I Want Moor
Fully verified Imagerys, literature and quotes confirming the presence, might and hidden History of the Moors. Who were they?
Sunday 2 November 2014
Sunday 31 August 2014
A Case of Racial Double Standard #MikeBrown
Blacked Out Through Whitewash (1992) Part I: Exposing the Greatest Cover- ups in “His-Story” by: Suzar
Thursday 28 August 2014
YASUKE THE AFRICAN SAMURAI
YASUKE THE AFRICAN SAMURAI
BY MAX MOSES
Yasuke is a Japanese name used to refer to a black (African).
Yasuke worked for the japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga as his bodyguard and then was granted the prestigious rank of Samurai. He was described in The “Lord Nobunaga Chronicle” (Shinchōkōki) has a description of Yasuke’s first meeting with Nobunaga. “On the 23rd of the 2nd month March 23, 1581, a black page (“kuro-bōzu”) came from the Christian countries. He looked about 26 24 or 25 by Western count or 27 years old; his entire body was black like that of an ox. The man was healthy and good-looking. Moreover, his strength was greater than that of 10 men.” After Matsudaira Ietada had met Yasuke in May 1582, Ietada journalized his looks. ” His name was Yasuke. His height was 6 shaku 2 sun (6 ft. 2 in., or 188 cm.). He was black, and his skin was like charcoal.” If so, his tall stature would have been very imposing to the Japanese of the day. And he was affluent in several languages including japanese which bolsterd along with his size and strength to warlord Nobunaga. Yasuke became a permanent fixture in Nobunaga’s retinue, his size and strength acting as a deterrent to assassination not to mention a flavour of exoticism.Apparently Nobunaga became so fond of Yasuke that rumours abounded that the former slave was going to be made a Daimyo (a Japanese land-owning lord). Yasuke was given the honour of being made a member of the samurai class, a rare honour among foreigners.
In the late 16th century a young African warrior from Mozambique assisted in the unification of Japan as a samurai to the historic warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534 – 1582).Yasuke was his Japanese name and he is mentioned in the 1581 letters of the Jesuits Luis Frois and Lorenço Mexia and in the 1582 Annual Report of the Jesuit Mission in Japan.
The “Lord Nobunaga Chronicle” (Shinchōkōki) has a description of Yasuke’s first meeting with Nobunaga. The compiled chronicle consists of 16 volumes and is considered “mostly factual” and “reliable”. Chicago-based producer Floyd Webb (The Search for Count Dante, 2014) and Tokyo-based producer Deborah Ann DeSnoo (Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire, 2004) have formed a partnership to re-capture the lost histories of global cross-cultural interaction, 16th century Jesuit missionaries and the forging of a unified Japanese nation.
Thursday 5 June 2014
Land Grab in Africa, Modern Day Colonialism
The silent recolonisation of Africa is happening on a mass scale. To address this issue, the first Africa Conference on Land Grabs is set to take place in South Africa on 27–30 Oct. 2014. Land is the source of life and death, but it might not always be with us.
One of the reasons South Africa’s apartheid system is said not to have vanished with the swearing in of Nelson Mandela as President is the question of land. The colonial system was complete in places where land ownership was taken away from the colonised, and decolonisation remains incomplete if the land does not return to its rightful owners, those who were brutally and slyly dispossessed.
Tragically, a silent recolonisation on a mass scale is happening through further dispossession in areas where the original colonisation had not been complete. The new colonisation is dressed in the language of economic development and fighting poverty but its interest is the satisfaction of the needs of multinational companies for markets and land to grow food for export – to satisfy the food needs of their primary market while depriving Africans the satisfaction of their needs.
Land is the source of life and death
Land is not just a material possession. The 1997 Church Land Conference in Johannesburg was indeed accurate in noting that land is and should be above commerce and politics, that land is the source of life and death, like a mother who gives her children sustenance without which they would perish. As Andile Mngxitama reports in The Chimurenga Chronic April 2013 edition, land is always with us, it gives us life and when we die, it takes us back.
