racism

SURVIVAL SHOULD NEVER BE RACIALISED

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

Every global problem comes with special extra dimensions of evil for Black people.

Blacks being prevented from escaping war in Ukraine. Thrown out of busses and trains. Refused entry at the Ukraine-Poland border. Many of them students. Some of them women with children.

BUT everybody wants easy access to the minerals under African soil.

War brings out the Ugliness – and the Truth – in humanity.

I feel pain. Because you want to help others. But does anybody want to help you?

You want to show solidarity with others. But no one wants to show solidarity with you.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

https://fb.watch/bqUuf3FIFf/

DO AFRICANS BELIEVE THAT AFRICANS CAN INVENT?

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We have to make our own world, because there is little space for us in the world others have created, out of their own ingenuity, for themselves.

So what we need is to create in Africa an African system that supports research and invention from Dream to Done Deed. What we need is to awaken the strong sense of the need to create our own world, a new world. A desire, the unquenchable thirst and unslackening desire to do this or perish. It becomes our racial focus, and the essence of the DNA we pass on, henceforth, from Generation to Generation. Our black spirits will come ready-made with the natural Urge to do this. We will be born differently from today. Born to invent.

But…: Do Africans believe that Africans can invent? Do Africans who feel the spirit of invention and innovation stirring within them have the guts to sacrifice their whole life to it? Are there financiers and patrons ready to support them to the bitter or sweet end?

If all you do is extract natural resources and minerals from the earth and the waters, and sell them unprocessed to others, then you are just a glorified miner. Now, today, as oil revenues dwindle, the call is sounded. Any mathematician can do the arithmetics and work backwards from the finish line. It is the point in time when our oil becomes worthless and our ability to invent and innovate becomes the only natural resource we have left. Untapped?

Yes I made the the jump from oil to inventions; whereby the popular wisdom proclaims that the alternative to oil bears another name: Diversification. But… Diversification Alone Is Not The Answer! It is only an interim puffer, but not the guarantor of survival. Only the fit survive. The fit are those who have trained the power and ability to create the future.

But…: Are African governments, think tanks, traditional institutions and financial institutes really ready to chart and push this course and pour all their resources into creating a new world, their own future? Do Africans believe that Africans can invent?

If we simply diversify from Oil to Solid Minerals, we will make the same mistakes again because not only are the underlying methodologies unaddressed and unchanged; nor the corruption issues in terms of persons, institutions and systems unammended; but, most importantly, the fundamentally flawed ideology that drives and guides our concept of nation-building, people-building, capacity-building – whatever you want to call it – remains the most entrenched and in-built weakness that we carry with us from generation to generation, from century to century. It is an ideology that supports a taker-mentality as opposed to a giver-mentality; it remains a receiver-mentality as against a creator-mentality; it stays a past-deifying and present-indulging mentality instead of a future-engineering one.

But it is better to produce the future than to reproduce the past. What our so-called education so far has not done for us is trigger the creator-gene. Systemically, deeply and deliberately. En Masse. The discoverer-Complex has yet to be activated within the context of African Culture, Upbringing, Orientation, Foundational Thinking that later guides investors, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and every citizen. We are talking about the Survival of the Species here.

The human being, in the end, respects only intelligence. Not just articulated intelligence, but intelligence that has yielded action and tangible form. The human species‘ only hope for survival and expansion, right from time, and for escaping extinction, has always been innovation and invention, i.e. the practical application of intuitive perception and intelligence. Thus, humans finally only respect those persons and groups whose ingenuity or depth of perception leads to discoveries and inventions that continue to move humankind forward. The urge to move, physically, mentally and spiritually, and to defend gained territories, is a deep evolutionary expression of primal survival instinct.

Therefore: Africans had better start believing that Africans can invent and that Africans SHOULD invent. And start pouring all their resources into making this a reality. Otherwise, the future which is being currently invented and designed by Non-Africans, for Non-Africans, will have no place in it for Africa and Africans. Or the place that will be reserved for us, we will not like it, nor possess the power and ability to change it. It will be worse that the days of Slavery and Colonisation. It will be a depth of systemic powerlessness and denigration not yet seen in the history of humankind. Because, if you don‘t make anything, you‘ll never own a thing.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Thoughts on Africa

THE GOLDEN CALF

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The golden calf of modern times is racism, dressed in nationalism and tribalism, burnished by religion. And we are all dancing around it.

