The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be right back after a message,
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

(Gil Scot Heron, "The revolution will not be televised")


"Dickson, I look at Tv and the press and from what i see all of Africa appears to be a bastard case, but then i meet you and it doesnt appear so, tell me in truth, how can this be, is Africa really a basket case?"

My dear dear Isadora darling,
I met Joe in a pub and drunk he may have been, he nevertheless was able to decipher in the cloudy mind of alcohol that the winds of change are here and that's why he asked me that question.
That somehow he realised I and many africans who are increasingly coming here are not necessarily conforming to the stereotypical image of Africans as a savage inferior people in need of saving is no surprise then.
I was unfortunately out of time but if he had asked me to tell him more of Africa as not just a dark continent but a beacon of life, i would have given him just two examples of the greatness of Africa from ancient times and this is what i would have told him:


1: The moors who were a candle of hope in europe's dark ages: African!

The second half of the first millennium AD in Europe is sometimes referred to as the dark ages. In some ways that's a misnomer. Although in some parts of Europe it seemed that the beacon of civilization had indeed been extinguished, in other parts, notably Spain, things were far from dark.

In Spain the candle of knowledge was kept burning by the Muslim conquerers called Moors. Not only did they possess a vast body of knowledge based on their own learning, they had also become the custodians of much of the earlier knowledge from the Greek philosophers including those of Alexandria such as Ptolemy.

The Spanish occupation by the Moors began in 711 AD when a Berber Muslim army, under their leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from northern Africa and invaded the Iberian peninsula. Roderick, the last of the Visigoth kings of Spain, was defeated at the Battle of Río Barbate and by 719 AD the Moors had conquered the entire area from the coast to the Pyrenees.


2: Egyptian civilization was great agreed but Umm not all the Pharaohs were "white"
"Egypt was ruled by black pharaohs for nearly 100 years, but their role as leaders of the ancient civilization has been largely kept in the dark because of racism.

Some studies also have found that Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun's grandmother, the 18th-dynasty Queen Tye, may have had Nubian heritage.

In the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before the salvation came.
By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I dread your grandeur.”
Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent. The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps saving Jerusalem in the process.

The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to uncharitable effect."

Likewise there was no chilling view of muslims as is now common today.
"The story of the Moors in Spain beginning over 1200 years ago paints a picture of an Arab world that was very different from what we see today. In the 8th century, Islam was barely 100 years old and knowledge on a broad range of subjects was welcomed and nurtured. In addition the wisdom and philosophy of foreign cultures—ancient Greece and India—was eagerly embraced and assimilated.
This is a far cry from the Arab world of today where a kind of xenophobia has set in. Most "education" seems to now be limited to the inculcation and preservation of increasingly narrow views of the various forms of Islam. In addition there has developed an us-versus-them mindset that makes any kind of bridge-building an exercise in futility."

My dear Isadora,
If i was president, my first act would be to revolutionise the education system to indoctrinate pride amongst our young people.
They would see and hear of the great tales of our people and side for side we would show them that yes even though there was genocide in Africa and that there have been dictatorial leaders, how far different have they been from any dictatorial leader worldwide irrespective of his color.
Hitler, 6million jews under his belt was of the so called pure Aryan(and Christian) descent.
Mao Zedong and Pol Pot under whom millions of Chinese and Cambodians died was not black.

Napoleon Bonarparte and Lord Nelson's and even today George Bush's own military campaigns often sacrificed their own people at the expense of military glory and "for King and Country" what do they get in return?
In the centre of London, at Trafalgar square up on a pedestal where all eyes look upward in astonishment is a sculpture of Lord Nelson in his own glory. This is despite the fact that he himself married had a public affair with the wife of the British ambassador to Naples. She became his mistress and they even had a daughter together.

Napoleon's sculptures are all over France and even his personal residence is a museum.
George Bush may be called idiotic(there is even a phrase for his idiocy and its called Bushlexia) but for a start he was elected twice as leader of the greatest nation on earth!

Why then is it only African leaders whose great acts are completely ignored and instead their latter years as dictators or their less glorifying acts paraded just to make entertainment news for the western media to show their children the images of us africans as savages?

Why is the story of Morgan Tsvangrai pulling out of race due to election violence classified within the entertainment section of yahoo news?
Granted Mugabe is in many ways a tyrant but surely is the story of the Zimbabwean opposition supporters' death entertainment? You think i kid? See : http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080622/ten-zimbabwe-vote-mugabe-1dc2b55.html

Perhaps it is only when you see and understand this institutional and subtle racism in the British/caucasian press which continously portrays us as savages and hopeless cases that therefore brings about the shock among white people when they meet a black person who doesn't conform to this so called "savage nature"
It is therefore in retrospect most chilling or even downright threatening then for some of these guys to meet us Africans who are holding the torch up of a new breed of African professionals.

My dear Isadora,
I am not all gang ho and don't recognise that some of these "white folk" are amazing people who don't see color but see the worth of a person, my boss and many other people i have met are like this....

I met Charlie once who in a mark of amazement(and with it silent respect) said: "Dickson, you actually speak better English than me for whom English is a native language, you must be exceptional and i am really pleased to meet you.... "

Over the past weekend, i almost felt like an Nubian Pharaoh, one of my "white mates" broke a man's nose just for making racist statements at me(apparently why was I an African feeling "cool" by smoking cigars. )
I should have felt pity for the man, afterall like Ghandi i often feel that non violence is the best way to solve problems but perpaps this was one of those times when i supported Otto Von Bismark's statment

Not by speeches and votes of the majority, are the great questions of the time decided — that was the error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.


My dearest little Isadora,
Indeed i can feel the winds of change.
It may take us 100 years but it will happen, and when it does, the revolution will not be televised, it shall be there for all to see and on that day it will be known that:
all men are created equal,
to walk this earth,
and perhaps in walking it
shall instead of killing and demeaning one another,
focus on seeking to find the ultimate truth....

"God who made the world and all that is in it, being Lord of both Heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, nor is he ministered to by human hands, as though he had need of anything - seeing that he is the one who gives to all men life and breath and everything else. From one forefather (Adam) he has created every race of men to live over the face of the whole earth. He has determined the times of their existence and the limits of their habitation, so that they might search for God, in the hope that they might feel for him and find him - yes, even though he is not far from any one of us. Indeed, it is in him that we live and move and have our being."
(Acts 17:22-31)


Now go to sleep little one, and when you wake, daddey shall explain to you how the revolution is going to begin....

***end****


References

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-02/black-pharaohs/draper-text.html

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text/3

http://www.scienceandyou.org/articles/ess_06.shtml