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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