The Death of Black History Month
Welcome to the latest issue of the Navig8or Newsletter.
This issue will focus upon the death of Black History Month (in the UK) and what this tells us about the condition of Afrikan people in the UK and perhaps further afield.
I say death, but perhaps critically ill or comatose would be a more accurate assessment of the condition of this cultural phenomenon.
Introduction
In this article I am going to quote extensively from my fifth book 'Why Willie Lynch Must Die', and in particular an essay in that book entitled, 'Black History Month – From Revolutionary Idea to Tool of Appeasement'.
I am going to cite this essay, because many of the things I warned of in 2007 when it was first published are coming to full fruition today.
The first and most obvious thing to note about Black History Month in the UK is that it takes place in October rather than in February; as in the USA and many other places. I am not going to go too deeply into this scheduling issue except to suggest that this should tell you that the whole Black History Month (BHM) idea was misconceived from conception in the UK. BHM is supposedly a tool for Afrikans (who are reluctant to call themselves Afrikan or who don't think they are Afrikan) to (re)connect with their global history and yet from the very outset there was a failure to consider and co-ordinate with other Afrikans around the globe who had already instituted BHM. This failure can perhaps be attributed to ignorance, parochialism or the control of non-Afrikan funders.
Money Matters
If you live in the UK you may have noticed the steady and in the last few years, dramatic; decline in BHM events in your community. This was something I had noticed when I wrote my essay in 2007. 2007 was the beginning of the current economic depression that has devastated so many people around the world. The problem with BHM in the UK is that its creation and funding was in complete contradiction to the principles and values it was meant to promote. That is to say from very early in its development it became dependent upon funding from the Labour Party led GLC (Greater London Council) and Labour led local authorities - and eventually even Conservative led local councils. So we had a people who were seeking to reclaim their history and culture for the purpose of - and this is the bit that is so often forgotten, ignored or not even understood - exercising self-deterministic power in the world, going 'cap in hand' (yes that's where the word handicapped comes from) to their historical and contemporary conquerors for the money to teach their community how to become liberated!!
“History shows that it does not matter who is in power….those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.”
Dr Carter G Woodson ‘The MisEducation of the Negro’ (1933)
The above quote from Carter G Woodson the progenitor of what we now call Black History Month/Afrikan History Month/Afrikan History Season gets right to the nub of why he created Negro History Week and the purpose it was meant to serve. The (re)learning, remembrance and celebration of Afrikan History was meant to be purposive and that purpose was to assist in moving the sons and daughters of Afrika from their then (and now) position of oppression under an invidious racial caste system created by Caucasians, to a position of power, self-sufficiency and dignity.
The main thrust was internal, i.e. to empower Afrikans through self-knowledge to rise up, not external; i.e. seeking the approval of those who oppressed Afrikans. There is an Afrikan proverb, ‘
Once you conquer the enemy within, the enemy without can do you no harm.’ And Dr Woodson realised how pervasive the sense of inferiority and self-hatred had become amongst his people in the US and indeed across the world.
In his landmark work he notes:
“In this effort to imitate, however, these “educated people” are sincere. They hope to make the Negro conform quickly to the standard of the whites and thus remove the pretext for the barriers between the races. They do not realize, however, that even if the Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You therefore have a larger number of people doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore continues to wonder, what the Negro is good for.” (Woodson 1933: 7)
This obsession with seeking the approval of Whites has been a constant theme in the misleadership of Black integrationists who are quick to warn against the dangers of radicalism, for fear of upsetting their psychological reference group whom they adore.
So BHM in the UK was placed upon the auction block right from the beginning and sold to the only bidder, the local authority. We are all familiar with the saying '
he who pays the piper calls the tune' and it became very clear that the White payer wanted the Black piper to play songs entitled 'Rainbow coalition', 'Multiculturalism', 'Diversity', 'Sing and Dance til your feet hurt', 'Forget Economics, we're Black', 'Power is a dirty word' and other diversionary hits. As time went on they got tired of this Black = Afrikan idea and wanted everyone to get under the bastardised BME umbrella and to celebrate Diversity. Afrikans were asked to prostitute themselves (and by extension us) for Local Authority funding. God forbid Afrikan people actually funded our own cultural celebrations. With the funding came the Caucasian 'political' imperatives and in some places I have been told even the Irish get in on the Black History Month act!
If we take the London Borough of Hackney as an example the original commissioning brief for the Black History Month activities they planned to fund for 2006 stated that the aims of their Black History Month activities were:
· To celebrate cultural diversity in Hackney
· To initiate cultural debates about Black History in Hackney
· To present high quality work
· To creatively involve participants from the community
To rub salt in the wound the eligibility criteria stated that
all cultural organizations based in Hackney were invited to bid for BHM commissions. That's right anyone could get money to run BHM activities!
