The Motherland beckons
7th January 2019 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
New Orleans Saints running back Alvin Kamara was definitely onto something when he donned a hat after a game with the slogan “Make Africa Home Again.”
Kamara, whose mother is a native of the West African nation of Liberia, has taken to New Orleans like a fish to water since he was drafted by the Saints two years ago.
He appears to be drawn to New Orleans’ African cultural continuity and its African-centered food, music and culture.
Somebody should probably tell Marvel Comics that we didn’t need it to create a Black Panther for us on the silver screen.
Kamara is a real-life Prince T’Challa, an African prince in the Crescent City, which has often been called the most African city in America.
While he is young and obviously still has a lot to learn, it is clear that Kamara has been embedded with humility, integrity, kindness, generosity, selflessness, reverence and a love for humanity.
And judging from the response he received at the Bayou Classic, humanity loves him right back.
It remains to be seen whether he will allow the Creator and Beloved Ancestors to continue to guide him to fulfill his divine mission.
Meanwhile in the Motherland… the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal opened recently amid a global conversation about the ownership and legacy of African art.
The Associated Press reported that Senegal’s culture minister isn’t mincing his words about what he expects from the Western World: He wants the thousands of pieces of cherished heritage taken from the continent over the centuries to be returned to the Motherland.
“It’s entirely logical that Africans should get back their artworks,” Abdou Latif Coulibaly told The Associated Press. “These works were taken in conditions that were perhaps legitimate at the time but illegitimate today.”
In November, a report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron recommended that French museums give back works taken without consent, if African countries request them. Macron has stressed the “undeniable crimes of European colonization,” adding that “I cannot accept that a large part of African heritage is in France.”
The Associated Press reported that the new museum in Dakar is the latest sign that welcoming spaces across the continent are being prepared.
The museum, with its focus on Africa and the diaspora, is decades in the making. The idea was conceived when Senegal’s first president, internationally acclaimed poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, hosted the World Black Festival of Arts in 1966.
At the museum’s vibrant opening in December, sculptors from Los Angeles, singers from Cameroon and professors from Europe and the Americas came to celebrate, some in tears.
“This moment is historic,” Senegalese President Macky Sall said. “It is part of the continuity of history.”
Perhaps reflecting the tenuous hold that African nations still have on their own legacy objects, the museum will not have a permanent collection. Filling the 148,000-square-foot circular structure, one of the largest of its kind on the continent, is complicated by the fact that countless artifacts have been dispersed around the world.
Both the inaugural exhibition, “African Civilizations: Continuous Creation of Humanity,” and the museum’s curator take a far longer view than the recent centuries of colonization and turmoil. Current works highlight the continent as the “cradle of civilization” and the echoes found among millions of people in the diaspora today.
“Colonization? That’s just two centuries,” curator Hamady Bocoum told the AP, saying that proof of African civilization is at least 7,000 years old, referencing a skull discovered in present-day Chad.
Like others, Bocoum is eager to see artifacts return for good. The exhibition includes 50 pieces on loan from France, including more than a dozen from the Quai Branly museum in Paris.
More than 5,000 pieces in the Quai Branly come from Senegal alone, Bocoum said.
“When we see the inventory of the Senegalese objects that are found in France, we’re going to ask for certain of those objects,” Bocoum said. “For the moment, we have not yet started negotiations.”
He brushed off concerns that African institutions might be unable to care for their own heritage, pointing to the new museum’s humidified, air-conditioned storage space.
The history of some of the objects in the opening exhibition is grim. Pointing to the saber of El Hadj Umar Tall, a 19th-century West African thinker who fought against French colonialism, Bocoum described how French troops fighting him stripped local women of their elaborate jewelry by cutting off their ears.
The Associated Press reported that contemporary works in the exhibition touch on both triumph and tragedy. There are black-and-white photographs of African nightclubs in the 1960s shot by famous Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, and a stark mural by Haitian artist Philippe Dodard depicting African religions and the middle passage.
Works by Yrneh Gabon Brown, based in Los Angeles, reference slavery and contemporary race relations in America.
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” Brown told the AP. “And here, as a member of Africa’s English-speaking diaspora, I am proud, reaffirmed.”
France, whose president in recent weeks has pledged to return 26 pieces to Benin, is just one of many countries loaning works for the new museum’s opening exhibition. Bocoum now is working with dozens of institutions around the world to plan future exhibits.
“This museum is celebrating the resilience of Black people,” professor Linda Carty, who teaches African American studies at Syracuse University, told the AP at its opening. “This is a forced recognition of how much Black people have brought to the world. We were first. That’s been taken away from us, and we now have reclaimed it.”
Reclaimed it indeed.
It is mind-boggling that European nations could steal and plunder so much from Africa while denying the Motherland’s creative genius, and historical and cultural greatness to this very day.
Despite oceans of evidence to the contrary that include pyramids, obelisks, massive temples and many other feats, Western scholars would have us believe that we have created nothing of lasting historical or cultural significance.
What they could never steal is our legacy and birthright as the first people on the planet, crafted in the image of the Creator.
As a people, we know who and whose we are and hold firmly to the belief that “I am because we are.”
Unlike Marvel Comics’ Black Panther, we don’t need a mythological element like vibranium to make us strong and invincible.
Our collective spirit, soul, ingenuity, wisdom, courage, intellect, beauty and ancestral DNA render us superbad.
You can take that to the bank.
This article originally published in the January 7, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