In the same article, Andile narrates the story of Sipho Makhombothi, the founder and now deceased leader of the Landless People’s Movement, who left instructions that on his death, he should be buried near his ancestors, on their and his land. Militant members of the movement indeed honoured his wish and buried the activist on the land, in defiance of guns and dogs belonging to the White ‘owners’ of the same land. Two years after the burial, Makhombothi’s body was exhumed under court order. Andile reminds us that “Makhombothi’s bones – landless in life, landless in death – still scream for justice across the fields and plains of Mpumalanga.”
The effects of colonial era land grabbing are not only visible in South Africa. Kenya’s tale of land-owners and squatters, of political families that own entire counties as rewards for political deals with the ‘departing’ colonialists remain an open sore during electoral campaigns. The case of Namibia, where residents of European countries still own huge chunks of land native Namibians have no access to is another sign that decolonisation of the land is still far from reality.
Repossession was bad for Zimbabwe. Really?
The case of Zimbabwe’s repossession of hitherto-White farmer owned land is perhaps the most known attempt at the decolonisation of the land. It has been heavily criticised by Western media and branded as an act of an almost mad and senile man, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. The neo-liberal capitalist in the true imperial fashion has preached that the repossession is bad for the African. Food shortage in the country has been blamed on the repossession, despite the fact that the White farmers used to export more food than they supplied to the Zimbabwean market when they owned the farms. The thirst for land by extreme capitalists is insatiable. Thus, parts of the continent that had almost survived the original land colonisation have to be recolonised, and those where the land was effectively ‘stolen’ consolidated.
Protests in Uganda
Since the end of active hostilities in Northern Uganda, the war has turned to the land. With residents migrating to camps for protection and refuge, most of their land remained bare alongside communally-owned land. With ‘commercial’ farmers like the Madhivani group and the discovery of oil deposits beneath much of this land, the post-conflict period has seen new forms of land conflicts emerge between the commercial farmer and government on one hand and residents who do not want to part with ownership of their land. The government claims it wants the land on behalf of the commercial farmer to grow sugarcane, and consequently the economy, but some critics think this is a disguised attempt at disenfranchising the people, especially that oil deposits have been reported to be in plenty beneath the same land.
The resistance against this recolonisation has taken on conventional and non-conventional methods. Women in the Amuru district – where the land grab machinery has invested both sly and direct intimidatory means –undressed in protest against political leaders, an act considered the most severe expression of displeasure and discontent. The wrangle continues. It is a big political issue, accusations of bribery of politicians by the corporate monsters are rife, but there is still hope that the people may prevail.
In Southern Uganda, in somewhat dissimilar circumstances, the people objected to the award of the Mabira forest-land to another sugar plantation-farmer in 2007. A huge demonstration in Kampala, that saw some Indians and Asians victimised by the demonstrators and some of the demonstrators gunned down by the army and police expressed the mass disapproval of the government plans. Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi, the reigning king of Buganda, where the forest is located, offered his own land to the sugar-cane grower in return for the forest, but his offer was rejected. On paper, it was reported that the land grab was stopped, but some press subsequently reported that some parts of the forest had been grabbed and were being used for sugar-cane growing anyway.
The African Union is complicit
The language of development and economic production is rife in the land grab justification. Like the 19th century colonisation, the new wave of land grabbing is allegedly well-intentioned. It is also well-planned, in the same way the 19th century colonisation was well hatched by European powers of the time. Ironically, the African Union is complicit in this new plan. The core plan comprises the G8′s “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa” and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
According to the African Centre for Bio-Safety, “opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 and AGRA interventions”. The Centre has labelled the plans as a new wave of colonialism. The plans include the harmonisation of laws across Africa to favour foreign direct investment in agriculture, ease land ownership laws to favour foreign multinational companies and allow the use of genetically modified seeds. All this compromises the ability of the majority small-scale farmers, the so-called subsistence farmers who grow food for their own consumption and a surplus for the market in order to continue producing for their own consumption, not to mention the market. Dis-empowering such people means controlling their lives and turning them into consumers of products they can’t produce. The use of genetically modified seeds enables multinational companies to collect royalties from farmers who use the seeds, thus destroying the seed varieties cycles that have proved sustainable on the continent for time immemorial.
