We have just concluded the days activities with an intimate dinner at a Black-owned restaurant in the heart of Oslo. The food reminded me of home. One of the international guests at the Afrika History Week is MK Asante, the son of renowned Afrikanist, Molefi Kete Asante. If you think the father is dynamite then you have not engaged the son. He is phenomenal! At 31, he is a tenured professor at Morgan State University. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and many other universities. A film he wrote and produced, 500 Years Later, won five international film festival awards. He has written a number of books which include Its Bigger Than Hip-Hop, in which he argues that hip-hop is a misunderstood weapon of social change. There are many Black people making waves in this world, but we do not celebrate them sufficiently because day in and day out, we have stories and images of Black corruption, maladministration, incapacity, criminality and all things negative thrust in our faces by a media that is more comfortable documenting all that is wrong with Blackness. I salute people like M.K for hoisting the flag of our humanness as high as it demands to be hoisted. And I choose to associate myself with such people, because they are people who build you, who make you a better person. Let me repeat: he is only 31 years old!
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:56:41 +0000
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