ahar...@earthlink.net
All this is very fascinating.
Amy
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Untold African history: Black Russians
Not all of the Africans in Russia were there because of slavery. Pushkin's
grand father was Ethiopian royalty and was a guest of the court. There are
others as well during that time frame.
There were slaves there but not as many that were brought to Europe, Brazil,
and America.
The former USSR is a mixture of a lot of different peoples. There are some
people that resemble Arab, Asian Indian, Inuit, others Chinese, and other still
a mixture of Caucasian and Asian.
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Martin Baxter <truthseeker...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
Keith, in the case of Black Russians, they became Russian in much the same
way we became American. If memory serves, Russian raiders, foraying out as far
as north Africa, brought back Blacks and Arabs as slaves. Eventually, after
being freed, they settled in enclaves, rather than risk the arduous trip back
to their native lands.
"If all the world's a stage and all the people merely players, who in
bloody hell hired the director?" -- Charles L Grant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQUxw9aUVik
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
From: keithbjohn...@comcast.net
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:19:57 +0000
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Untold African history: Black Russians
Dude, that "Black Obama" is a watermelon seller? I wonder if the irony of
that is lost on a Russian?
I remember many stories about blacks in Russia and the pain they suffer.
Remember a few short years ago there was violence at a dorm where African
students were staying while at university? That was linked to racism by white
Russians against those students of color.
I am still saddened and frankly, sometimes confused, at people of color
going to places where they are even more in the minority. I get seeking out new
and better opportunities. And I sure as hell get why Russia could have seemed
more welcoming to people flying the horrors of Jim Crow America. But I have
longed believed that it is important to be surrounded by people who look like
you in addition to those who dont: it fosters a sense of belonging and comfort,
it helps prevent one from feeling like some kind of oddity, and it can help
shield from some of the more hostile barbs one might take. I have black friends
here in America who have chosen to live in majority white areas, and they
always end up with problems. I live in a very mixed community,and don't have
those pressures at least.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mr. Worf" <hellomahog...@gmail.com>
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2010 1:34:03 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [scifinoir2] Untold African history: Black Russians
society
Russia’s Black Community
Kevin O’Flynn, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Image 1: “African-Russians activists demonstrate in a march against racism
in the Volga city of Nizhy Novgorod”; Image 2: “Yelena Khanga (right)
co-hosting a popular daytime TV show, The Domino Principle. She became one of
Russia’s best-known celebrities;” Image 3: “Some African families have lived in
Russia for several generations.”
Society: African-Russians: Seeking their Place in an Often Hostile
Environment
Society: African-Russians: Seeking their Place in an Often Hostile
Environment
Russian reaction to President Barack Obama's visit seemed mixed, but he
serves as inspiration to the country's little-known African-Russian community.
For Russians of African descent, President Barack Obama offers a potent
symbol of triumph over the same challenges they themselves face in a country
where dark-skinned people remain rare and often unwelcome.
Yelena Khanga is one of Russia’s best-known black citizens. The popular
host of a top-rated 1990s chat show about sex – “Pro Eto,” (About That), she
became one of the few black faces regularly seen on Russian television.
Khanga’s grandparents came to the Soviet Union in the 1920s to escape the
racism they had endured in the United States as a mixed-race couple. Today,
Khanga says Obama’s election to the American presidency has special meaning for
her.
“He did what my grandmother and grandfather dreamed about in their day,”
Khanga says. “They couldn’t even have dreamed that, one day, America would have
a black president. The only dreams that they had—my grandmother was white, and
my grandfather was black—was that Americans would someday allow mixed couples
to live in peace, have children, and let the children have decent lives. That
is what they dreamed about.”
Khanga’s grandfather, Oliver Golden, became a member of the Communist Party
in the United States after he failed to find work as anything but a waiter
despite having a college degree. He soon left for the Soviet Union with his
Polish-American wife, Bertha Bialek, in one of the groups of black Americans
actively encouraged by Bolshevik leaders to pull up stakes in their capitalist
homeland and help build a new society in the U.S.S.R.
Golden traveled to Uzbekistan to work on cotton cultivation. He and his
wife soon gave birth to a daughter named Lily, Khanga’s mother.
