Marian's Blog

2005: Thank you from me to you

Habari gani? Nia. Purpose. Today is the fifth of the seven days of Kwanzaa 2005. In this sense, Ron Karenga's official Kwanzaa website explains that purpose means "to make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community..." The older many of us get (and perhaps among people across the world), the more we marvel at some mysterious "space" somewhere 'out there'; the place to which months and years and decades and even centuries fly away. Miraculously, 2005 has now done the same thing. And twelve months from now we will already have lived the first five years or 5% - of this still-new 21st century (by "western" time). For me 2005 has been a most amazing year. We began 2005 celebrating Capo d'Anno (while in shock over the tsunami) near Alberobello, in Puglia, in Italia (Italy). Two years ago we ate, danced and celebrated with my Mother, at Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. I sense that for me this New Year's will be one that is more contemplative, and I would like to take this moment to thank God and family, friends, readers and other colleagues for helping to make 2005 as amazing as it's been. We look forward to wonderful and beautiful experiences to come in 2006, and even to some of those not so easy things along with the friendship, love and support we share with each other to get through them. Thank you, also, for reading this blog, Marian's Blog!

It's Kwanzaa 2005 - Habari gani

Here are the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or the "Nguzo Saba", in the (arabised) East African Swahili language. The standard Kwanzaa definitions I found at swagga.com, however, the original parts of the accompanying definitions for each of the Nguzo Saba are mine - so if you reprint, please share credit (i.e., fair use). Kwanzaa begins annually on what the UK and Commonwealth call "Boxing Day" - that is the day after 25 December, Christmas. December 26 - Umoja (unity); Dec 27 - Kujichagulia (self-determination) - Never give up. Resolve to not be a bump on a log. To openly and repeatedly be and describe ourselves and our role in this world; to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves; Dec 28 - Ujima (collective work and responsibility) - to build and maintain our community together. To pledge to contribute to re-building the lives and communities of our loved ones all over the US Gulf Coast. To not deliberately instigate (i.e., to refrain from instigating) problems for our sisters and brothers; desist from making our sisters' and brothers' problems worse than they may be. To not put our folks' problems 'in our mouths' (i.e., not talk about people's business) if we have no intention of helping to positively solve the problems. To take a positive and active interest in our sisters' and brothers' problems and to work together to help solve them; 29 Dec - Ujamaa (cooperative economics) - faithful networking; to patiently and persistently do everything we can to build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together; 30 Dec - Nia (purpose) - to make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness; 31 Dec - Kuumba (creativity) - to do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than it was when we were born into it and inherited it; 1 January 2006 - Imani (faith) - to believe with all our heart in ourselves and our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. Peace.

As humans, we can do better: Bermuda's one homeless shelter condemned - "prefab" in use 30 YEARS after opening

