Was the righteous chorus I heard being preached in the cold, dirty and cramped San Francisco streets
A rainbow of humanity in unity
we all marched down market street up to city hall
The scenery was as beautiful and dangerous as a thorny rose
We were surrounded by liked minded allies and protestors who chose to stand for justice against military armed cops and agent provocateurs, whose views we opposed
I hoped this would be the beginning of an activist revolutionary epidemic, and not just a sign of people being bored during the pandemic…..
He wasn’t a gangsta, he was a warrior from Kumasi, Ghana, region & kingdom of Asante
The first Sub-Saharan African country in 1957 to achieve a true democracy
by freeing its Black body away from the tight circulation cutting chains of the economic enslaving British Monarchy .
By plane, boat
Or walk down to the wilderness sea? Like Li-Young Lee…
My father mimicked Eddie Murphy from the “Coming to America” movie, when he came to the so-called land of the free to find his Black American queen, my doting mother, Cathyann, in Detroit, the Motor City.
I still remember your cool African accent, your powerful black hands, the smell of your old spice cologne, or how you never wanted my brother, Kwadwo, and I to be home and alone
You forced my brother and I to come with you to work at your party store and taught us how to be young black entrepreneurs
The right way, not the wrong way, like some of our friends who went deep down the wrong path like a sunken raft
By learning the genocidal war crafts of drugs, murder and guns..
Many of them would either die young, become addicts, or be sentenced to hard and heavy years by the tonne
Something I’ve never understood was how tough you had to be, to go back to work the next day after getting shot near the top of your head in our store’s crime infested neighborhood to ensure that our family had a life that was prosperous and good relative to others living in the hood.
Something I have always wanted to share with, you, is how I regretted the times I got mad and argued with you, even if you deserved it, for the insane fits you sometimes put the family through
I used to dream of our immediate family reuniting with our extended family in Ghana, if It were to happen now, I would have to do it without you beside me physically, but you’ll always be with me spiritually.
Haggag Hassan Oddoul, was born in Alexanderia, Egypt, in 1944. He was the son of Nubian parents who left their poverty-stricken village in hopes of economic growth. For about four years (1963-1967), Oddoul worked as construction worker on the Aswan Dam.
A SOLDIER
Oddoul, served time in the Egyptian army, and fought in the “War of Attrition” (July 1, 1967-August 7, 1970), and later the “Yom Kippur War” (October 6, to 25, 1973).
WRITER & ACTIVIST
Oddoul, began his writing career at the age of forty. Most of his writings focus on perserving Nubian language and culture, which has been gradually disappearing since the Nubian population in Egypt, were forced to relocate from their ancestral homes in 1902, with the construction of the Aswan Low Dam. Oddoul, has received many Egyptian awards for his literary works.
We don’t need the government to tell U.S. that only in February
The birth month of, Frederick Douglas, one of greatest abolitionists, in memory
That it will reluctantly and hesitantly teach U.S. a watered-down version of our glorious Black History.
The only history books about Black folks in which the joke of a Governor, Ron Desantis, would approve of, is a history that’s “anti-woke”.
Like the Rage Against The Machine song-Bulls On Parade:
“They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove em”
Not just because the books make their “snowflake” children feel guilty, about the harsh realities of slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, red lining , and for-white-profit and black-agony penitentiaries, where like cattle, inmates are kept behind barb wire fences and are kept in check by armed sentries
The books are removed to control the minds of the youth and future policy makers for another century.
Forgot about black history lessons that will inspire the adolescences
No true stories of how Harriet Tubman , like a black woman Moses, spread justice through treacherous enemy lines, like it was the red sea and freed her fellow woman and man from white brutality, chains , whips , and rapes of Antebellum southern slavery, Or how she became a union spy who risked her life behind crimson soaked bloody earth to bring clandestine information to the union to help save northern army lives.
I’m sorry, but in American public pre-schools to universities, in deeply and devilishly red states run by makers of political policies like “anti-woke” lady Arkansas Governor, Sarah Huckabee, in class your babies, young men and ladies will never learn about great men like Pan-Africanist and black freedom fighter, Marcus Mosiah Garvey .
No information on Egypt’s 25th Dynasty, that’s when in 744 BC Nubian King, Piye (Piankhi), conquered Egypt, and reunited the two African lands of splendid gold jewelry and granite stone pyramids into one Nile Valley Monarchy .
No revolutionary history from the year 1804, that’s when a bunch of poorly treated and trained, self-freed maroons, brought black doom and apocalyptic misery upon Napoleon’s Imperial navy and Army in Haiti
This defeat forced the Empire of France to sell its remaining 15 states in the “louisiana purchase” territories for a meager 15 million dollar fee
Creating much of the land in the country of the land of the free that you currently see from sea to shining sea.
At an “anti-woke” elementary, high school, or university, they might let you hear about MLK’s “I Have A Dream”, but you never hear that the dream was also anti-Vietnam war or that the dream included reparations for the descendants of the blacks who suffered the world’s worst froms of brutality, lynchings, Jim Crow and slavery.
No student research paper inquiries on how in 1999, in a court in Tennessee, the King family won civilly against Jowers, and several U.S. government agencies, for their part in the Dr.King assassination conspiracy.
If we leave it to the Alt-Right, suspected white supremacists podcasters like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro types to rewrite black history, it will read and only in February:
Blacks were put in Antebellum slavery due to their mental inferiority, and kept in modern slavery (mass incarceration) due to their criminality.
