Umoja - The Spirit of Togetherness Pt 1 & 2

The following pages tell the story of the birth of UMOJA,
a dream realized by it's Creators: Todd Twala and
Thembi Nyandeni

Living in those times..

In 1950 the apartheid government passed a law, The Group Areas Act. The Act allowed the government to determine who would live where. Forced removals and the relocation of Black people who occupied valuable land, or land considered too close to White settlements were the order of the day. This was to ensure that Blacks remained in “reserves” and only came to the White areas when needed for work. Over the years, tens of thousands of Black people were forcibly removed, not compensated and dumped, often in the middle of nowhere. Lack of food, improper housing and little sanitation resulted in incredible poverty, malnutrition and suffering by Blacks living in the most prosperous country in Africa!

It is against this background that Todd and Thembi’s
ambitions of a better life took shape.

Where their story begins..

Todd Twala grew up in a township outside Johannesburg, called George Goch. In 1968, Todd and her family woke up to a bulldozer at their front door. They were forced to leave. continue reading here

Black Woman stabbed in parking lot, may have been random attack

I was just watching cp24 and her husband was speaking to the media, saying that his wife is doing well but is just in shock that someone randomly stabbed her. The suspect is male white, 20 to 22-year old male, five foot three to five foot five with short black hair wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt and sweater.
Breaking News: The suspect has been caught!!

Police are looking for a suspect after a 34-year-old woman was stabbed outside a Great Canadian Superstore near Dufferin Street and the 407 just after noon today.

Const. Tony Vella says the victim was approached by a man who was asking for directions in the parking lot of the store, at 51 Gerry Fitzgerald Dr.

During the conservation, the male suspect pulled out a knife and stabbed the victim in the neck. Vella says it appears to be a random attack.

The woman has been taken to hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries.

The suspect is described as a 20 to 22-year old male, five foot three to five foot five with short black hair wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt and sweater. He fled in an older model, white vehicle, possibly a four door hatchback with rust around the wheels.

Anyone with information is asked to call police at 416-808-3200. source

Oprah Resonating With Saudi Arabian Women

As Oprah Winfrey's trademarked brand of female empowerment beams into living rooms and hair salons across the U.S., her show is also resonating with women in Saudi Arabia, as reported by
Katherine Zoepf of The New York Times.

When "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia's population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai'a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives -- as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife -- without striking them, or Saudi Arabia's ruling authorities, as subversive. continue reading

What is Candombe ?

Candombe (can-dome-bey) is an African derived rhythm that has been an important part of Uruguayan culture for over two hundred years. Uruguay, with a population of approximately 3.2 million, is a small country located in South America, bordered by its two massive neighbors, Brazil (162 million) to the East, and Argentina (34 million) to the West. This rhythm traveled to Uruguay from Africa with black slaves, and is still going strong in the streets, halls and carnivals of this small enchanting country.
To understand how this rhythm, which is so strongly rooted in Uruguayan culture evolved, one would need to turn back the pages of African and South American history to look at how this contagious rhythm anchored at the shores of Montevideo. The text that follows are excerpts from books and articles written about candombe, as well as the viewpoint of individuals who have been close to this scene.
Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, was founded by the Spanish in a process that was begun in 1724 and completed in 1730. African slaves were first introduced to the city in 1750. The roots of this population were not homogeneous, but rather a multi-ethnic swath of Africa that was culturally quite varied. 71% were sourced from the Bantu area, from Eastern and Equatorial Africa, while the rest came from non-Bantu Western Africa: Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast (what is today Ghana).
The Bantu area is an enormous cultural region of Africa with an extremely complex mosaic of ethnicities, consisting of over 450 groups with a linguistic heritage that overwhelms man's migratory limits: more than 20 linguistic groups and 70 dialects.

Candombe is what survives of the ancestral heritage of Bantu roots, brought by the blacks arriving at the Río de la Plata. The term is generic for all black dances: synonymous with and evoking the rituals of that race. Its musical spirit sums up the sorrows of the unfortunate slaves, who were hastily transplanted to South America to be sold and subjected to brutal work. These were pained souls, harboring an inconsolable nostalgia for their homeland. During colonial times, the newly arrived Africans called their drums tangó, and used this term to refer to the place where they gathered to perform their candombe dances; by extension, the dances themselves were also called tangós. With the word tangó, they defined the place, the instrument, and the dance of the blacks.

At the dawn of the 19th Century, Montevideo's Establishment was deeply troubled by the existence of the candombes, which they indistinctly called tambo or tangó. They banned them and harshly punished their participants, considering the dances a threat to public morals. In 1808 the citizens of Montevideo requested that the governor repress these dances even more severely and "prohibit the tangós of the blacks."
In Africa, Tambor and the person playing it are defined by the same word, Tambor.

