Happy 76th Birthday, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47.
Was reading some remarks made by Soyinka on Haiti, not too long ago.
Before discussing them, and the contribution of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, to the body of literature about Haiti's history, I'd like to point out that yesterday Black Kos co-sponsored a fund-raising diary with 2 auctions for Haiti, which very briefly hit the rec list and then sank into a black hole (in more ways than one)
Give the diary some love and funds please.
Haitian Earth Quake Fundraiser, co-sponsored by Black Kos
The lack of interest and sustained support around here re: Haiti (and in the media at large it is worse) is very telling about where progressive priorities lie. Black oil spilling - lots of concern. Black folks blood spilling...not so much.
~~~~~ End of commercial message - now back to Soyinka ~~~~~
Back in the beginning of the year, Wole Soyinka delivered the Derek Walcott Lecture, on the island of Saint Lucia, which was the birthplace of Nobel Laureate Walcott.
He spoke on Walcott, Africa and Haiti.
This lecture took place right after racist remarks made here in the US about Haiti being cursed by the devil, and the earthquake as some type of divine retribution for Haiti's sins.
The St Lucia Star covered the event with a headline that read
African laureate says Haiti disaster not related to Obeah!
In a discussion that touched on issues from literature to politics, Soyinka addressed the question of Haiti’s misfortune—both the natural and the man-made. Much of Haiti’s misfortune has, of course, been man-made. "It stems back to the unequal relationship between us and the European world," he said. "It used to be one of equals, going all the way back to Benin and Portugal. They had trading, they had embassies. In the first writings of the penetrators, they were respectful.
"The distortion came through a mixture of evangelism both Christian and Islam combined with commercial interests. There was a turning point: The use of the Berbers to subdue the people south of the Sahara; the first shipment of slaves; the need to demonize Africa to justify slavery."
Soyinka’s opinion was that Haiti’s most recent disaster was not some karmic consequence and that responses to the disaster were more important, more telling than the disaster itself. On this score, the Nobel Prize winner had some choice words for African leaders. "They should really be ashamed of themselves," the outspoken writer said of the continent’s leaders response (or lack thereof) to the most recent disaster in Haiti. "No symbolic gesture of sympathy, quite apart from humanitarian response. If they were conscious, they would be the first to act and to say something. Haiti, to Africa, is a very special zone in the Diaspora. It is the scene of great heroism."
He spoke also of the period after the fall of colonialism, in Africa and the Caribbean.
"It’s just unfortunate that revolution drags in its wake contradictions," Soyinka summed up the problems that Haiti and African countries have in common. "It eats up its own people. Participants have to work together carefully so the leaders don’t become a mirror image of the thing they fought against."
But according to Soyinka, Haiti might be in an even worse situation than some African nations that it could be compared to. He pointed to a flood in Mozambique which had the effect of consolidating national momentum.
"After the war of liberation in Mozambique, they fought each other," he said. "There was brutal civil war. But they had a respite and then there was the flood, so they had the opportunity to harness all the national resources to recover. If Mozambique had not had that period of respite, they might be in a similar state as Haiti. Haiti did not have their period of respite."
There was a period of hope, however, when it seemed that Haiti’s democracy would finally overpower its dictators.
"Aristide was one of the finer possibilities to help Haiti recover herself again," Soyinka said. He has had contact with the former President of Haiti, who was ousted in a coup and ‘rescued’ by American soldiers who dropped him off in Africa.
Soyinka understands speaking truth to power, and going to jail for his words and thoughts.
He was first arrested in 1965 for seizing control of a radio station and demanding the cancellation of rigged elections. He was freed on a technicality. Two years later, during a civil war, he was jailed for trying to broker peace between the Nigerian and Biafran parties. He wrote poetry on tissue paper while in jail. This poetry became the collection Poems from Prison. He is a consistent critic, not just of Nigerian dictatorship, but of dictators all over the world, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who many African descendants still sympathize with. His writings, he says, are concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it."
His biography, for those not familiar with it:
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honoured. In 1994, he was designated United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication. One of the most prominent members of the eminent Ransome-Kuti family, his mother Grace Eniola, was the daughter of Rev. Canon JJ Ransome-Kuti, sister to Olusegun Azariah Ransome-Kuti and Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, making Soyinka cousins to the late Fela Kuti, the late Beko Ransome-Kuti, the late Olikoye Ransome-Kuti and Yemisi Ransome-Kuti... He became a Professor of Comparative Literature at the then University of Ife in 1975). He is currently an Emeritus Professor at the same university.
Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1965, he made a broadcast demanding the cancellation of the rigged Western Nigeria Regional Elections following his seizure of the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio. He was arrested, arraigned but freed on a technicality by Justice Esho. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring Nigerian and Biafran parties. While in prison he wrote poetry on tissue paper which was published in a collection titled Poems from Prison. He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his unwarranted imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972).
He has been an implacable, consistent and outspoken critic of many Nigerian military dictators, and of political tyrannies worldwide, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. A great deal of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". This activism has often exposed him to great personal risk, most notable during the government of General Sani Abacha (1993–1998), which pronounced a death sentence on him "in absentia". During Abacha's regime, Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the "Nadeco Route" on motorcycle. While abroad, he visited parliaments and conferred with world leaders to impose a regime of sanctions against the brutal Abacha regime. These actions and his setting up of the Radio Kudirat helped immensely in securing Nigeria's return to civilian democratic governance. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. When civilian rule returned in 1999, Soyinka returned to a hero's welcome back in Lagos, Nigeria. He accepted an Emeritus Professorship at Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) on the condition that the university bar all former military officers from the position of chancellor.
Here's a promo from 'Wole Soyinka; Child of the forest' a documentary produced by Akin Omotoso.
Derek Walcott, in whose honor the lecture series was named was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992:
Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.
An important collection of 3 of his plays, now bundled as "The Haitian Trilogy: Plays: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and the Haytian Earth" he
uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.
In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries—led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe—whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.
From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.
So here we have two black Nobel Laureates, each with links to Haiti, in their prose, poetry, plays and politics.
We are asking you to fight the blackout in the media and the help sustain the efforts here at Daily Kos to keep Haiti on your radar.
You may not get a Nobel prize for your efforts, but the reward will be life, and hopefully a new future for Haiti and Haitians.
Thank you/Merci/Meci/Muito obrigada/Muchisimas Gracias.
=================================================================
News roundup by dopper0189
=================================================================
=================================================================
The rightwing media is effective even when they push BS, we need to be our toes to fight them. ColorOfChange: Tell CNN to stop echoing FOX News.
=================================================================
FOX is up to its old race-baiting tricks. But this time, CNN is repeating FOX's distortions and taking them mainstream.
FOX is claiming that under President Obama, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is refusing to prosecute voting rights offenses when the victims are White and the perpetrators are Black. It's a bogus story based on the allegations of one former Republican DOJ attorney, and it sidesteps a mountain of facts.
On Tuesday, FOX complained that other news outlets weren't covering the story. The next day, CNN uncritically echoed FOX's distorted story, lending it mainstream credibility. We expect FOX to engage in this kind of race-baiting. But CNN should know better, and we need to hold them publicly accountable.
FOX consistently plays to the fear that President Obama will not govern Blacks and Whites equally, and they're hard at work promoting this twisted narrative again.
The story that FOX is pushing revolves around an incident on election day 2008 in which several men from a small, fringe organization called the New Black Panther Party (NBPP -- no relationship to the original Black Panther Party) stood in front of a polling place in a majority Black voting district, one of them carrying a nightstick. The Bush Justice Department charged them with civil voter intimidation charges, after deciding that the case didn't meet the bar for criminal charges. After Obama took office, the Department of Justice dropped most of the remaining charges, saying that they weren't supported by the facts and the law, while obtaining an injunction against the man who had been carrying a nightstick.
But in FOX's hands, the story has become that the case was dropped because of anti-White policies in the Obama administration, with Andrew Breitbart and host David Asman effectively calling the President a racist. CNN's willingness to follow FOX's lead is inexcusable.
==============================================================
==============================================================
Officially in WTF department! School officials shackled Ja'Briel Weston to a chair for being disobedient. Two days later, they did it again. Now his father is suing. Why we should all be concerned. The Root: Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New Orleans? Seriously?
==============================================================
Six-year-old Ja'Briel Weston was shackled by his ankle to a chair for disobeying his first-grade teacher. Two days later, he was apprehended by an armed security guard, dragged down a hallway and handcuffed to a chair for getting into a shoving match with another student. This didn't happen at some medieval-age boarding school. It happened this year, this May, in New Orleans, at Sarah T. Reed Elementary School.