No mention of systematic white supremacy, mis-education, and over-policing and poverty.
The white supremacist domestic terrorist who targeted and assassinated three black people at the Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, this past Saturday was a 21-year-old man named, Ryan Christopher Palmeter.
Palmeter, who was wearing a tactical vest, was armed with an AR-15 rifle and a handgun. According to Reuters: the suspect was caught on video shooting Angela Michelle Carr, a 52-year-old woman, in her car outside the Dollar General (DG.N) , a U.S. discount chain.
He then entered the store where he shot and killed 19-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr and Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29. He would later use his handgun to kill himself.
According to Sheriff T.K. Waters , says that the shooter left several manifestos behind for the media, where he detailed his hatred for black people. Palmeter, who lived with his parents in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, also left behind a will and a suicide note.
In a statement, the FBI said they will be investigating the targeted killings as a hate crime:
“The FBI Jacksonville Field Office is coordinating with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida on the tragic shooting in Jacksonville, Florida. The FBI has opened a federal civil rights investigation and we will pursue this incident as a hate crime. The FBI will bring every resource to bear in this investigation. As this is an ongoing matter, we are not able to provide additional information at this time”.
Yaa Asantewaa was born in 1840 in Besease (a town in central Ghana), she was the daughter of a man named Kwaku Ampoma and a woman named Ata Po. Her brother was a man named Afrane Panin, he would become a chief of the people in a local community called Edweso. As she entered womanhood, she grew crops on her land and would enter into a polygamous marriage, (which was not uncommon for regal or wealthy men) with a man from the Asante captiol city of Kumasi.
Painting: The War of the Golden Stool, also known as the Yaa Asantewaa War
WAR READY
During the rule of her brother, Yaa Asantewaa witnessed the Asante Kingdom (formerly the Asante Empire), go through a major decline. Which was the result of it’s five year civil war (1883-1888), and the Asante’s long on-and-off bloody conflict with the British Empire. After the death of her brother in 1894, Asantewaa utilized her power and influence as Queen Mother to nominate her grandson as Ejisuhene (King/chief of Ejisu, a city near the Asante capitol city of Kumasi). In 1896, Yaa Asantewaa became regent of the Ejisu-Juaben district, after the British exiled her grandson, the Asante King, Prempeh l and several other nobles and government officials to the Seychelles Islands. Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson, who was the British governor-general of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), demanded the Golden Stool . which was and is believed by traditionalist to hold the soul of the Asante kingdom. The demeaning demand by the British led to a secret meeting with the highest remaining Asante officials. In the meeting there was a disagreement on rather or not to give the Golden Stool (the physical representation of the soul of the Asante Kingdom) to centuries-old enemy the British, for their exiled Asante officials and nobels. During the meeting Yaa Asantewaa stood up and gave a speech to the members of the Asante council:
Painting: Yaa Asantawaa giving a speech.
How can a proud and brave people like the Asante sit back and look while whitemen took away their king and chiefs, and humiliated them with a demand for the Golden Stool. The Golden Stool only means money to the whitemen; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall not pay one predwan to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments (Montu mo danta mma me na monnye me tam).
To add seriousness and dramatic affect to her words, Asantewaa picked up a rifle and fired it in front of the other council members. Yaa Asantewaa would be chosen by one of the regional kings of the Asante kingdom to be a leader/commander of an Asante battalion. She would lead an armed-force of 5,000 men in war against the British empire
WAR AND AFTERMATH
In March of 1900, the Asante laid siege to a British fort at Kumasi, where the British sought refuge. After several months more months of back-and-forth conflict, the British governor of the Gold Coast would send an elite, well-trained and equipped force of 1400 soldiers to put down the African rebellion. Yaa Asantewaa and about fifteen of her most trusted advisors and confidants would be captured by the British and exiled to Seychelles. Yaa Asantewaa’s military defeat would mark the end of the series of wars between the Asante and the British, which took place from 1823 to 1900. In January of 1902, the British would annexe the territory of the Asante empire, and made it a protectorate of the British crown. On October 17, 1921, Nana Yaa Asantewaa died in exile on the Seychelles Islands. Three years later, on December 17, 1924, King Prempeh l and other members of the Asante royal court were allowed to return to Asante (at the time a British colony). Prempeh l, would make sure that the remains of his grandmother, Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa received a proper royal burial. A little over 30 years after her death, her dream of an Asante independent of British colonial rule would be achieved when the Asante kingdom (now-part of the Republic of Ghana), won its independence on March 6, 1957. Ghana would be the first sub-saharan African nation to accomplish this feat.
HER LEGACY
Nana Yaa asantewaa is a revered figure in the history of Asante and Ghana, for her role as a strong and empowering woman, who confronted European domination and oppression. She is remembered in this Asante song:
Koo koo hin kooYaa Asantewaa ee!Obaa basiaOgyina apremo ano ee!Waye be egyaeNa Wabo mmode(“Yaa AsantewaaThe woman who fights before cannonsYou have accomplished great thingsYou have done well”)
A week-long centenary celebration was held in her honor in Ghana in 2000, to acknowledge her accomplishments as Queen Mother and her role as a freeddom fighter against British imperialism.
Statue of Yaa Asantewaa outside of a museum destroyed by fire.The Burnt remains of the Yaa Asantewaa MuseumPosters calling for the Yaa Asantewaa Museum to be rebuilt.
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