THE NATURE OF SELF-HATE By NAIWU OSAHON

Columnist: Naiwu Osahon

African women are loosing sense of self-worth. Their idea of feminine elegance is to wear white female hair styles. Flip through any issue of our week-end newspapers and picture magazines to see how far this disturbing trend of self-hate by our females has gone. No class of black women is exempt: film and sports stars, musicians, students, models, literary gurus, politicians, academics, business executives, civil servants, religious leaders and followers, unemployed or working class spinsters and housewives, are trying desperately to pass for white. They are all pampered as teenage daughters, with charming African hair styles, which they promptly abandon for white female hair styles as soon as they become of age to choose hair styles for themselves.

Advertisers of cosmetic products are the architects of the assault on our sense of self-worth, telling our women that light skin and long, shinny, bodiless, straight, white female hair styles, are the ideal for our women. The advertisers hide the truth that light skin colour age faster than dark skin, and that every race has natural hair styles that suit and compliment her. Africans have the greatest variety of elegant, feminine, beautiful, sexy, creative, ennobling, envied, open to further innovations, female hair styles, than all the other tribes of the world put together. Our women have hundreds of matchless teasers from the ancient Nubian, Kanuri, Calabar, Edo queenly varieties, to the modern exquisite resourceful African tribal traffic stoppers.

The proper African female hair styles fall in the range of low/full cut, to thick, rich, woolly, curly, alluring, lively, dramatic, healthy, luscious, moist, sheer, knotted, kinky, plaited, jumbled, tangled, crown of part-collected, massed or cascading hair, confirming (like the peacock’s crown for the birds’ kingdom, or the lion’s for the animals’ dominion), our females’ ordained status as the human queens: brave, proud, confident, real, important, dignified, feminine, irresistible.

African women, wearing hot combed, straight, stretched, compacted or other white female hair styles, look inferior, like cheap substitutes and slaves, standing besides their true to nature white female peers; and like grandmas besides their proudly African peers with African female hair styles. They invariably look like white headed black dolls, doubly empty inside, or like cats emerging from a forced bath of hot oil: ugly, slimy and abnormal. So, one is tempted to ask, do our women wear white female hair styles out of a feeling of self-hate or because they are angry and want to shock and terrorize with their, I don’t care how I look pose, blacks they are ashamed of and whites that reject them?

Most modern African and Black women from around the world are ashamed to be African because African continental women are copying their African American peers. There was this actress looking like a precious jewel in her African hair style at the Pan-African Night of Tributes in Los Angeles and a few hours later, was looking like grandma in her white female hair style, at a Pre-Oscar Gala. Every April, Ebony magazine features black College Queens. All of them wear white female hair styles that make them look like jokers and pretenders to the throne of beauty queens of any tribe, black or white. Obviously, a great deal of confusion is going on in our women’s heads at the moment. A kind of a split personality crisis. If they cannot change their ‘black skin blemish’ fast enough, they can at least, jump start this with white female hair styles.

Of course, 400 years of slavery dealt a devastating blow to our feeling of self-worth. While Hiroshima bombing happened over a few days and the Jewish holocaust lasted a couple of years, without causing either of them the loss of cultural focus and identity, our dehumanization went on for 400 years and it was brutal and total. It obliterated our languages, culture, traditional mores, religions, history, individual names and identity. It was 400 years of no industry, learning, or progress, because we were running and hiding, not knowing who they would kidnap or murder next.

Over two hundred million of our relatives died on the run or during the Middle Passage. It was 400 years of unbridled rape of our women and the inhuman and ungodly castration of our men; 400 years of slaving like beasts of burden without pay on the plantations of Bible totting slavers; 400 years of not knowing what we did wrong to be visited with so much hate, violence and destruction; 400 years of not knowing if and when it would end, and it has not ended 600 years after.

