african history
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About the #BlackPantherSyllabus Best known for his research into television content and cultivation theory, George Gerbner (1972) said that “representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation” (p. 44). Historically, the Black experience has been absent, underrepresented, or misrepresented. Intersections within the identity have suffered with additional pressures, promoting a continued…
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Which books have been important in your life? And how did you, the son of a peasant, get to write one in the Kenya of the ’60s? While growing up, we had no books in Gĩkũyũ, my mother tongue. The Bible’s Old Testament became my book of stories. In high school, when I saw a…
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I be holding beauty when I glance upon them theoretically shaping the future into an afro centric sharpness that shook the white power structure into confronting black consciousness organized and mandated to dismiss that old time religion that said everything in its place especially the black…
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Flora and Fauna I wanted to bless my eyes this morning with flora and fauna so I came in from the cold of a dream full of unrelenting rain and opened my eyes to what is customarily my second sighting of the day: My ideological father shot down in the Audubon ballroom where the only…
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i. discordant never/ polyrhythmic like life we were/ in the beginning/ many feet make many sounds we took the tree and made it talk/ a jungle of sounds we produced everyone for miles around heard it gravitated towards it then strangers came chanting like gregor tolling the bell like igor creating a cacophony a frankenstein…
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My son loves mythology. I have invested quite a few dollars and I don’t know how much energy in meeting his mythological needs. From D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths to D’Aulaires’s Book of Norse Myths, it seemed as if we had gone around the world of myths but one day, during a geography lesson, he…
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I now think that those two accomplices–guilt and shame–are probably together the most corrosively painful scourges the human spirit can experience. Precisely because they always and only stem from one’s own failure to keep faith with one’s truest self. With one’s private conscience, one’s most cherished and basic principles, with one’s sense of honor. For…
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Sometime in the late 1930’s, the government in another of its persistent and futile attempts to suppress African cultural survivals, decided that the colony would more easily be governable if drums and other traditional musical instruments were outlawed. The colonials must have sensed, and correctly, the importance of music in the cultural independence and political…
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Living in the shadow of Elmina Castle, the first European building south of the Sahara, built in 1482 by the Portuguese and then occupied by the Dutch (and now a UNESCO World Heritage site for its importance in the transatlantic slave trade) was a small community of former Dutch army conscripts who had served in…
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Elsewhere on the African continent, mission-educated men took power as Africa emerged from direct European colonial rule. The list is long. Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, now a member of the Academie Francaise, is a former seminarian and a leading Catholic intellectual. The late Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivorian president who constructed the world’s…
Tichaona Chinyelu 
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