Celebrations and causes can compete or compliment. I recall when someone had the bright idea to redub Black History Month as Reggae Month instead. I was not pleased. (And I was then a music industry CEO). Sure our music is cultural capital worthy of being celebrated … well at least some sections more than others. But our history as Black people is paramount capital from which all our songs and styles and creative expressions of worth derive. In a context where Black identity was targeted for extinction like all non European identities that preceded it, (if body survived, soul and memory was targeted) music unconnected to collective memory and core community values is vain, no matter how commercially lucrative.
So I welcome the AU’s designation of a whole other month to rebalance the equation. Someone needs to tell a rootless generation where they came from and who they are, and that requires ritual and celebration. But of course, we are accustomed to celebrating May as Child’s month, and children’s advocates wont be pleased.
Again, we will have to do the best we can to share space and meaning, for the truth is that this generation of Caribbean children, if they dont know solidly who they are, they will not have a civilization that protects their rights or identities or supports their life process. Who cant conceive of that needs merely look at Palestine (and there are many more examples, some of them not too far from our doorstep) and see themself in the mirror.
The Ministry of Education started out last year on a good footing. Gone are the days of perenially complaining about not teaching Marcus Garvey in schools. That era is dead. Our backs are against the wall. Let the *Out-of-Many-oners who dont understand how absolutely essential the assertion and affirmation of Black identity is to that very proposition, who constantly pipe intellectual nonsense about Jamaicans being above race and that racial and ethnic identity no longer matter, that they are our past but not our future; let them come out of the woodwork now screaming their intellectually shallow nonsense. Very soon, a child will be able to rebuff their intellectual drivel with but a few quotes learned in primary school.
*(I am the biggest defender of the proposition myself once African identity ia accorded its rightful place as initiator and protector of the process)
Africa arise. Your light has come. God’s glory is shining all over you.
YeKengalé 