The Jews and the Japanese received compensation for the terrible wrong done to them but our tormentors do not consider us human enough to deserve their apology and reparations. We do not count in their records of human history, not even as a footnote and we are powerless to exert restitution because we are not united. When men are powerless, their female folks tend to ride with the winners as booties, or in the hope of some of the master’s spoils robbing off on them.

In a recent Ebony magazine feature on black female senior executives, directors, and vice presidents of some leading US corporations, all of them wore white female hair styles that did severe damage to their look and age. They obviously believed they reached their merited heights by being dowdy and loyal servants. White leaders and bosses are not likely to be telling themselves, “I trust her absolutely because she is not true to her nature?” There is courage and strength in not living a lie, which all sane leaders and bosses, whites inclusive, recognize and quietly respect. Our girls cannot hide their basic nature under alien and unbecoming hair styles and assume that all is well.

Senior black female holders of political offices in the US and African governments, including Michelle Obama, our first, first lady, think, passing for white with white female hair styles, encouraged their ascendance or appointment, and that foreign white leaders would resent them if they looked their natural African selves from head to toe. For a start, it makes them look older than their real age, unattractive and undignified. It definitely offends the trust implied in the truism that: “real is more likely to be honest and reliable to deal with.” That is a conflict we all face right now, we are not real but we think we are, or do not care.

The current US Ambassador to Nigeria, Robin Rene Sanders, is an exception. She proudly wears dreadlocks and proud Africans love her madly for her courage. We trust her; see her as our own; as a sister and a friend who wants the best for us. It is an instinctive feeling because she identifies famously with us. Another great Diaspora African mommy and beauty is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of the US Congress. I wish all our women, at what ever age, would emulate her and Robin Rene Sanders. They look ageless, regal, strong, trustworthy, dependable and beautiful. They inspire our confidence by being proudly African. That is what African women not contaminated by Western decadence look like. It confirms that the Queen of Sheba’s extended family has not been completely wiped out by European’s plastic culture.

We have great female poets who, despite their age, could still win the Miss World title if they would be true to their African nature. We have others in public eye, people others look up to, such as artistes, authors, film stars, who ought to know better, in terms of the correct public image to project, who do not feel there is anything wrong with their unnatural hair styles.

We have daughters with long straight hair, of course, who look becoming because they are natural, but we also have black female TV hosts who wear pathetic, short or long, weightless, graceless, revolting, fake styles, thinking they look cute. Such hosts would not get me out of bed in the morning to watch a ‘Good Morning’ TV show?

When African American men were wearing pressed or hot combed hair styles not too long ago, many of us pined and prayed for the phase to pass. Our urgent critical worry now is that we may not find proudly African sisters to marry by the morning. May be we should buy our African American females, mirrors to look at themselves with the African eye every morning, before stepping out into the world? Better still, we could send them the mirrors left behind in Africa in payment for slaves by slavers? That way we might find some value for the mirrors, by using them to see what the slavers are still doing to our daughters’ mentality because, Diaspora Africans are continental Africans’ mirrors in modernity.

Female newscasters and talk show hosts on African television stations habitually wear white female hair styles. Typical cultural African programmes on TV stations are routinely hosted by females unsure of their correct racial image. The confused message they pass on with their unsightly non-African look, as against what they say on the programmes, apart from irritating their proudly African captive audience, discomforts the non-African viewer, eager to be treated to genuine and honest African scenes and entertainment.

There was this presenter the other day on television with long, straight, artificial hair, drooping all over her face to below her shoulders. She was shaking her head every few seconds to re-arrange the hair, and using her hands to transfer hair falling over her eyes to the back of her ears in typical white female manner. It was a lot of trouble for her, but that is not the issue here. On the programme, she was admonishing her listeners for not being true to their nature. “We should be proud of our culture, stick with it, and show it off to the world,” she said, stoned face. I had to touch my television set to assure myself, I was not dreaming.