The modern day biblical Aarons of today agitate and invite their people to bring all their wounded or selfish volitions and angers, throw them together into one terrifying heap and build it up into a shiny mock-sacrificial lamb statue of false beauty whose enticing radiation attracts spirits of like weakness.

Then they continually polish it, dance around it and sing sickly sweet warm songs of vicious ire and malicious fire to it; and all the while they keep on feeding it with their volitions and angers and hatred, and increasing its size. They praise and dance around their worship of their own selves and their hatred of others.

But Moses is true humanity on the Mountain-top, lonely and few, who make the effort to climb to connection to the commandments of self-conquest and selfless love. Watching the madness going on down in the valley of human soul – the madness that has engulfed the entire earth, all the continents and nations and peoples. Division is the only thing that still unites humankind.

Moses is true humanity on the Mountain-top of human nobility, lonely, clarified and few, watching the madness in the valley, and wondering if there is still any hope or still any point at all in sharing with these crazy ones the knowledge and the conviction which they carry deeply imprinted upon the inner soul-pages of their calmly flaming spirit. Love thy neighbour, as thyself.

It’s been repeated for so long, that it almost sounds like a childlike joke now. But some still believe. And I guess the children shall inherit the earth.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

MOCKERY THEIR WEAPON

~ Che ~ 1 Comment

Once they used chains
Once they used Whips
Once they used Dogs
Once they used knives and guns
Now they use mockery

Because they have seen that all those things
Did not provide a final solution
To the verdure of your tenacious Proliferation
For you sprout from within

They will weight the System against you
But it will not hold you down completely
Yet it will mock you
They will twist the law against you
But it will not hold you down completely
Yet it will mock you

Mock you and ridicule you and make you small they will
Because as long as you are small
You cannot build, or run, a big House.
It’s not your body they want to kill
It is your Spirit.
Do not believe the hype,
Racism is still alive and well.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

TRAYVON

~ Che ~ 9 Comments

Trayvon-Martin-1

You’re walking on water
Don’t think it is land
The tide is about to turn
Your feet into sand

Signals sent out over the earth
Kill them before they grow
There is a protection Claws in our justice
For a darker tomorrow

Subliminal messages
Password more valid than passport
What is the colour of love?
Blindness is just in court

Mankind will destroy humanity
And claim to be its saviour
And cunning will mask hatred
And none shalt love thy neighbour.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

In Memory.

AGAIN

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

Faces of strangers
Phases of enmity
A look is fuller than a book
Brevity is the soul of it

Hatred is a virus
It lies low for generations
Then breaks out with the new youth
Like a message stored in the DNA
Unbroken.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 4 – (Sudan and South Sudan)

~ Che ~ 11 Comments

(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)

Those who have a knowledge of post-independent Africa will, sadly, not be surprised by the turn of events in South Sudan today. Macabre, but true. Indeed, they would have expected it and, like Mandela and his team, and they would have prepared for it, to try and avert it. South Sudan’s road to independence has been long and winding. She began her life in the modern African world as a region of an arab-dominated Sudan which was herself the joint colonial property of Egypt and Britain. Even before their first modern independence – that of Sudan from Egypt and Britain – Sudan was divided into an arab-speaking islamic north on the one hand, and on the other hand a south full of a myriad black tribes speaking different tongues, mainly Christianised, partly adherent still to ancient African religions, and basically lacking a sense of united nationhood amongst themselves. What united them was their wariness of the north in the face of a long history of slavery and jihadic wars; whereas the north itself was focused on achieving independence from its external colonisers. And independence indeed eventually came, but it did not bring peace with it. Acrimony between military and politics, disputes between Marxists and non-Marxists, moslem-christian religious animosities, and the distrust between north and south, ensured that years of coups, civil wars, genocide and violent disunity would follow. Decades after independence, seemingly unable or unwilling to find a lasting workable peace between north and south, in 2011 they parted ways acrimoniously. Soon after, in the newly independent and sovereign South Sudan, the very same quarrels, accusations and maneuverings that had plagued newly independent African countries five decades earlier, reared their stubborn heads here too and South Sudan degenerated into a hydra-headed civil war. Finally, the tribes of the South, lacking any other external adversary, seemed all too willing to turn their guns on each other and destroy what it now seems that they never had nor ever really tried to cultivate during the decades of tribulation: internal Oneness, inter-tribal political unity. And, unfortunately for them, it seems that they, too, have no Madibas amongst them.