When Ja'Briel's parents found out about this, his father, Sebastian Weston, met with the school's principal, Daphyne Burnett, who not only confessed to the child cuffing but also said that she'd have it done again if the child got out of line. According to a legal complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, "When [Ja'Briel's] father implored the school principal to stop these unconstitutional practices, she insisted that school policy required the arrests and seizures at the school."
The juvenile-justice advocacy organizations are helping the father sue not only the school and its security officers but also the Recovery School District, the city's public school system, for allowing the "required" policy to take shape. Since the incident, young Ja'Briel has suffered pain in his wrists and ankles, as well as longer-lasting harm to his emotional and psychological well-being. This is increasingly cruel, but unfortunately not unusual punishment, since New Orleans isn't the only city to cuff a 6-year-old. But if there is a city that could do with less emotional pain, it is New Orleans, whose children in the thousands, displaced as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have bounced city to city, school to school, ever since.
==============================================================
San Jose Mercury News: Mehserle case re-ignites debate over lack of diverse juries - impact on verdicts.
==============================================================
Moments after the verdict was announced this week in a racially charged case involving a white transit cop who fatally shot a black man, the accusations rang out.
Critics said the jury convicted former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle of the least serious of three homicide charges — involuntary manslaughter — because none of the jurors were black. Three were Hispanic, one was Asian, and eight were white.
Though the verdict prompted protests and looting in Oakland on Thursday, the violence was limited — mostly likely because it is so rare for a jury to find an on-duty police officer guilty of any abuse that the verdict was viewed by some as a small victory.
But the case has rekindled a hotly debated legal issue — the impact of the under-representation of minorities on juries, particularly blacks.
Commenting on the makeup of the jury, Olis Simmons, executive director of a youth group in Oakland, said: "I think everyone — the family, every young black person who is afraid of the police — is going to see this as a miscarriage of justice."
==============================================================
==============================================================
A documentary shows how women toppled a dictatorship and brought Liberia's decade-long civil war to a halt. The Root: Sending the Devil Home.
==============================================================
Praying the Devil Back to Hell is such an exceptional documentary, transcending mere fact telling to provide a shocking occasion of human affirmation. In a shorthand of crisp but telling images and interviews, the 2008 film, recently released on DVD, tells us of the remarkable victory had by a Liberian peace movement. The movement was led by women in the face of a civil war marked by brutal extremes of murder, mutilation and rape.
The movement was largely organized by Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian social worker who was able to bring Christian and Muslim women together with such determined and growing force. Armed with white T-shirts and prayer, and using one of the oldest bargaining tools in the world -- sex -- the women took on the warlords and helped bring an end to the civil war being fought by the monstrous Charles Taylor. Taylor was a dictator, it is true, but it should be noted that he was no more cruel than the rebel forces focused on removing him from power. War is like that.
The award-winning film proves what Picasso felt was the deeper identity of war -- no matter the ideology, the nation involved or even the religion, there is a consistent connection true to all conflicts. That connection is the slaughter of the innocents. Those who fight wars rarely recognize the individual humanity of their victims.
Guns and bombs will kill, wound and mutilate whomever is available, or just happens to be, as it is said, in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wrong place for women is anywhere that battle takes place. In the blood-spewing theater of war, rape is yet another weapon used against the innocent.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell, directed by Gini Reticker, moves the viewer from heartbreak to a feeling of unexpected affirmation in a time when human cruelty is on daily display on the international stage. These women of Liberia decided to rouse their courage and stand up in the face of the devil they knew so well he could have been a close relative. In the film, each of the women interviewed speaks simply of right and wrong; they realized that civil war was destroying their country. And they realized that it was destroying them as well; they had become were sexual pawns in a man's war.
==============================================================
Being a global showcase unites the nation, which manages to quell violence, overcome racial tension and present an ebullient African spirit for all the world to see. LA Times: South Africa the nation is the big World Cup winner.
==============================================================
Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — They would never finish the stadiums on time. Transportation would be a fiasco. Tourists who weren't shot, stabbed or killed in car crashes would get food poisoning. And if that didn't ruin the soccer World Cup, the bad South African service would.
It wasn't just the British tabloids that predicted South Africa could never pull off the World Cup tournament successfully. There were plenty of skeptics in South Africa.
But the tournament that ends with the Netherlands-Spain final Sunday buries the stereotype of South Africa as a violent place where nothing really works, incapable of staging a global showcase.
Yes, there were transport mix-ups and armed robberies, some of them vicious. And the cost of staging the event blew out from an estimated $329 million to somewhere between $4 billion and $5.5 billion.
