MF GALAXY

(Repost of an article I wrote for Vue Weekly in 2008) It’s African History Month again, and across the city and across the continent, folk are gearing up for education and celebration. But not everyone is celebrating. Some folks are fighting over the name. Others are saying the month shouldn’t even exist. “All other peoples take up the other eleven months well,” says Winston Hawthorne, an engineer and community activist with the National Black Coalition of Canada, a major force behind the Month in E-Town. “We just need a little space for ourselves so we have time to talk with ourselves, see ourselves and do for ourselves. We’re behind in self-representation.” Reminds me of Berke Breathed’s popular Bloom County comic strip , years ago, when one lad asked the sole Black character, Oliver Wendell Jones, why Ebony magazine should exist. If Ebony is okay, shouldn’t Ivory be all right? What Breathed and his boy didn’t get is that all the other mags on the stand are a...

Ground-breaking Egyptologist on Cheikh Anta Diop, connecting Senegal to Ancient Egypt, Plato as the student of African-Egyptian ideology, and the link between philosophy and mummification LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Across the world, modern peoples look towards the great civilisations of antiquity of their continent for answers about who they are now, and from what greatness they have arisen. East Asians gaze toward China; indigenous Americans recall the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and Inca; Europeans remember Greece and Rome... and Africans remember Nubia and Egypt. Yet despite the obvious Africanity of Egypt, for more than two hundred years, Europe has taught an imperial racist mythology that erased who the Egyptians truly were, and thanks to Hollywood, has pinkwashed them into Europeans, a depiction never created by any ancient Egyptian painter or sculptor. To re-establish Egypt, or Kemet, literally, the Black Land, as an African society and civilisation populated and led by rac...

Dr. Rashidi wri tes the following: "A milestone was seemingly achieved this February of 2008 when National Geographic Magazine did a front cover story entitled 'The Black Phara ohs: Conquerors of Ancient Egypt'. "It was a milestone in the sense that this was the first t ime ever that National Geographic Magazine had admitted that there wer e ever any Black Pharaohs in Egypt at all. I refer to it as 'seemingly' in that the article title is misleading and the context of the story is deceptive to say the least. "1. The title says 'The Black Pharaohs' as if to imply that the re were White Pharaohs or a Pharaoh other than an Egyptian. Egyptians, during the time of 'Pharaohs,' were Black people. Black not in the sense of all of them being the literal color, but of the many shades of people as experienced here in America amongst African-Americans or the many shade s of people in Ethiopia. "Now, there were diff erent non -Egyptian conqu...

Kia Gregory writes, " For Mukasa Afrika , it’s another blow in a continuing assault. "In June 2005 National Geographic magazine featured the reconstructed imag e of King Tutankhamen on its cover. The headline read: 'THE NEW FACE OF KING TUT.' The young pharaoh had light eyes, a pointy nose, thin lips and a golden caramel hue.... “The mummy itself is evidence that King Tut is African,” he says. He adds that paintings found in king’s tom b show he had deep brown skin . Also the kin g’s 18th dynasty descends from Thebes , located in the southern part of Egypt , making his family lineage African. He also points to the famous golden mask in which the king has almond-shaped eyes, a rounded nose an d full lips.... "He questions why scientists didn’t use a melanin dosage test or a DNA test for a truer picture of King Tut’s African identity. 'It’s mo re about money than racism,' Afrika says of the museum’s 'Golden Age' exhibit. 'If they had ...

The Daily Observer ( Banjul ), wrote on February 7, 2007: “At the World Black Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Dakar , Seneg al , in 1966, Cheikh Anta Diop, with W.E.B. Dubois, was honoured as ‘the writer who had exerted the greatest influence on African people in the twentieth century’. “The African continent's fight against colonialism engendered both the ‘warrior-nationalist’, demanding political independence, and the 'scholar-activist', retrieving the stolen 'family China '. And Diop's intellectual oeuvre establishes him as the ‘scholar-activist’ par excellence. He compared imperialism with the prehistoric hunter, who killed his prey spiritually and culturally, before eliminating it physically. And we see evidence of this insight in the way that European imperialism had walled up itself behind a facade of f alsifications and misconceptions about African history, and then proceeded to devalue and disparage our cultural heritage. And relying on this i...