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What I also learned concerning modern literary resources in third-world countries also gave me a culture shock that had me re-evaluate the civil liberties I had taken for granted as an American citizen. When a country like Uganda faces social upheaval, as was the years of Dictator Idi Amin, one of the first institutions that are destroyed are the libraries. Most political leaders afraid of an educated proletariat class would either seize control or regiment all institutions of learning or severely lay waste any teaching or literature perceived as doctrinally opposing their rule and form of government. To prepare myself for meeting Joshua’s friends, I went to the Shanghai University college library with hopes of finding more resources to accurately detail events from American history, to my surprise, I couldn’t find anything. Of course, most of the books were in Chinese, but after asking the librarian about books of historical significance, most holdings, in fact, all holdings carried either Maoist-centered literature or books about science and technology but nothing on social studies. Did I have internet access? Yes I did, but Africans afraid of surveillance by the Chinese government, stay away from any web content that would jeopardize their status as students or workers. Many Africans say that they wouldn’t even know how to begin to search for Black history online, even with the limited access to internet-accessible computers in their home countries.
I met with Joshua’s friends, gentlemen from Uganda, Gabon, Cameroon, Tanzania, and several other parts of Africa. I began with Malcolm X and Dr. King, their background and history. I explained the Civil Rights movement and how African-Americans fought for their human right to live as equal to Whites under the American flag. I described what it felt like for Rosa Parks to be asked to give up her seat for a White passenger, and Medgar Evers helping Moses Wright escape from Mississippi Klansmen for testifying in the Emmett Till case. My message to them was that Black history and American history are not separate histories and that if it weren’t for movements like Civil Rights and the cultural, political, economical, social, intellectual, militaristic, athletic, artistic and heavy laboured contributions African American Blacks made to America, America wouldn’t be the country it is today. They also admitted to me their lack of knowledge of their own African history prior to the 1930’s. I spoke about the eight hundred year old Moorish Empire that covered most of the known world and controlled most of the Mediterranean trade routes. I spoke about Hannibal the Great leading hordes of manned elephants across the dangerous Alps to defeat the Romans across many fronts, and Napoleon’s loss of Haiti at the hands of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black emperor. As I kept telling stories, they kept feeding me food, and eventually we engaged in healthy discussions about the present relationship with African-Americans and Africans of the continent.
Returning to the Unites States, I immediately picked up my home television remote control to reacclimatize myself with current American events and culture. The first channel that popped up was B.E.T., a music video with a young African-American woman in a skimpily dressed outfit dancing between a rapper with numerous gold teeth and a red fire truck. I turned off the television. I went back to my books and multimedia encyclopaedia to learn more about the countries of the men and women I entertained while I was in China. I also looked for DVD movies about the sleeping car porters and A. Philip Randolph, and the Deacons of Justice. I was engrossed in learning more about my history, not just for myself anymore, but for Joshua Mutambi, my African brother in China, and my other friends in China, and every future friend I will make who will ask me about Black history, and I hope to help them to understand that Black history should be studied and appreciated, yes, but to recognize that without Black history the greatness of American history would be lost. We not only survived some of the worst persecution America had to offer, but we endured! And we endured with remarkable dignity, value, warmth and grace. United, tolerant, and amazingly strongly and supportive of each other, our leaders were American icons and heroes who revived and instilled in new generations the will to struggle and attain the American dream by stretching its vision to whole new horizons.
How do I explain how far we as a people have come, and the struggle for civil rights we’ve fought for, only to explain that a large population of us don’t vote, many of us don’t read, and many of us don’t know what Malcolm X felt when Mr. Ostrowski suggested that he be a carpenter rather than a lawyer, or have read Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It was hard enough to explain these current issues of the African-American community to my adopted African family, and is even harder for me to explain it to myself.
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Kalimah Priforce
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Comments
Young Griot Lazarus Kubasu Nolasco | Apr 8th, 2004
Thanks a lot Kamillah for the courage of sharing your insightful experinces. Indeed your ability to narrate and see the positive side of even negative encounters speaks volumes...wisdom is the ability to abstract good from any experience whether bad or good.. Keep it up and keep on reading hard .
This was an amazing piecee Michael Newton-McLaughlin | Apr 10th, 2004
This was a very good article... you are an excellent writer, and as it sounds, a good orator as well. I am not exactly sure what the American dream is any more... it seems that many people's ideas of an American dream are living oppulently, or at least quite a bit above any kind of subsistence levels. I worry then, if by doing so, we are ignoring many other factors - such as classism- and the fact that if we acheieve a certain amount of wealth, it is at the present moment still at the expense of others.
As the U.S. built this country by taking land through the use of systematic genocide as well as through slave labor... it now continues it's economic growth through imperialism...
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