But the faults weren't enough to overshadow the event's vibrancy and enthusiasm, and its ebullient African style. Mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics are often defined by the people who host them. If the first World Cup on African soil wasn't perfect, at least it was real.
==============================================================
New York Times: In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging to the Edge.
==============================================================
Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails.
Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why.
"Don’t they have a heart, or a suggestion?" asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children’s noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong.
Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins.
The tableau does contain a spectrum of circumstances: precarious, neglected encampments; planned tent cities with latrines, showers and clinics; debris-strewn neighborhoods where residents have returned to both intact and condemnable houses; and, here and there, gleaming new shelters or bulldozed territory for a city of the future.
==============================================================
==============================================================
I sound like a DC pundit with my "blame bothe side" mantra, but this article does make some valid points (dopper0189). Don’t blame the dropouts, blame the outdated education system.
==============================================================
During the past few weeks, a number of blogs have chimed-in on the recent National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) dropout report, which highlights the large number of Black and Hispanic/Latino students who fail to graduate from high school each year. According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, approximately 1.2 million students fail to graduate from high school each year; more than half of those students are from a minority group. I came across another one as I read a friend’s Facebook posts. I think it is safe to say that the statistics did not surprise those of us affiliated with public education as parents, teachers, or advocates. Surprise and disappointment are two completely different emotions. I am not surprised, but I am deeply disappointed. I will even admit that I try to ignore these studies since they report the same thing, repeatedly. The results have not changed because the formula has not changed. It really is that simple.
These studies fail to address the real impetus behind the dropout rate: No one asks students what they like, need and want to gain from attending school 180 days each year, for 13 years. Yes, I said students, as in the kids subjected to attending schools in war-zones, or schools that are falling apart around them. Additionally, schools operate under our government’s ‘pass the test or fail’ regime, it is not surprising to me why kids first mentally dropout, then physically dropout shortly thereafter.
Teachers are up against: the pressure of testing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the push to link future employment and merit pay to students’ test scores, an attack on the entire profession, and the blatant movement to undermine and/or abolish teacher unions. Our government expects teachers to teach under these conditions, without consideration for how the current climate affects them both personally and professionally. As a parent, I would prefer that my children’s teachers do not have to focus on such distractions while trying to engage them academically.
So how would I propose curbing the dropout rate? Many states, including Georgia, opted to employ Graduation Coaches in high schools to work with those at-risk of dropping out. This individual works alongside the school’s counselors, but also takes on some mentoring responsibilities as well. When considering the size of most of Georgia’s high schools, usually at least 2,000 students, one Graduation Coach is not sufficient.
==============================================================
==============================================================
Maybe he felt he was looking out for the little people. Black Enterprise: NAACP: BP Gives Minorities Worst Clean Up Jobs.
==============================================================
The NAACP is seeking a meeting with BP CEO Tony Hayward to address concerns that minorities are being hired for the most dangerous jobs in assisting with the oil spill clean up, and "to ensure that all communities, including communities of color along the Gulf Coast are fully restored and receive needed support and assistance from BP."
In a letter to Hayward dated July 8, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous, said "Workers of color tend to be assigned the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins, while white workers tend to be in supervisory, less strenuous positions." He urged BP to establish monitoring mechanisms to make sure that workers of color were given better paying jobs.
================================================================
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves; when the crushing weight of today is laying low; when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this penal colony rail road earth; it is important to remember...
destiny
under volcanoes & timeless years within watch
and low tones. Around corners, in deep caves among
misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds.
Cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. Resurrect work.
Check your distance blue. Come earthrise men
deepblack and ready, come sunbaked women rootculture on the move.
Just do what you're supposed to do, what you say you gonta do
not the impossible, not the unimaginative,
not copy clothed as original and surely
not bitter songs in european melodies. Take hold
do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple
talk of mission & interpret destiny
put land and selfhood on the minds of our people
do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. Capture tomorrows
-- Haki Madhubuti
==============================================================
The front porch is now open. Kudos to Black Kossak Adept2u for today's diary Tim Wise on White Privilege and to Tim Wise for once again having sparked a discussion on race and privilege.
If you are new to Black Kos, introduce yourself. We are a rainbow family here.
Ribs are sizzlin' on the grill, there's corn on the cob and fresh squeezed limeade. Moonshine is round the back of the house ;)