80th birthday of Samora Machel

(Born 29 September 1933, Madragoa, Mozambique)

Nurse, brilliant and highly accomplished commander of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Mozambique Liberation Front, which frees Mozambique from nearly 500 years of the Portuguese conquest and occupation, June 1975, and he becomes first African president of the victorious republic

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FWD – Urgent question on Kemet: Who uses a comb not fit for their hair texture?

http://goodblacknews.org/2013/09/23/cambridge-university-in-england-hosts-major-exhibition-devoted-to-afro-combs/

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Our Kofi Awoonor

Kofi Awoonor – poet, linguist, diplomat 

Olu Oguibe

Wake for Awoonor

We salute Awoonor's body
Salute the Great Spirit
Great Spirit, we salute

The poets salute Awoonor's body
Salute the Great Spirit
Great Spirit, we salute

The linguists salute Awoonor's body
Guardian of the sacred word
Great Spirit, we salute

The drummers salute Awoonor's body
Master of the giant drum
Great Spirit, we salute

May his murderers die a thousand deaths
A thousand deaths to his murderers
World without end

May their memory be wiped from the land of the living
A thousand deaths to his murderers
World without end

May their memory be wiped from the land of the dead
A thousand and one deaths
To his murderers' souls
World without end

Oguibe salutes Awoonor's body
As long as the waters of the Great Volta
So may his voice survive

Africa salutes Awoonor's body
Great Spirit, we salute
Great Spirit, we salute
Everlasting Element
Without beginning
Without end
We salute.

© Oguibe, 2013

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

To Kofi Awoonor (1935-2013)

An ancestor 
In the future tense
Past tense is not your forte
Kofi 
Son of Awoonor
Abiding in spirit
Between capitals
And periods
Beyond the death sentence 
Of mullahs of terror.

I sing of you
In the present tense
Songs sans sorrow
Out of the lofts
Bearing legends
Of the weaverbird 
Bestriding Kenya and Ghana
In the hug of harmony
Named immortality
Across the globe of love.

© Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, 2013


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1st anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country

(Published 27 September 2012, Penguin, London, Britain)

Father of African Literature’s incomparable memoirs on the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, when the Nigeria state murders 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population

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102nd birthday of Eric Williams

(Born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago)

One of the most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement, from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of  the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation

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87th birthday of John Coltrane

(Born 23 September 1926, Hamlet, NC, United States)

Iconoclastic tenor (and soprano) saxophonist and composer who, arguably, has had the most profound impact on the development of jazz, African American classical music, in the past 50 years

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104th birthday of Kwame Nkrumah

(Born 21 September 1909, Nkroful, Ghana)

Influential philosopher and theorist of an encompassing African World consciousness and first president of contemporary Ghana, July 1960, following the 6 March 1957 restoration-of-independence after a century of the British conquest and occupation

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