czvasser Afroticity, Fried Chicken

Africa

Africa, the “Mother Continent,” is the oldest inhabited continent on Earth. The Egyptian civilization is more than 5,000 years old. There were other civilizations in Africa before Egypt. Egypt is an African country. Its people are African.

Africa is home to more countries than any other continent in the world. These countries are: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the island countries of Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Comoros.

The most populous country in Africa is Nigeria with 206 million people. The United States has 340 million people. There are 50 million people that identify as African American in the U.S. That’s roughly 15 percent.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: Countries of the world continue to plunder Africa and it’s to the their benefit to strike deals and bully individual countries rather than work with a United Africa. Bully Economic Countries will keep Africa “Third World” forever. Just as those countries stole 15 million people from Africa and made them slaves, they will continue to keep Africa subjugated. Economic Slavery never ended.

You’re concerned with African history when you should be concerned with African future. A rising tide rises all boats. As the worth of African people rise so will the worth of the diaspora and blacks in America. We’re the orphaned children of Mother Africa. No great grandmothers or great grandfathers. No ancestral home. No real place to call home in America. Slavery severed ties and destroyed, erased and corrupted us forever. We are qualified as African-Americans. Is that another way to say 4/5s. We continue to build boats and sailing ships in anticipation of better seas.

“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise”.

Maya Angelou
czvasser Afroticity, Fried Chicken

Family Portrait

I was told the guy third from the left looks a lot like my Great Uncle Robert. Grandma almost never talked about him but he’s the reason she and her two sisters came north. Slavery may have ended but the conditions in the south got continually worse after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, what had been Plantation Law was now the Law of the Land. There was the Constitution, Jim Crow, and the Black Codes, all separate and not equal.

Whippings, rape and murder were always plantation practices. Now there were no “owners” but the practices and, most importantly, the rules had only slightly changed and not for the better. You weren’t owned but you weren’t free. You sharecropped, barely fed your family and got nowhere. Even if you died, the family was responsible for your debt and debt was just another name for slavery.

Being in prison was worse than being on a plantation. In prison, you were locked in a cage and only allowed out to work. There was no male/female interaction. You worked until you died or they killed you. There are few records on how many men survived a southern prison sentence. Any infraction could get you killed and almost no one cared. You were a criminal with no rights. You labored everyday. It wasn’t slave labor. It was Convict Labor, the new term to cover this new status. Master was now Warden.

So the bits and pieces suggest Great Uncle Bob was arrested as a vagrant even though he worked harder than most. It was Sunday and he was on his way to see how mom and his sisters were getting on now that he worked six days a week in town as a blacksmith’s helper mostly mucking out the town stable. He generally slept in the barn so he’d be there, working, at dawn. He was accosted, by “patrollers”, arrested and sentenced to 6 months hard labor. Three months later great grandma heard he was dead. Upon hearing her hopes and first born were gone with no inkling how he was killed or even if he had been buried she died. She was sure he had been killed. She always felt he was the type of man that would be murdered.

So his sisters knew it was time to leave Maryland. There was nothing to keep the in the south. That was Spring 1900. Two of Great Uncle Robert’s sisters wound up on Long Island and Cornelia, my grandmother, the youngest girl, that could pass if she wanted to, landed in Harlem. A story for another day.

czvasser Afroticity

Truth and Justice

The never ending battle for truth and justice and the American way.

Superman

The quote, used before WWII, didn’t include “the American Way”. That was added with the Superman television series in 1952. America never really fought the battle for truth and justice for all people. Poisoned fruit came over with the pilgrims and was planted in the New World. It began with land grabs, genocide and unequal rights for women. It continued with slavery and, even though a divided country fought the good fight, the roots and seeds remained and regrew as Jim Crow, race laws, lynching, segregation and bigotry. The American legacy includes Racism: the poisoned fruit of a poisoned tree. We’ve got to work much harder to root it out.