Prof Lugemwa,
Happy New Year!
The last place I would look for for fair and balanced reporting on Black issues is FrontPage magazine. Much like finding a refuge for goats in a lion's den. After recanting Marxism, the magazine's founding editor, David Horowitz, has discovered his true calling as a right wing nut whose atonement for his lefty years appears to be relentlessly beating up on Blacks.
This article you posted is a classic example of White supremacist thinking. The mainstream assumption in U.S. America is that the institution of slavery destroyed all links between U.S. Blacks and Africa, so any attempt by African Americans to reclaim their African heritage provokes so much foaming in the mouths among the high priests of Eurocentricity. The simple explanation for this apoplectic rage is that culturally, spiritually, intellectually, Blacks are never supposed to escape from the plantation. This is a verbal attempt to hunt and take them back in slave chains.
For all his faults, Maulana Karenga has displayed rare genius in inventing Kwanzaa.
So, the vicious nature of these attacks. The tragic truth is that not many Blacks can trace with precision and accuracy their villages or towns of origin in Africa. Even those who do would most likely embrace the whole of Africa as the Motherland. It is the institution of slavery and the White supremacist mentality that produced it that should be the real target of the rage of well-meaning White people, not Blacks, who owe no apology to Whites for attempting to reclaim their African heritage.
In any case White supremacy is pan-European in orientation. That's why, an Irish American will never be excoriated by the likes of Paul "Moonshine" Mulshine and his editor Horowitz for claiming the mantel of Plato and Aristotle or the toga of the Romans Cicero and Cato -- never mind the fact that no Celtic blood flowed in the veins of those Greek and Roman thinkers .
Only proponents of apartheid would insist that Black people in Africa or elsewhere belong in Bantustans, mental or material. So, I say let African Americans celebrate their African heritage in any African language of their choosing.
vukoni
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