Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The anti-apartheid, white South African poet, writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach, was exiled after marrying a French national of Vietnamese descent while studying in Paris in the early '60's. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and The Immorality Act of 1950 made it a criminal offense for a white person to have sexual relations with a person of a different race. He made a trip to South Africa in 1975, was discovered in the country, (it had been reported that the ANC betrayed him to the government because they didn't trust him), arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for High Treason. Massive international intervention ultimately secured his release in 1982, he returned to Paris and obtained French citizenship.
Nigerian poet, novelist and musician, Chris Abani has a prescience that is almost uncanny. His first novel, Masters of the Board, about a neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria earned him praise as "... (A)frica's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The government, though, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup and sent the 18 year old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months, he was released, but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group which led to his arrest and imprisonment at the notorious Kiri Kiri prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute, was arrested a third time, sentenced to death and sent to the Kalakuta Prison, where he was jailed with other political prisoners on death row.
Languishing most of the time in solitary confinement, Abani was finally and fortunately released in 1991. He lived in exile in London until 1999, when, fearing for his life, he emigrated to the United States. Currently living in Chicago, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University.
With Nigeria recently added to Trump’s travel ban, one can only wonder what fate awaits Chris Abani, this time.
There are stones even here
worn into a malevolence by time
gritting the teeth and tearing
the eyes with the memory.
Out in the desert, the wind
is a sculptor working the ephemera
of sand. Desperately editing steles
to write the names of thousands of slaves
who died to make Pharaoh great.
It is a fool’s game.
And we are like the blind musician
at the hotel who tells us with a smile:
I’ll see you later.
The guard at the pyramid eyes me.
Are you Egyptian? he demands,
then searches my bag for a bomb.
At the hotel they speak Arabic to me,
don’t treat me like the white guests,
and I guess, even here, with all
the hindsight of history we haven’t
learned to love ourselves.
I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot
explain why. How do you say: In my country
they buried me alive for six months?
And so you lie and tell yourself this is love.
I am protecting the world from my rage.
Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves
here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa.
Do you have a knife? Do you have one?
the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me,
searching us. We call this on ourselves. We
are clearly political criminals.
I trace the glyphs chipped into stone.
As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could
I too would carve myself into eternity.
Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me
you’ve found a spelling mistake in it!
A line of miniature statues is placed
into the tomb to serve the pharaoh.
One for each day of the year. Four hundred.
The overseers are a plus. I think
even death will not ease
the lot of the poor here.
Statues: it seems the more I search the world
for differences the more I find it all the same.
Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too
when he said we are all one.
Mona argues about who should pay
to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can
treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists.
A woman nearby tells her husand she can see
dead bodies at work. Why pay?
Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask.
That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees.
From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops
spread out like a conference of coffee tables.
Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs
like family secrets sunning themselves.
Two white goats on a roof chew
their way through the debris.
On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me
she wants to be Celine Dion.
She is my sister calling me home to Egypt.
Perhaps one day I will be ready.
For now it is enough to know I can
be at home here.
-- Chris Abani
“Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Meet Renae L. Bluitt a Brooklyn, New York-based filmmaker, digital content creator, and PR consultant, who also serves as an advocate for Black women’s accurate representation in the media. With over a decade of experience, Renae has gained valuable insight into Black women entrepreneur’s narratives — a passion that she recently channeled into her first film as Creator and Executive Producer of the documentary, “She Did That.”
Bluitt’s first cinematic project, ‘She Did That.,’ explores the passionate pursuits of Black women and their entrepreneurship journeys. An extension of Renae’s In Her Shoes blog, ‘She Did That.’ offers an intimate peek inside the lives of four Black women entrepreneurs who continuously raise the glass ceiling for future generations. The film, which offers an up-close and personal look at Black women entrepreneurs, addresses topics like the funding gap for women of color.
There are approximately 1.9 million Black women-owned firms that employ over 376,500 staffers and generate $51.4 billion in total revenues. What drives Black women to turn their obstacles into opportunities and passions into profit? ‘She Did That.’ seeks to answer this question with the goal of inspiring the next generation of change agents.
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THERE ARE many ways to rig an election. Voters can be beaten or bribed. Ballot boxes can be stuffed. Computers tallying results can be hacked. But few methods are more rudimentary than that used last year in Malawi’s general election. In the southern African country of 18m people the dastardly tool was Tipp-Ex, the correction fluid that has saved many a teenager’s error-strewn homework.