The African poet Amos Totuola writes: When the Tambor Began to play the Tambor Those who had been Dead for years Came forth to witness How the Tambor played the Tambor.

"Kalunga kalungangue O-je o-je Imbambue."

It was the voice of the old "tatas" of candombe from the middle of the last Century, bellowing in the halls of black clandestine gatherings, sons and grandsons of those brought over in the holds of the slave ships. From 1751 to 1810, Montevideo received large contingents of Africans aboard vessels flying English and Spanish flags. While their culture was quickly repressed by the Spanish, their need for expression, their liberation, was maintained through their Tambor.

The Tambor of candombe is the presence of ancestral Africa in Uruguay.
Source

News Updates : Sept 18 2008

Mexico prison riot leaves 19 dead

Study to fight Black infant mortality

China's tainted milk crisis escalates

Number of people needing aid in Africa doubles

Quote of The Day

Your body is the temple of knowledge.

Fashion For Relief

Pics: theybf.com
Naomi Campbell’s glamorous charity fundraiser. Fashion For Relief tickets will help to raise money for the Rotary Flood Disaster Appeal, a charity that helps communities affected by flooding. The show took place last night in London, UK.

California Named After Black Queen

By Kwaku Person Lynn, Ph.D. | SPECIAL TO THE OBSERVER


It is well documented that of the 44 people who founded the City of Los Angeles, 26 were of Afrikan descent. What is amazing and not taught in California schools is that the majority of the founders of San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego were of Afrikan descent, or that Orange County, Beverly Hills and Malibu were once owned by people of Afrikan descent.




Pio Pico, brother of Andre


The Picos, Black Spanish speaking brothers, Pio and Andres, the former twice California governor, owned San Fernando Valley, Whittier and the Camp Pendleton area.

California is in the media everyday. It is incredible most California residents know nothing about the state being named after a Black Woman queen. The genesis of the name begins with a story read by Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez, who conquered Mexico, killed Montezuma, ended the Aztec empire before entering Baja California, continuing his search for gold.

The 17th century best-selling adventure story was written by a Spaniard named Garci Oronez de Montalvo and published in Seville in 1510. The name of the book was "the Exploits of Esplandian," and it was written as a sequel to the popular Portuguese poem, "Amadis de Guala." (Wanda Sabir, San Francisco Bay View)

The following is an excerpt from the epic that inspired Cortez, featuring a nation composed entirely of fierce, powerful, wealthy Black women. "Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island named California, very close to that part of the terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by Black women, without a single man among them, and that they lived in the manner of Amazons:





"They were robust of body, with strong and passionate hearts and great virtues. The island itself is one of the wildest in the word on account of the bold and craggy rocks. Their weapons were all made of gold. The island everywhere abounds with gold and precious stones and upon it no other metal was found." The commanding Queen Califia ruled this mythical island.

Conducting an interview with John William Templeton, California historian and author of the four volume set, "Our Roots Run Deep: The Black Experience In California," started on the journey of digging up the history of Blacks in California through a conversation with a San Francisco radio host.

"I was doing a story on Rodney King for the Mercury News, and while I was down there someone said that a Black man used to own the San Fernando Valley. That was Pio de Jesus Pico (1801-1894).

"And then I found out that he was also the last Mexican governor of California. I didn't know of any Black governors or anything, so I called into the Ray Taliaferro show (on KGO news radio, San Francisco) and said to him, "Did you know that there were four Black governors of the state of California?" He said, "That ain't nothing. The whole damn state is named after a Black woman."

According to the story, California was an island where only Black women lived, gold was the only metal and pearls were as common as rocks.

The women were the most powerful and ferocious women in the world. They had beasts that were half men, half birds. After mating with men, the women would feed the men to these beasts called griffins. When Cortez arrived in California, searching for this mythical queen, her influence on him was so sever, he paid tribute to this powerful Black Woman Queen Califia by naming the state after her. California literally means, "the land where Black women live."

Her painting can be found in the state capitol California Senate building in Sacramento; a mural painted in 1926 by Maynard Dixon and Frank von Slun in the Hall of the Dons at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and in all places, a large painting of her resides on the wall of the Golden Dreams building at the Disney California Adventure in Orange County:




Unfortunately, on the Great Seal of the State of California, we have Miniver instead of Queen Califia, because Miniver was the Greek goddess who was born full grown, and more acceptable to the Europeans who settled in the state. None of this matters though.

At the end of the day, when all the historians and anthropologists attempt to spin this story in another direction, the conclusion will still come down to one dynamic detail: California was named for a Black Woman queen.

Kwaku Person-Lynn is the author of "On My Journey Now — The Narrative and Works of Dr. John Hendrik Clarke."