When a Nigerian won the Miss World title in 2001, she was looking a delectable African queen. A year later, after her European sponsors had taken her around the world as their queen, she visited Nigeria looking like a masquerade. No one could recognize her. She had added 30 years to her age in twelve months, with her European hair style.

If you ask our females why they take so much trouble to disfigure themselves, they say it makes them look beautiful. It is all so very sad for our race because they (as our mothers) pass their feelings on to the average African child who prefers a white baby doll to a black one because the white one is more beautiful. Then when you ask the child to point to the doll that looks more like him or her, he or she helplessly and slowly points to the black one.

The typical African right now, would tell you he or she is proudly African, wearing a suit in our noon day heat, and answering names like John, Jane, Stella or Stephen. The young men are wearing hair styles the females should be wearing, with earrings and all to boot; the women are looking like scarecrows or extraterrestrial beings, repulsive, masculine and strange to our environment, in compacted, stretched, alien, unbecoming hair styles. They look neither black nor white from bleaching to sore point, with accentuated stretch marks all over the covered body.

Non-African tribes that would not try to change their nature as a race, by switching wholesale to African hair styles, religion, fashion, or answering African names, or burning black (in counterpoise to us bleaching), with injurious health consequences, that include kidney ruin, aggravated or heightened diabetes and hypertension, are difficult to fault for thinking that black IQ might be lower than that of the Chimpanzee.

NAIWU OSAHON, Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader) World Pan-African Movement); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: ‘The end of knowledge’. One of the world’s leading authors of children’s books; Awarded; key to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift the African race.

How a New Process Lets You Control Your Appetite Without Cravings

If you’re like most Americans you’ve probably tried a few approaches to weight loss – and without much lasting success.

The problem, according to experts is the combination of our sedentary lifestyle and our strong tendency to overeat.

Most of us spend 8 to 9 hours a day, 5 days a week sitting at our desks, plus more time sitting on our daily commute.  And exercise is apparently of little help when it comes to dropping pounds.  Even though Americans spend $19 billion dollars a year on gym memberships, and most of us say we exercise regularly, two-thirds of the population is still overweight or obese by government standards. Something just doesn’t add up.

Overeating seems to be the main problem. To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you consume and unless you’re following a strict diet, it’s very difficult to “work off” the excess amount of calories that most of us take in. For instance, for a 140 lb. woman to burn off the calories in a bagel with cream cheese, she would have to jog for an hour. And that’s just breakfast.

That hasn’t left people with too many effective options. You can rely on willpower and ration your food intake, turn to fat blockers that have embarrassing side effects, or worse, use dubious stimulants that could put your health at risk for the sake of losing weight.

So, is there a solution to this dilemma?

Apparently a new California Company called Sensa may just have one. They have just launched a remarkable new product that has been shown to control the appetite and convince the brain to stop overeating.

Sensa was developed by Dr. Alan Hirsch, an intrepid doctor and neuro-scientist, whose lifelong specialty has been to study how our senses, and in particular, smell and taste affect the brain’s functioning. Dr. Hirsch’s breakthrough occurred when he discovered that many of his patients who had lost their sense of smell and taste due to illness or accident experienced rapid weight gain.  He recognized that certain smells and tastes seemed to be acting on the brain to control the appetite.

Dr Hirsch studied hundreds of compounds and after years of research developed a set of virtually odorless and tasteless food sprinkles that showed a strong impact on the body’s appetite-control center, which he called “Tastants”.  Then, in one of the largest studies of a non-prescription weight-loss system, these Tastants were tested for effectiveness as a means of weight loss. 

The results were significant. Over a 6 month period, 1,436 women and men sprinkled flavorless “Tastant” crystals on everything they ate, and lost an average of 30.5 pounds – nearly 15% of their total body weight.

Participants achieved these results without having to follow any special exercise regime or diet.