On May 27th Malawi’s Electoral Commission (MEC) announced a victory for the 79-year-old incumbent president, Peter Mutharika. The MEC said it had received 147 reports of “irregularities”, including the use of Tipp-Ex on results sheets, but refused to call for another vote. Opposition candidates petitioned the country’s constitutional court, asking judges to nullify the vote. Protesters, many of them young Malawians born after the end of dictatorship in 1994, took to the streets to keep up the pressure on those on the bench.
It worked. On February 3rd the court concluded that there had been “widespread, systematic and grave” flaws in the electoral process. It ordered that a re-run of the general election be held within 150 days. Millions of Malawians have for months followed the twists and turns of the case live on radio broadcasts—but few could have hoped for such a decisive verdict.
The judgment is a historic moment for one of the world’s poorest countries. Income per person is just $385 a year according to the World Bank, a quarter of the amount in neighbouring Zambia. The flawed democracy that replaced the one-man rule of Hastings Banda has done much to enrich an elite but little to lift the vast majority out of poverty. The hope is that the court’s verdict ushers in a new era in which politicians must govern rather than cheat to stay in power.
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A South African court has issued an arrest warrant for the former president Jacob Zuma after he failed to appear in court to answer corruption charges on the grounds of needing medical treatment.
Zuma’s lawyer, Daniel Mantsha, presented a document from what he said was a military hospital to excuse his client, but the judge questioned whether the note was valid or even written by a doctor. Prosecutors said it was a criminal offence not to fully explain an absence on medical grounds.
“Zuma’s absence is disappointing … we want Mr Mantsha to tell us what the illness is and why Zuma can’t be here. It is a criminal offence for the accused not to be present if he has been warned in court,” said Billy Downer, representing the state.
Zuma, who held office from 2009 to 2018, faces charges of fraud, racketeering and money laundering relating to a $2.5bn (£1.98bn) deal to buy European military hardware for South Africa’s armed forces in the late 1990s.
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A civil rights leader who was gay and a confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was posthumously pardoned by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who also announced Wednesday what may be the nation’s first process for forgiving those convicted under outdated laws punishing homosexual activity.
Bayard Rustin was a key organizer of the March on Washington in 1963 where King gave his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech. He also helped plan other nonviolent protests and boycotts to end racial discrimination.
Newsom pardoned Rustin for his arrest in 1953 when he was found having sex with two men in a parked car in Pasadena, where he was appearing as part of a lecture tour on anti-colonial struggles in West Africa.
Rustin served 50 days in Los Angeles County jail and had to register as a sex offender before returning to his home state of New York. He died in 1987.
Newsom noted that police and prosecutors nationwide at the time used charges like vagrancy, loitering and sodomy to punish lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people.
He issued an executive order creating a new initiative to identify those who might be eligible for pardons and swiftly consider those applications.
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Mainstream society was not friendly to curly hair in the 1990s, particularly if it grew from a black woman’s head. But my modem led me to the natural hair underground. Slate: Curly Hair on Dial-Up
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It was once considered a rite of passage for black girls, that moment sometime during the tween or early teen years when you received your first perm. This “perm” was really a chemical relaxer—one designed to remove the curl from your hair, leaving you with sleek, bone-straight tresses that projected an image of respectability and maturity.
For many of us, the initial excitement that came with the prospect of silky flowing hair faded into complaints about chemical burns, constant breakage, and shedding. But we went back to the salon or to our sinks faithfully every six-to-eight weeks to apply more perm to the kinks and coils growing from our scalps, lest the contrast between the two textures reveal the truth about how our hair looked in its untouched state.
Call it youthful rebellion or just a lack of funds, but when I reached my junior year of college, I’d had enough. The whole process controlled too much of my time, energy, and finances for an aesthetic result that felt less than satisfying.
As one of the few students at my Midwestern university who possessed a laptop in 1998, I could retreat to the privacy of my dorm room to begin my quest. Late one night, I pulled up the ol’ AltaVista search engine, typed “black hair” into the search bar, and thanks to a mega-fast 14.4 baud modem, AltaVista responded two minutes later with a list of results.
The first was a site with a simple name—BlackHairCare.com. Click. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the site offered a discussion forum, ushering me into the black hair underground. Hundreds of women from around the United States—and sometimes the U.K. and the Caribbean—congregated to share styling tips, product recommendations, and advice on “going natural.”
I gasped. “Going natural” felt like the final frontier. We discussed our fears of what might happen if we dared to walk outside with our naturally kinky, coily, and curly hair revealed to the world. We’d be called ungroomed, unprofessional, and worst of all—nappy.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.