Today is the second day of our Black American celebration called Kwanzaa, a word linked to the idea of "celebrating the first fruits" - borrowed from East Africa's Swahili language by Kwanzaa founder, Californian Maulana Ron Karenga. During Kwanzaa we're learning to greet each other with Habari gani? (How are you?) (Oops. I've been saying "Happy Kwanzaa...") Today's Kwanzaa principle is Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) - "To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves," according to swagga.com's Kwanzaa website. Self-determination is something many people globally need to make real locally. I can especially relate to 'speaking for ourselves'. Meanwhile, many French and other francophone folk have a saying - "Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose" - "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A view of the world from my stance reveals certain things - conditions - that seem to remain terribly consistent far longer than they logically should; and longer than many of those things actually need be around, particularly some distinctly negative things which would be far healthier for us all if just a few more of us anywhere on the planet would more frequently act in our highest collective interest - as living beings and as human beings. Our highest collective interest. In my "collective we" I'm referring to our entire planet and all of us - including plants, animals and everything that can't quite be separated into either category. The website of the Royal Gazette newspaper from Bermuda (which is not in the Caribbean) has a fascinating little article from 16 Dec 2005. 'For a country as affluent as Bermuda this really ought to be an embarrassment', is how it's titled. The author is a chap called Dan Jones. Seems this little island country in the Atlantic, a Commonwealth country, about 600 miles off the US east coast, has, for at least three decades, virtually abandoned its only shelter for Bermuda's homeless and those addicted to drugs (though probably not those financially well-off) and perhaps also other folks in need of emergency housing. Doesn't Habitat for Humanity - or another group like them - work in Bermuda??? The shelter residence, known as Marsh Lane, is run by the Salvation Army. "The funding crisis engulfing the Salvation Army can be laid bare today, as the organisation warned its crumbling homeless shelter had to be “condemned” and replaced fast and its drug treatment programme faced the axe. ..." Elsewhere it goes on: "... In the wake of the news $1.5 million had been set aside to revamp the Premier’s new house at Clifton, The Royal Gazette toured the Salvation Army’s Marsh Lane homeless base. Given a ten-year life-span when built 30 years ago, the prefab shelter was yesterday branded a “national embarrassment”." The article recites a litany of seemingly gratuitous neglect in a country as well-to-do and connected (in particular to Canada and the UK, and to the US perhaps to a lesser degree). "Gaping holes in flimsy plywood walls. Chunks of roof caving in. Pipes hanging off walls. Tissue paper plugging gaps in the roof, so rain does not pour on beds. Wooden floors rotting away. Eight people sharing a room. Ageing showers and toilets. A dirty lagoon behind the shelter, now a haven for rodents and mosquitoes. ..." Apparently, 12 women and 35 men currently reside there. In today's full-blown, neo-whatever "socio"-economic environment (though there's nothing really "social" about it) I realise I must admit that for some among the more "well-heeled" segments of the human population information like this is not only passé but more pointedly socially unacceptable as well as "irrelevant" after a fashion. And yet I remain stubbornly determined to ask the (euphemistically) "ethnic" composition among the residents of this shelter as well as among the homeless and those otherwise materially (and possibly also spiritually) distressed on Bermuda. Do they look the same or very much different from the homeless men and women populating streets in, say, Washington, DC, Cartagena, Colombia or Kibera in Nairobi (Kenya), as examples? Those populations "just happen" to be, oh, plus or minus 90% Black/Black African. In the wake of certain historical conditions, such as collective enslavement of virtually an entire group, not so surprisingly homelessness often goes hand in hand with landlessness. Think about it and check those facts, too. More of Dan Jones' article is below, and the rest may be read on the Royal Gazette website. Thank you to Dan Jones for writing about this. Habari to all - happy Kwanzaa!!

A "Native Christmas" to all - and Ramadan, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa

Please accept our warmest greeting from Great Turtle Island - America. And thank you to my friend Sandra (One Feather) who shared this image with me.

About those Diebold machines... A FL county elections head thinks votes were manipulated

Blogger and investigative reporter Brad Friedman writes that the elections director of the Florida county that includes the state capital, Tallahassee (that would be Leon County), says he believes there was "electronic manipulation" of votes in the state's year 2000 US presidential election results. More specifically, he alleges manipulation of some "certain" votes cast in Volusia County, Florida. How many more knowledgeable folk need to come forward on all this?? Friedman's own Brad Blog documents his detailed account of the ongoing struggle over votes, politics and democracy in the United States of America.

"Jim Crow Guide: The Way Things Were" - first published 1956 by Jean Paul Sartre

Jim Crow Guide:

This book is online! Here are the chapter links from author Stetson Kennedy's website - Why This Guide

No Room For Redskins

White Man's Country

America's Great Wall

Who Is Colored Where

Who May Marry Whom

Who May Live Where

Who May Study Where

Who May Work Where

Who Are Subject To Forced Labor

Who May Vote Where

Look Out For The Law

Who May Travel How

Open To All (Whites)

The Dictates of Racial Etiquette

Black Peruvians excluded while Fujimori had presidency - plus citizenship in Japan