Best of all, because it is tasteless and odorless and contains no stimulants and does not directly interact with the digestive system, there are no unpleasant side-effects.  According to Dr Hirsch, “With Sensa, you can eat all the foods that satisfy your senses and you don’t have to deal with any intense food cravings or feelings of starvation. Sensa merely helps you eat less of the foods you love and gain greater satisfaction from smaller portions.”

How to try it free

Real weight loss without diet and exercise – too good to be true? Apparently the company anticipated a somewhat skeptical response from consumers so they have launched the Sensa Challange.

They are so sure you will lose weight with Sensa that new customers get to use the product for 30 days so that you can see real weight loss before deciding if they want to pay for it or not.

Click here to learn more about this free trial offer.

This article sponsored by Sensa Copyright Howlifeworks.com 2010

A history of the Batwa (Pygmy) people in Africa

by Aldo Bonincontro.

The Pygmy people are, maybe, the most ancient population to have lived in African forests.
Their name derives from the Greek “pygmaios” (one cubit high, that means “small”), in fact, these persons are only 1.40 m high for men and 1.30 for women, in the average.
The Greek, in fact, referred to a legendary dwarf people living southward from Egypt or even in India, always in war against the

storks that devastated their cultivations.

They’re not to be considered belonging to Black people, because their skin is pale-brown, much clearer than in the other sub-Saharian populations.
They live in the topical-equatorial region of central Africa, from Cameroun to the limits of the Rift Valley, between Congo and Rwanda and Uganda, in a region still formed by equatorial forests, in the largest part and they inhabit small villages, in the forests, living od hunting, fishing and collection.Ethnologists have few news about their most ancient history, but it’s likely they were diffused in East Africa, as some legends refer and they should represent the last representatives of the prehistoric African populations in central Sahara region.
They were already known by the ancient Egyptians in the II millennium B.C. who report, in some written witnesses, that they were named “Dancers of the Gods”, for their great ability in dance.
We know a letter sent by a pharaoh of the Ancient Reign to one of his governors in which the first thanked the governor for having donated a “dwarf” coming from the “spirits land”, the name with which the Egyptians named the lands southward their territories.

About 1000 B.C., they welcomed pacifically the Bantu populations coming in their area, creating with them exchange relations giving their hunting products to receive food from agriculture, that the Pygmies have always scarcely practiced, much less than the Bantus.Later, this relation on equal bases with Bantu begun to deteriorate at the expense of the Pygmies, because the Bantus profited of their own technological superiority, with the knowledge of metallurgical art, unknown to the Pygmies and of the same farming practice that gave them more authonomy and economic power.
So, the Pygmy people was often submitted and reduced in a more or less total slavery by tus and this started their decline, when they couldn’t count anymore on forest resources.Only in the last decades, after the arrival of missionaries, doctors and antropologists, the Pygmies started to enjoy again a partial freedom from the Bantus, despite their human rights are still today seriously limited in various situations.

The Pygmies had always been nomadic, given their attitude to move across the territory for hunting and collecting fruits but, more recently, due to the influxes of urban civilization spreading in Africa, they are becoming more and more sedentary.Today, their overall population counts about 250,000 people and they talk various languages, but with various words common to all Pygmy groups and this makes think that, in the past, they shared the same language.

Their life today knows an unprecedented crisis, due to deforestation that is reducing their vital and cultural space; the governments don’t recognize their rights as citizens like the others.
In Cameroun the life of the Bagyeli Pygmies is going to be shaken by the building of an oil pipeline, financed by the World Bank, that will cross their land; in Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo, (where the Pygmies are named Batwa) their forests have been nearly totally destroyed and they live in misery as manual workers and even beggars.

The World Cup 1, African Liberation NilBy Jared A. Ball
July 03 2010 – blackagendareport.com

“These stadiums are encased in a ‘Ring of Steel’ to protect audiences from ‘unpatriotic citizens’ of South Africa.”

