MF GALAXY

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD    Maybe you’ve been chained at the centre of the earth and the mole-people have been jamming your wifi since you got there, and that’s why you don’t know about the breathtaking Marvel blockbuster Black Panther. If so, I don’t know how you’re hearing this podcast, but my sympathies to you and I’ll try to lower a pitcher of lemonade on a long rope. But for everyone else, as of February 21, not even a week after opening day, the $200M-budget movie has earned $441 million worldwide. The idea that a completely Africentric science fiction film with a pan-African cast, set in a fictional African country, with no major European stars, and written and directed by Africans, could achieve one of the biggest opening weeks ever was, even a few years ago, unthinkable. You could even say the idea of that success itself was Africentric science fiction. And now, it’s reality. Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole wrote it, Coogler directed it, and Chad...

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD   Continuing our programming for Black Panther Month ahead of the local and international review panels for the Marvel blockbuster, we’re delving deeper into historical African martial arts, or HAMA. If you loved the exciting, aspirational vision of a fictional African technostate with its own fighting arts, MF Galaxy is your show to learn about actual combat systems from the continent. Yes, you know about East Asian martial arts such as Chinese kung fu, Korean tae kwon do, and Japanese judo, but what about Sudanese Nuba wrestling? Or stickfighting from Ancient Egypt called Tahtib or from Zululand called Nguni? Or Madagascari boxing called moraingy? To discuss those forms and more, I spoke with Mansa Myrie. Originally from Red Deer, Alberta, Myrie is the Chief Operations Officer of the Historical African Martial Arts Association, a new and international organisation whose aim is to promote verifiable information about and practice of histor...

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD This is Black Panther Month on MF GALAXY and with all the excitement surging about the Marvel movie about the Wakanda super-genius, superhero, super-fighter, the time is right to go beyond fictional African martials arts and discover authentic, deadly African martial arts from across the continent and across history. Most people in the West think of the phrase “martial arts” as referring to East Asian fighting systems such as kung fu, karate, and tae kwon do, without realising that “martial arts” means any combat system. And certainly every culture in the world produced its own combat systems or its people would have been assimilated or annihilated. So it really should not be a surprise that the African continent, home to humanity and birthplace of civilisation, should have scores of martials arts, ranging from the wrestling, sword systems, and stick fighting of Ancient Egypt, to the range of West African fighting arts, and that’s where we begin to...

Whether you're holding a rally or a progressive social gathering, your #1 mission must be organising the people who show up. It's a lot of work to get all those people in one place, but if they don't DO anything afterward, so what? You just taught them that gathering together doesn't solve or produce anything. Or you made them believe that the purpose of gathering is to have a party, and that, magically, just gathering will solve their problems because "They" will understand and take action (whoever "They" are).  So figure out your S.M.A.R.T. * goals as early as possible, long before game day. Once you know WHAT you hope those people will do, and HOW MANY of must act to be effective, you can figure out HOW you will measure whatever they do. That's the only way to know if you're successful. Realistic goals about productivity followed by stats! And your goals must include building the power and vision of participants to improve th...

REPRESENTING SOUTH AFRICAN CULTURE, TRIUMPHING OVER DUTCH-ENGLISH NEO-NAZISM LISTEN/DOWNLOAD What were the weapons in the arsenal of a man who survived a vicious racial dictatorship to emerge as an international ambassador for his people and his craft? In the case of Hugh Masekela, who returned to the ancestors on January 23, 2018, the answer is two-part: a gramophone, and a Louis Armstrong trumpet. Born outside Johannesburg in 1939, Masekela began playing music at age three--by way of winding his grandmother's gramophone and singing along. In his career, his own music would fuse South African mbaqanga, bebop, funk, and Nigerian Afrobeat. His prolific six decades of making music took him around the world and granted him the personal victories of playing with such titans Abdullah Ibrahim, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Zensi Miriam Makeba, and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. His single “Grazing in the Grass” in the early 1970s topped the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping...