Marimba Ani Visits The University of MarylandJared Ball - The Funkinest Journalist
University of Maryland at College Park
November 21, 2002
Bolekaja! “Come on down, let’s fight!” is the Yoruba phrase that opens professor Marimba Ani’s powerfully original and important book Yurugu. And that is precisely what Yurugu and tonight’s lecture by Dr. Ani were all about. Black people have no time for false notions of objectivity or euphemism. Our struggle for personhood continues and only rhetoric, poor leadership and the ongoing psychological warfare waged against us through education and media prevent us from seeing this. Our horrendous interaction with European people over the last 500 years has damaged the normative processes that we, and all people, need to interpret reality and then act on it in such a way that serves rather than damages ourselves.
All people develop ways to understand themselves and the universe in which they live, their own culture, worldview or filter. This worldview is subjective and nationalistic. It, by nature, is meant to serve that group of people, help them organize their society, develop, learn and progress. But, as Dr. Ani asks, what happens when a people are forced, over long periods of time, to operate using another people’s worldview? More than that, what happens when that worldview is contrary or antagonistic to the people using it?
Dr. John Henrik Clarke used to tell his audiences of the importance of subjectivity in study and action. He said that as much as anything else the African diaspora had to understand that there is a need for the “essential selfishness of survival.” We have lost that, he felt, as a result of 500 years of European dominance (never mind the 700 years of Arabic dominance that preceded). What Clarke argued for, and what Ani has provided, is a blueprint for the study of culture, worldview or perspective and how operating with a European worldview has had, and continue to have, disastrous effects on the Black world.
The second statement of the introduction to Yurugu reads that “this study of Europe is an intentionally aggressive polemic.” Period. How beautifully subjective. We wouldn’t ask a medicine to be objective, to assimilate or befriend a disease. We want the medicine to move in and kill, remove or render that disease ineffective. This is precisely how we should approach a worldview that ails us. Black people are an African people and it is essential that we lovingly accept that. Doing so will allow us to learn and access an African worldview that has been broken by this long interaction with and use of European culture.
Ani asks us to consider the Maafa (Ki-Swahili for “disaster”)
that we have experienced through 500 years of European
enslavement, colonialism and apartheid (domestic and
international). This 500 years has been more than
the direct abuse hurled upon our ancestors. It has been
a process by which the filter we use to interpret reality
has been replaced so as to prevent proper development.
She says we must actively move through Sankofa (an Akan
term meaning “return to the source”) in order to restore
Maat (the Kemetic -falsely known today as “Egyptian”-
term summarized by Ani as meaning “a paradigm for correct
behavior”).
Some have been critical of Ani’s use of a variety of African terms to describe our situation but they are missing the point. Language is part and parcel of the cultural shift we have undergone. Language is the transmitter of culture, a people’s worldview is wrapped up in their language, we are imprisoned by our own words. As Ani says, “language enforces a worldview.” So by using these, and other, terms Ani is helping us to reconnect not only with words but with the expansive worldview that they convey. For example, when she speaks of Maat Ani is referring to a Kemetic word that formed the basis of the African worldview. Symbolized by a woman, Maat is the principle guide for behavior. Maat is truth, is correctness, is to what we all are to aspire.
It is Maat which we hope to reach when we pass through this life and are judged through the weighing of the heart after life. If we are able to truthfully recite the “Negative Confessions” our heart is unburdened and is seen as light when placed upon the scales of Maat for judgment and we are able to then move through the underworld into rebirth, to join the ark of Ra. It is from this that Judaism, Christianity and Islam (among the other religions of the world) emerged. It is from this African wellspring of culture that the world now operates only without the original essence. And it is towards this that we must return.
We need a new worldview, filter or lens through which to see ourselves and our world. We need such warrior scholars as Ani to do the research and provide us with the information we cannot hope to get elsewhere. Through a new lens we can then see the political, social, economic and spiritual actions we must put in place. Yurugu is one step to reaching this plateau.
-Jared Ball, aka The Funkinest Journalist, is a founding member of Organized Community Of United People (COUP) a Washington, DC - based organization for total change (www.voxunion.com/coup). He has a master's degree in Africana Studies from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and is currently a Ph.D. student in Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is also a host of Chaos Or Community a weekly radio foray into funk, news, history and politics.