Today, June 16, marks the 34th anniversary of the South African Soweto uprising where thousands of African youth took to the streets and where hundreds would die at the hands of the South African police and military. Today, June 16, also marks the first anniversary of that uprising to take place during the first ever World Cup on the African continent. These competing, colliding commemorations and events stand in violent opposition to one another precisely because the World Cup is corporate-sponsored spectacle playing on our emotions in the hopes that we will not realize or will ignore those who try to force realization, that the causes of the Soweto uprising, indeed the very existence of a Soweto or a South Africa, remain, are even worse now than 34 years ago. So bad are these conditions today that in response to seeing so many Black American entertainers participating in the World Cup opening ceremonies one veteran activist remarked to me that “these folks are crossing the picket line.”

No one at all familiar with the history of the labor movement can hear lightly this kind of condemnation. To cross any picket line, that is, to become a “scab” is to betray the struggle of your kind, of your class. And this is precisely what major events such as the World Cup demand of its participants. And everyone did. Hugh Masekela was there to briefly blow his once defiant horn, as was John Legend and the Black Eyed Peas fresh off their Obama inauguration performance where they omitted their lyrics about the CIA being terrorists. Shakira was there in her grass skirt wiggling her light/white Latin Americanness before the world and from within the “Dark Continent” no less! And, of course, there was K’Naan the talented Somali rapper who foolishly accepts invitations from white liberals to bash Black Americans as not really being that oppressed while himself selling his liberation song Wavin’ Flag to Coca-Cola to be used as the World Cup theme song absent, naturally, of its lyrical references to Somali suffering. And all the while his fellow continental Africans, who he cannot dismiss as having it as easy as their American cousins, do not have their concerns addressed either.

“Since the “fall of apartheid” White income has risen 24% while that of Black Africans has actually dropped.”

So no mention of the 20,000 poor removed from stadium sites into even smaller slums. No mention that these stadiums are encased in a “Ring of Steel” to protect audiences from “unpatriotic citizens” of South Africa whose presence alone, never mind any actual protest, might heighten too many contradictions. No mention either of the 22 million Africans in South Africa who live as squatters, and have no potable water. Or the 14 million who are unemployed, or that 43% live ith less than $2 a day. And no mention that Black South African men earn what equates to $320 a month while White men earn $2,600 or that Whites as 12% of the population still hold 74% of private sector jobs, control over 80% of the land and all of the military. Further, no mention can be made of the fact that since the “fall of apartheid” White income has risen 24% while that of Black Africans has actually dropped. Of course, this is aided by the embedded model of journalism where the World Cup governing body FIFA has right of refusal to any journalist accreditations should anyone be so foolish as to actually attempt to report any of this. This will also be helpful in preventing the world from becoming aware of the fact that most of the products being sold at the World Cup are Chinese or that FIFA owns all the merchandising rights which has led one writer to explain that, “This World Cup is not for the poor – it is the soccer elites of FIFA, the elites of domestic and international corporate capital and the political elites who are making billions and who will be benefiting at the expense of the poor.”

And though few will see or hear of them protests are being organized and efforts to break through the televised façade will continue. One such effort is coming from the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) whose statement in promotion of a call to join them June 16 in South Africa to commemorate the 1976 Soweto uprising says: “Therefore, our call comes at a time when the subtle and insidious mechanism of State is used to good effect by the Capitalist Overlords to ensure the willing obedience and subservience of the working-class through a twisted vocalization of what they claim is a “universal message of equality, love and justice” wrapped up in massive sports jamborees, coupled with the subtle threat that “…if we do not believe and promote their message, then we are evil and will be dealt with in ways that we cannot begin to imagine…”

In the meantime, I like many Black onlookers, will continue to watch and root for teams along the following lines: against all teams of the West, then for the teams with the most Black players and so on down the line and ultimately only for those whose struggles continue and remain ignored.

Source: blackagendareport.com

Eric Williams revisited

By Selwyn Ryan