One of the greatest and continuing challenges of our lives, in both ordinary and extraordinary times is to know how to live a good life and then to actually live it in a conscious, committed and determined way.
As we celebrate the graduation of our young people stepping into the world and continue the critically important struggle for quality education for our children, I think of all the Seba, the teachers of the good, the right and the possible, that I’ve known.
As we close out the month of March, Black History Month II: Women Focus, I am drawn to two ancient teachings concerning the sacred and social significance of women in the world. And I want to use them as foundation and framework for paying homage to African women of the world, of the Movement and especially the women of Us.
Heri za Kwanzaa, Happy Kwanzaa to you, Limbiko. In the tradition of our Kemetic ancestors, this is a letter long overdue since May, the month of your coming into being and beginning the journey of life and love, work and struggle that would lead you to us and a new way and wonder of being African woman and man in the world.
In reaffirmation. Those of us who still wage righteous and relentless struggle inwardly and outwardly to live a liberated, good and meaningful life will continuously find invaluable sources for grounding and growth in the enduringly relevant and deeply insightful sacred teachings of our ancestors found in the Odu Ifa, especially in this critical time.
Reflecting on the challenge before us, I am drawn to the word for “challenge” in Swahili, changamoto. The word is a combination of two words—moto (fire) and changa which has several meanings, but is here interpreted as both to collect and to contribute. Thus, it literally means both to collect and contribute fire, a gathering and giving of fire, interpreting fire here as vital and transformative energy and focused and determined agency.
This is a reminder and reinforcement for Black Lover’s Day this month and each day all year round. It is not an exaggeration to state that there is no issue of greater importance, urgency or enduring impact in terms of the foundation, functioning and future of us as a community and a people than the quality of male/female relationships.
As we contemplate various ways to celebrate Black History Month, we must ask ourselves how do we pay proper hommage to this sacred narrative we know as Black History? How do we think and talk about this, the oldest of human histories and about the fathers and mothers of humanity and human civilization who made it? And how do we honor the lives given and the legacy left in and on this long march and movement through African and human history?
In this time of warmongering, weapon brandishing and the waging of war of various kinds against the vulnerable, revisiting this Kawaida stance and statement on the importance and essential good of peace is both needed and reaffirming.
Kwanzaa is a time of celebration, remembrance, reflection and recommitment. It requires these practices throughout the holiday. But the last day of Kwanzaa is dedicated to deep reflection, meditation on the meaning and measure of being African and how this is understood and asserted for good in the world in essential, uplifting and transformative ways.
Nowhere is the profundity and beauty of African spirituality more apparent than in the Odu Ifa,the sacred text of the spiritual and ethical tradition of Ifa, which is one of the greatest sacred texts of the world and a classic of African and world literature.
If we are to know ourselves rightly, honor our history, radically improve our present and forge a future worthy of the names African and human, then we must reaffirm and renew our moral and social vanguard role as a people, wage righteous and relentless resistance to evil and injustice everywhere, and put forth in plan and practice a new history and hope for our people and humankind. In the months of February and March, which we of Us have designated as Black History Month I (General Focus) and Black History Month II (Women Focus), our people have set aside time and space to celebrate ourselves inhistoryand ashistory. For we are producers and products of this sacred narrative, and the subject and center of this awesome record and struggle, the most ancient of human histories.
Odu Ifa 11:1 tells us we must, in our most earnest struggle, also model fire without its destructiveness, but with its capacity to make a way for itself.
As Kwanzaa draws to an end and the old year meets and merges with the new, we are, as always, obligated and urged by ancient custom and ongoing current concerns to sit down and seriously engage in righteous reflection on being African in the world. To speak of righteous reflection is, in an Ebonics sense of the word righteous, to talk of thought that is real, ethical and excellent. That is to say, thought that is free from the artificial, false and formulaic and comes from the heart as well as from the head. What is aimed at here is thought which is informed by an ethical sensitivity to the subject under consideration. And this holds true whether in our concern for each other or for the health and wholeness of the world; for the loss of human life or the mutilation of historical memory; and for the deprivation of material needs or the denial of dignity and rights due everyone.
To imagine a whole new future and to forge it in the most ethical, effective and expansive ways speaks to our need to constantly be concerned about those who come after us, about the world itself after we, as our honored ancestors say, have risen in radiance in the heavens and sit in the sacred circle of the ancestors. It’s about wanting, working and struggling for the constant advancement of good in the world and imagining and forging a future worthy of the name and history, African.