NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
My backstory kills your axe to grind bs as it makes no sense to be here if I felt such a way.
Its disingenuous to say hes just an entertainer knowing his mom was a STAUNCH anti-colonialist activist called Nigeria’s ‘lioness of Lisabi.’
She led protest marches of up to 10,000 women. She drove the creation of the Nigerian Women’s Union and lobbied for the right to vote. The Nigerian police threw her off a second floor balcony in her late 70s killing her. Fela was not just an “entertainer” he was the son of one of Nigeria’s powerful activists. His cousin is Wole Soyinka. Fela grew up in a activist family and was more in tune and observant to Black liberation than 99.9% of Nigerians and THAT’S who you are making out to be “just an entertainer”?
GTFOH. His music still speaks to the ills of Nigeria because of his upbringing and his experiences. And thats who you are downplaying when he spoke on Africans lacking a pride that it took others outside the continent to inspire them. We can go a step further to where after he got with his Black Panther girlfriend who put him onto the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Kwame Ture, Nikki Giovanni, The Last Poets, Jesse Jackson, Nina Simone, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and, Malcolm X, he was able to draw parallels between the effects of American racism that stemmed from generations of slavery and the colonial racism that he experienced in Nigeria. in his own words he said, unlike people in Nigeria he saw that black American were unabashedly confronting the systems of black oppression, instead of embracing it. Its not a super power. Proximity to the cruelest oyinbos on earth will create a rebellious people from Haiti to the US. And to show you that the seeing Black Americans on 125th street Fela mentioned wasnt pulled out his has, Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah had the same experience 20 years earlier. Harlem was the world’s Black Nationalism epicenter. Kwame’s mentor was Black historian John Henrik Clark (my dad’s professor at Hunter) via John’s words about Kwame’s time in Black America
These evenings were a vital part of Kwame Nkrumah's American education. He was going to a university – the university of the Harlem Streets. This was no ordinary time and these street speakers were no ordinary men ...The streets of Harlem were open forums, presided over [by] master speakers like Arthur Reed and his protege Ira Kemp. The young Carlos Cook [sic], founder of the Garvey oriented African Pioneer Movement was on the scene, also bringing a nightly message to his street followers. Occasionally Suji Abdul Hamid [sic], a champion of Harlem labour, held a night rally and demanded more jobs for blacks in their own community ...This is part of the drama on the Harlem streets as the student Kwame Nkrumah walked and watched.
All these dudes looked to Harlem as the source of Black liberation. Most Africa did NOT have the strain of militancy that came out it Harlem, and many African activists viewed Harlem as a source. In his own words, Kwame said his time in the US made him realize that “we have to reset the African personality to be more prideful.” You really think these dudes left the Black diasporan epicenter of the world and not be aware of the shortcomings of Africa that needed to be addressed?
These dudes werent pulling shyt out their ass.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-927290432-0ce64c0bd99e4249844893a618c8fb06.jpg)
.jpg)