I'm pondering discrepancies I feel work against the humanity of some of us and which - by extension - work against the humanity of us all. One is Arnold Schwarzenegger - as a white man able to leave his home continent, become governor of an American state that even now has never had a governor who is a person of colour; Schwarzenegger - allowed to comfortably and aggressively covet the idea of possibly altering the American Consitution in order to become president of the United States of America; Schwarzenegger - in the same breath able to condone the state-sponsored execution of yet another Black American. Then there's Hugh Grant. Also able to enter the United States and have a Hollywood career while slithering around Los Angeles making use of the Black American female body of a woman (a "sex professional") nicknamed "Divine" Brown. In the same vein I ponder the economic, social, political and historic chasm between Alberto Fujimori and scores of Peruvians of predominantly African ancestry. Fujimori once was the elected president of Peru - till he flew off to Japan claiming that, oh, by the way, he's really Japanese. Now that we're into the 21st century, Afro Peruvians collectively have as much prayer of becoming president of their own country (or even more modest public positions, including non-elected) as do most Black Americans (especially the majority who are non-neo-conservative) in the US. The same logic applies to almost any other member of historic Black communities throughout the Americas; people who are native to countries that, after 500 years of virtually total exploitation of the same populations, either still do not welcome or don't even acknowledge existence let alone rights of their Black sister and fellow countrypersons (and blood relatives). "There is a saying in Peru that everyone has a bit of either "Inga" or "Mandinga" in them, meaning that all Peruvians have some indigenous (Inca) or African blood." That's from Angel Paez's article on Afro-Peruvians and their over three century struggle against virulent, continuing anti-Black (and sometimes anti-Indigenous) racism. The article is reprinted in The Black Commentator. I do wish more humans would bother to distinguish between the African descendants of the Americas and our African ancestors - kidnapped and seized from their homes and continent - and the horrific violation against them which was the condition of slavery or enslavement. They were not 'black slaves', they were African people. Even this article does not make that key distinction. "But the descendants of the tens of thousands of black slaves [i.e., kidnapped/enslaved Africans] brought by ship to this coastal city south of Lima in the 16th and 17th centuries point out that this oft-quoted proverb is not reflected in the country's political and social life. "If it's true that we all have some Inga or Mandinga in us, then why has there never been an Afro-descendant president in Peru in the 184 years since it became an independent republic? Why has someone of our color never been the head of the navy? Why are there no television programs made by descendants of the Mandingas and aimed at them exclusively?" asked the director of Peru's Centre for Ethnic Development, Osvaldo Bilbao." Read the rest online.

Ex-gangleader Stanley Williams killed by the people of California

One of my prevailing thoughts is, When was the last time a Black American was awarded power of life or death over an Austrian?? That's a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger, for anyone who may have missed it.

News that Richard Pryor has died

It may be true that Black American comedian, Richard Pryor, has died, but his energy - his genius - are with us forever. I remember one of his comedy albums of the 1970s. I will never forget his monologue about people from another country whom the US government (and certain private interests) was 'transplanting' to the USA. In this case it was Vietnamese people. "They [the American interests responsible] are teaching them to say [the "n"-word]," Pryor declared. It was frighteningly believable and yet somehow hilarious, after a manner. And I'm sure it was not far from the truth, either then or now. Travel well, Richard Pryor. Thank you for the laughs - and the thoughts. [From Reuters news service via Australia's National Nine News: "Richard Pryor took a brutal look at racial attitudes in the United States and fashioned it into a comedy career. His chaotic personal life also provided material for a stand-up act that was as profound as it was profane. Born Dec. 1, 1940, and raised in his grandmother's brothel in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor served in the U.S. Army before heading to New York to pursue comedy in the early 1960s. The former class clown played it safe at first but later moved on to controversial subjects with a routine that was more like Lenny Bruce than Bill Cosby. His comedy albums, which included "Bicentennial [the "n" word]," "Is It Something I Said," and "That [the "n" word]'s Crazy," won five Grammys. He reportedly decided to quit using the word [the "n" word] after a 1980 trip to Zimbabwe, writing in his autobiography: "There are no [the "n" word]s here. The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride." ..."]

Bush library 'destroyed by flood'

Got this from Democrats Abroad who got it by way of Ruth who got it heaven knows where: Dateline Crawford, Texas --
"A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential
bathroom where both of the books were kept. Both of his books have been lost. A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated, as he had almost finished coloring the second one. The White House tried to call FEMA but there was no answer."