Of course we don't have such problems today. The economic depression has largely moved BHM off the funding agenda in the age of 'Big Society' and volunteerism i.e. do it for free or pay for it yourself.
So this October promises to be very quiet on the cultural front. In Nottingham, people used to ask 'what's happening for Black history month?', now they don't even bother. Things got so desperate that a few years ago the City Council started the practice of including any Black person performing in Nottingham in their BHM calender. I remember seeing an Alesha Dixon concert included. Her concert had absolutely nothing to do with BHM it just so happens she was performing in Nottingham in October!
The economic chickens have really come home to roost. The endemic global failure of Afrikans to practice 'ethno-aggregation'/Ujamaa/Co-operative economics/Powernomics, call it what you will has had profound ramifications, of which the death of BHM is just a minor casualty. The values and behaviours required to have independently institutionalised BHM in Afrikan communities across Britain are the values and behaviours required to have created a solid economic foundation in those same communities. The failure to achieve the latter ensured the failure to do the former.
What does one of our greatest thinkers, Amos Wilson, who suffered financial hardship as a result of the generally pathetic level of support offered to him by Afrikan people, whom he lived and in the end died serving, have to say about the real purpose of Black History Month:
“Therefore, think again when we celebrate Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, King, and others. We should begin to look at the central issues. If our study of Black history is merely an exercise in feeling good about ourselves, then we will die feeling good.
We must look at the lessons that history teaches us. We must understand the tremendous value of the study of history for the
re-gaining of power.
If our education is not about gaining real power, we are being miseducated and misled and will die “educated” and misled…..The study of history cannot be a mere celebration of those who struggled on our behalf. We must be instructed by history and should transform history into concrete reality, into planning and development, into the
construction of power and the ability to ensure our survival as a people. If not, Black History Month becomes an exercise in the inflation of egos; it becomes an exercise that cuts us further off from reality.
Ironically, we now see even other people who are not our friends joining us in this celebration, which means that they must see in it some means of protecting their own interests, and see it in something that works for them, and possibly against us. If they can celebrate our history and see it as something positive, then it means that we are not using it in a revolutionary sense. They do not see our study of it as a threat to their power.
If we are not studying it in a way that is a threat to their power then we are studying it incorrectly, and our celebration of it is helping to maintain us in a state of deception. So let us make sure that we look at and study history in a light that it advances our interests, not inflates our egos and blinds us to reality.” (Amos N. Wilson cited in Barutu 2006: 58-59) My emphasis in bold.
Conclusion
So there we have it, or as Jamaicans say, '
see it deh'. It is a truism that ‘s/
he who pays the piper calls the tune’ and the reason it is called a truism is because it is true. Our enemies will not fund our liberation.
So, rest in peace Black History Month, your guardians did not value you and left you to die of neglect. As Asa Hilliard noted, '
To be Afrikan or not to be Afrikan, that is the question'. Until a significant number of Afrikans in the UK and elsewhere can answer that question in the affirmative it does not matter how many individual achievers we produce, a powerless nation of beggars we will remain.
I have just finished reading the book 'Forty Million Dollar Slaves - The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete' (by William C. Rhoden) which I would highly recommend and the recurring theme throughout this book is that it does not matter how many highly paid superstar athletes we have produced, without group co-operation, loyalty and a sense of collective mission they remain powerless multi-millionaire 'slaves' dependent upon their billionaire owners. Every day we make Afrikan history, for better or worse, so the death of BHM is an opportunity to free the history of Afrikan people from a 31 day (or 28 day) prison and liberate it to occupy the highlands and lowlands of July, January, March etc.! Far better if we commemorated special days throughout the year e.g. Marcus Mosiah Garvey's birth anniversary, as high points in a constant reinforcement of our identity and culture.
Make every day Afrikan History Day.
Tendai Mwari
Ifayomi
'
Power is the ability to define reality and have other people respond to your definition as if it were their own' Professor Wade Nobles
http://www.houseofknowledge.org.uk
http://www.abdf.co.uk
References
Baruti, K. B. (2006) ‘Notes Toward Higher Ideals in Afrikan Intellectual Liberation’, Akoben House: Atlanta, Georgia
Hackney City Council (2006) Black History Month Commission Brief
Woodson, C.G. (republished 1993) ‘The MisEducation of The Negro’, Africa World Press: Washington, D.C.
