Friday, November 15, 2013

STOKELY CARMICHAEL BEQUEATHES BLACK POWER TO FELLOW AFRICANS

1.       Anybody knows Stokely Carmichael’s date of birth? I struggled in vain to google the bloke's arrival to this temporary abode of ours called Earth!

2.       I like Carmichael a lot.  He commanded intellectual respect, if you ask me.  And few people leave that impression to a Phiri who is the world's first royal blood a.k.a. Pharaoh!


3.       Today I resign myself to doffing my hat over the 15th anniversary of a Gargantua’s death.



BLOG AUTHOR’S MEMORIES OF GIGANTIC CARMICHAEL.


4.       It is today exactly 15 years since the Father of Black Power, Stokely Carmichael presumably died in some African country (although he had not been born on the Continent but had come to it out of love and respect for the Motherland, adopting in the process the name 'Kwame Toure').

5.       People like he are never remembered lightly especially if you ever rubbed shoulders with them and they left something for you to chew on.

6.       When I met him, I was then Secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania Political Party’s Johannesburg Branch.

7.       He asked this memorable question: [“How many black people…do you think…know insofar as how much gold still remains underneath in South Africa after all the years’ mining during Apartheid?”]

8.       Nobody in my branch thought even then President Nelson Mandela had a clue.

9.       Kwame Toure then delivered his killer blow:


10.   [“No black man or woman can under prevailing mental circumstances acquire those facts especially  under a dispensation that has a long way to go before seeing black people having real power in South Africa.”]

11.   While I was still digesting his statement, he added yet another one, if only to seal the meteoric force of his previous one: [“Make no mistake though: White People know almost with all exactitude just how much of gold or any other mineral lies under this African soil.”

12.   He was far from being racist.  He was, methinks, being assertive in making the so-called black race shun dependence on European handouts even where it concerns knowledge, science and technology which are all no privy to so-called White People but will remain so forever if and only if us swarthier races eschew hard work, study, love for self and intra-racial cooperation.


13.   I understand Carmichael finally succumbed to prostate cancer.

14.   He was not only frail when he came to us in Johannesburg in the late 1990s, but he made it no secret that he was not only aware he was dying  but he was also here in South Africa only to bid us farewell prior to promotion to the next world.


15.   Stokely Carmichael is credited for founding the term ‘Black Power’, a term that rallied us the youth of South Africa as galvanized into action by Tsietsie Mashinini of Soweto in 1976.

16.   Long Live Black Power!


17.   Long Live Stokely Carmichael!




















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