felt more African than American and seem to relate to them better. One big reason I decided to stay in this part of town instead of moving to Sandy Springs/Dunwoody/Buckhead, etc. is that I want my son to know how to relate to African people, and he's more likely to meet some here than in those other areas.
One BIG problem we have with Black unity is that too many of us want to identify with white culture and even start to think of other blacks (Africans/Haitians, etc.) as though we're white just to be more in tune with them.
And we're too fucking stupid to realize that EVEN WE would treat a Mr. Stoyanov or a Mr. Chowdhury better than we would a Mr. Ngatta. We CONFIRM our position, by AGREEING with it and participating in keeping it that way. |
Dahomeyahosi
Regular Poster
Username: Dahomeyahosi
Post Number: 90
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 09:47 pm: |
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Tonya I'll begin to answer your question with a question....you asked for the opinion of Africans on the board and you had a group of people in mind when you asked. Did you mean black people who were born on the continent? That is a necessity for me but not sufficient.
My definition of an African does not include members of the black diaspora. Personally I think one has to culturally AND "racially" African to carry the name. But you have concluded that Mbeki's definition includes you and that is key...there are as many definitions of African as there are people and few people listen to mine...maybe for good reason. |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3213
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 12:10 am: |
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Hi Dahomeyahosi. No, I wasn't picturing black people who were born on the continent necessarily. I was thinking of blacks living in Africa in general, whether they were born there or not. For example, we have a poster--Anunaki3600--who, if I’m not mistaken, was born here in the US but is currently residing in Africa. I considered him an African. It might have been ignorant of me but I did. I sort of figured that if Angelina Jolie can go there and have a baby and secure citizenship, someone like Anunaki3600, a black man living there for some years now, can/should be considered a citizen too. And so you have a black man who I thought was a citizen of Africa..so in my ignorant mind his race and citizenry made him an African. Of course, now, I get the feeling that it is not only ignorant of me; it may be offensive as well. If so, I’m truly sorry. As for Mbeki’s speech, it just makes me FEEL like an African. Anunaki, though, seemed like a real one at the time. |
Dahomeyahosi
Regular Poster
Username: Dahomeyahosi
Post Number: 91
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 09:07 pm: |
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Tonya I don't think anything you said is ignorant. You are right that can gain citizenship by birth in an African country or through application just as in America but when I think of Africans I think of cultural identity rather than a claim to a passport. Sort of like being born in North Carolina will not make you Cherokee nor will living there for 10 years. |
Igbogirl
Regular Poster
Username: Igbogirl
Post Number: 227
Registered: 09-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 10:23 pm: |
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Part of the reason I identify as an African is because of my family. I'm the only person in my family NOT to have been born in Africa. My folks identify themselves and me as African, no question. So that is sort of ingrained in me. If I turned around and called myself an American (I live in the US) or a European (I was educated in Europe) my family would probably just crack up laughing. Going to Nigeria is referred to as "coming/going home". |
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