Take any African region, north, west, east and south, and study its collective post-independent or post-liberation history. Examples abound, enough of them. The wound cries out like a disjointed pack of scattered wild voices screaming from a burning house: the lack of reconciliation; the lack of representative, inclusive democracy, of socio-political unity. Some will call it the lack of national common sense. In Africa, for some reason, political office is not voluntarily terminal, whether or not the constitutions stipulate such, and power is not shared. Leaders seem to love only the concept of their country, the fact of having a country, but do not also love all the peoples of the country, their welfare, their liberties and their peacefully united future – not if it requires that the rulers and their support groups themselves equalise themselves with the rest of the country and subject themselves to a rule of law that stands above everyone. Instead, everybody wants to grab the crown, and sit on the throne, and then ostracize, under-develop and punish his enemies. No matter what effects this has on the country in the long and short run.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

… continued in Part 5 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 5 -(Ghanaian Black Holes & Ivorian Time Bombs)

Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 1 – (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 2 – (Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 3 – (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)

MIX UP

~ Che ~ 2 Comments

White men complain
Of losing their women
Black women complain
Of losing their men

White women complain
Of losing their men
Asian men complain
Of losing their women…

From race to race
Place to place
Everyone is sure
Everyone is impure

I guess we’re all lost
I guess we’re all found
I guess we’re all free
I guess we’re all bound

I guess we all complain
I guess we’re all afraid
I guess we all know
How best to get laid.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

AGAINST POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS

~ Che

Political correctness
Has fallen out of favour

Racial correctness
Is the new In-thing
The new hypocrisy
The new incarnation of evil

All you clever cowards
Claiming it’s time to be politically Incorrect
You have simply replaced one evil
With another –
Racial correctness
Cultural correctness
Religious correctness
Narrow-hearted correctness

That’s what brings in the Votes now.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

IN OUR DESERT

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amazon cover copy there is always something more 2015
BIGOTRY CONTINUES to exist upon the face of the earth, but not within its heart. And just as skin-characteristics are skin-deep, so is bigotry only surface-deep. I’m talking about the face of the earth.

But anyone who nurtures bigotry within the heart will continue to nourish it for a long time yet to come. It will not die easily. Is there hope for the flower?

Should I revert to the tales of the heart? Should I revert to the inner sequence? Should I revert to yesterday’s tenderness? The first woman? The last kiss?

Or should I continue into the desert? Should I seek a new oasis and wander after the unknown treasures of the sand? But who can open up the secrets of the sand? A flower?

The first strike was a miss. The first step was the first fall. The first sight was blinded by a pitch-fork. But there will be a second. The second is the other side of the coin.

I want to write a poem. I want to penetrate deep into the heart of the broken home, there where the spirit in us resides. We are all to one another strangers. Bridges we build, communal words we use, eyes we touch when we will, hands we give, yet remain unto one another strangers. The shared blood was poisoned aye ere we were born. The shared earth was divided already long ago and divided we stand and stare at one another across the border, the boundaries of our little egos and remain each alone. But each is but alone. Little egos. Little worlds. Little by little, if watered, like flowers, perhaps, we grow.

The secrets of the sand, approaching, covering up our footsteps. Hey, I wrote this poem before, when I was young. But if I was young then, what am I now, older or younger? For the first poem was the greater and the latter flow gropes for reconnection with the source that thundered out of the young heart of the finalised decision. Seen once. Pondered once. Grasped once. Perceived once. Decided once. At the start of the journey. And everything else is just the hanging on, the wondering, the new search. We have found but have not yet reached the Goal. We are still on the path. Believing in the flower.

This is what I would like to give to you, a flower in the desert. Do not perhaps think that the Desert is more powerful than the flower. Nay. There you would err. But treasure and protect the flower. Water it anywhere you see it. For the flower alone, of all the forces in the universe, can subdue the Desert.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

Taken from my collection of thoughts and stories: “There Is Always Something More.”