Khanga says her grandparents worked hard to show Lily — who went on to
marry Abdullah Khanga, a political leader from Zanzibar whom she met in Moscow
— that she was free to achieve whatever she wanted.
“The Obama campaign said, ‘Yes we can.’ My grandmother and grandfather said
the same thing to my mother: ‘Yes, you can. You can do it,’” Khanga says. “And
my mother was the best pupil in school, she graduated with a gold medal.... She
was practically the first black person to study at MGU [Moscow State
University] in the Soviet Union. She played tennis; it was the dream of my
grandfather that she, a black girl, play tennis. She was the champion of
Uzbekistan.”
The most famous African-Russian is legendary poet Alexander Pushkin, who
was the great-grandson of an African brought to St. Petersburg under Peter the
Great in the early 18th century. During the Soviet era, African students were
actively encouraged to travel to the Soviet Union for their educations, leading
to a number of mixed marriages and African-Russian offspring.
But black skin remains extremely rare in Russia. One estimate says that
there are between 40,000 and 70,000 Russians of full or mixed-African heritage.
That distinction has singled many black Russians out for treatment that
they say swings between curiosity, at best, and open hostility, at worst.
Grigory Siyatinda, an actor at the Sovremennik Theater in Moscow, grew up
as the only black man in his hometown of Tyumen in the 1970s. His experience
was that of an object of fascination in an isolated Soviet society where
foreigners, and especially black foreigners, were exotic.
“How to put it? It wasn’t racism, what I experienced during my childhood in
Tyumen,” Siyatinda says. “I was the only black person in Tyumen—Tyumen is a
Siberian city and there were no black-skinned people at all. ...That’s why
there was simply this heightened curiosity toward me. It was heightened so much
at times that it crossed over the borders of tact.”
Racism, long officially denied under the communist regime, is a reality in
modern-day Russia, where nationalist groups and xenophobia are on the rise.
Russia’s Sova center, which tracks issues related to race and ethnicity,
reports that 97 people were killed in racist attacks in 2008. Statistically,
Central Asian migrants have become the primary victims of attacks in recent
years. But African-Russians and African students remain constant targets as
well.
Still, Khanga—whose great-grandfather was a slave in Mississippi—says she
believes the scourge of racism was far worse in the United States, where there
were 4 million African slaves by the time slavery was abolished in 1865 and
where it took another century before school segregation and other forms of
racial discrimination were formally outlawed.
Khanga notes that there was a very small percentage of mixed-race and black
people in the Soviet Union.
“I was part of the first generation...,” Khanga says. “...I can be the
first to tell you what kinds of problems we had. But, of course, you can’t
compare them to the kinds of things that happened in America.”
Still, the few black Russians who have risen to prominence in their country
have done so through sports or the entertainment world.
Khanga says she hopes that Obama’s historic rise to become the first
African-American president will open doors for blacks in Russia as well.
“I would like to see us have success in politics or science as well,” she
says. -
www.rferl.org/content/For_Russian_Blacks_Obama_Visit_Stirs_Special_Interest/1770531.html
“Copyright (c) 2009 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Reprinted and
excerpted with the permission of RFE/RL, 1201 Connecticut Ave., NW Washington,
D.C. 20036
A Barack Obama from Volgograd
A 37-year-old man from Guinea-Bissau is bidding to become Russia’s first
black elected official.
Dubbed the “Volgograd Obama,” Joachim Crima, who calls himself Vasily
Ivanovich in Russian, is standing in district elections in south Russia’s
Volgograd Region.
“I was born in Africa, but I have lived in the district for 12 years and
feel practically Russian,” the watermelon seller said. “I have a son here and
this is why I cannot be indifferent to the fate of the region.”
“I want to make the lives of people, whom I consider my compatriots,
better. I am ready to work from morning until evening to resolve their
problems.”
The newsru.com website said Crima was using the common Russian expression
for working hard as his campaign slogan. Elections are due on October 11.
Q&A: Traveling to Russia requires a visa plus registration, and those who
are not with a package tour have to register on their own. Our expert shows you
how
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Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity!
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