Update from Qudus' blog

Mar 28, 2008

I'm NOT proud to be Blak... Part 1


Its the season for the growth of a new age, this youth-quake, borne out of an awareness of the old times, just like the comprehension of the present and aspiration for the realization of a future Africa proposed by those of the past. Presently there is a completely different lingua franca and point of approach of the contemporary times. The youth no longer do disco, this is the Hip Hop era.

The culture and approach is taking another phase, gone were the days of "i'm proud to be black" and "Black is beautiful". The slogan these days no longer broadcast our Africanity, it actuality affirms our humanity and engagement in the global discussion and as part of the master plan of why mother-earth is still the world "I AM BALCK AND AFRICAN, I'M BLACK AND YOU KNOW IT". 

We should be "Afro-Politans", Africans and citizens of the world. No Negritude, No Tigritude, whatever we may be, we should only constantly have it in mind that the Lion will never look back when the little dog barks, inferiority only reduces the self-esteem in he who feels it. So, we just have to decide if we want to be the Lion or the barking little dog, but not by words of mouth or blind patriotism. 

Africa has been vulgarly seen and told from the eyes and mouth of the west, innocently most of our creators and men and women of ideas finds themselves dancing around this already laid down stereotypes, its then our own duty to 
cleanse ourselves off this standard/conventional image. 

Its time to sprang up new energy, stop wanting to prove to the west that we can also do it, of what good will that do to us, i don't know, i'm yet to get hipped to the ism behind that ideology. 

If i have anything to say to the French, either good or bad, i will go ahead to say it with ease, because just the same way i have a responsibility in Nigeria, i do the same in France, i am in the system and that is where my second home lies, so when i speak of a circumstance that faces me as a Nigerian, it doesn't mean i face same as a France inhabitant, and in the same way, if i face one as a France resident and not as a Nigerian i still have the same responsibility and ordeal as an artiste to voice it out just as raw as it is without blue-pencil. 



In this 21st century, we must give to the sea what belongs to the sea, there is no more need for pointing our violent knives at the white folks for over 400 years of slavery and over a century of colonialism. Those were the cries and agitations of all the recent black heros of the 20th century and we arrogantly say farewell to post-colonialism, farewell to apartheid, farewell to dictatorship. 

All the Fanonian criticism, Mandela's 26 years imprisonment, Lumumba's ultimate life price, Senghor's Negritudism, Fela's radicalism and Soyinka's intelectual struggles and Tigritudism, all those were not raise to make the occident afraid of our black melancholic moods, but a mere warning and an awareness of our "black-ness", their guns 
were principally pointed to fellow blacks, who has gotten the special talent of oppressing their subjects and others who have been specially created with wools in their ears, they were been rejected, tortured, exiled or even murdered, just for you and i to realize where our hiding shelter and survival race should be directed. 

Unfortunately, we still never get healed of our sleeping sickness, we turn deaf ears to those mesiahs as if they never existed, yet searching elsewhere for our saviors, we want to face the future as if our past is not enough for us to learn from. 

This generation of Africans must shift the question, our immediate past and present heros has faced the situation with the realities of their own time. For sure those books they wrote, those songs they sang and the words they said were not accessible solely to Africans or blacks, the white folkes also took the pain to listen to them, read them and with the help of some super humans like Jean Paul Satre, Antonin Artaud and their likes, they understood better and now the rule and the mode d'emploi of the game is taking another form. 

The past has come and gone, gone leaving some with the possession of stolen values while others were devalued, even though we are conversant of the fact that this is not how the story should go, yet, i propose that all our guns be pointed to our own noses, our creators; writers, choreographers, theatre directors, film makers, sculptors, painters, poets, photographers, musicians and all other people of ideas who has got a voice, instead of speaking behind the walls and refining their words like deluded stammerers. They must enormously take the pain to explain to us, that the western value poorly matches with our present day reality. That our values has been devalued and refused from developing organically from its own will and pace. To add to it, we can neither reject their generosity nor sincerely integrate them as one of our wins...

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