The recolonisation plans are already working. A report published in April 2014 by UK campaigning group World Development Movement (WDM) titled Carving up a continent: How the UK government is facilitating the corporate takeover of African food systems showed that “huge tracts of land in African countries with access to the sea and high economic growth are being targeted by corporations such as Monsanto and Unilever with help from the British and American governments”. According to the report, agreements signed with key African countries Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania expose huge tracts of African land to a risk of being grabbed by multinational companies under the guise of fighting poverty and food insecurity.
As the African Centre for Bio-Safety reported, huge projects such as the ProSavanna project in northern Mozambique are already displacing farmers from their land and imposing large-scale production structures for export. They add that “actual farmers are separated from the land and the only realistic option for a livelihood.” Like the 19th century colonisation project, some African entities are cooperating in this new wave of colonialism; latter-day governments, to wit. They are the ones signing these agreements and lending their coercive machinery to the multinationals to evict small-scale subsistence farmers from the land.
The faulty development mantra that the market is a fix for all needs – including basic needs – does not consider the fact that most African populations, as reported by The Guardian(UK), are “fed by smallholders as opposed to corporate farming, which tends to focus on exports and rich markets.” Like 19th century colonialism, the New Alliance strategy focuses on using Africa as the production grounds for the consumption needs of Western markets. The food security and sovereignty of African local populations is of no concern for the multinationals and the foreign governments funding their activities in Africa.
In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported that the Ethiopian government had forced tens of thousands of people off their land, and given it to ‘investors’. The BBC reported the land was bought by Chinese and Saudi Arabian ‘investors’ who intended to grow more than one million tonnes of rice on it, to export to their countries.
In Liberia, a community in Grand Bassa county is resisting the encroachment of Equatorial Palm Oil (EPO), a British palm oil company on their land. Around 169,000 hectares had allegedly been allocated to the company by the government, without consulting over 7,000 people of the Jogbahn clan who have lived on the land for several generations. Skirmishes involving the company’s security unit and the Liberian Police Support Unit have not shaken the resolve of the people to defend their land, and as of May 2014, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the Liberian President, has promised to halt the grab, although the company has not acknowledged the presidential statement.
As a result of the increasingly deteriorating situation, the first Africa Conference on Land Grab is being organised, scheduled for 27–30 of October 2014 at the Pan African Parliament, South Africa. The conference will feature various speakers who will focus on a range of country case-studies of land grabbing in Africa. One hopes that a feasible resistance strategy is hatched to halt the recolonisation of the continent.
Sunday 25 May 2014
Idol Worshipping, Lost Moorish Roots & Religion
Moors in Europe from Antiquity
Morgan Freeman (Moor) Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Fresco of Christ Among the Apostles, Catacombs of St. Domitilla, Rome
Queen Charlotte wife to King George II of England - (1744-1818)
Sir Allan Ramsay’s 1762 portrait of Queen Charlotte in the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photograph: Guardian
Queen Charlotte died nearly two centuries ago but is still celebrated in her namesake American city. When you drive from the airport in North Carolina, you can't miss the monumental bronze sculpture of the woman said to be Britain's first black queen, dramatically bent backwards as if blown by a jet engine. Downtown, there is another prominent sculpture of Queen Charlotte, in which she's walking with two dogs as if out for a stroll in 21st-century America.
Street after street is named after her, and Charlotte itself revels in the nickname the Queen City - even though, shortly after the city was named in her honour, the American War of Independence broke out, making her the queen of the enemy. And the city's art gallery, the Mint museum, holds a sumptuous 1762 portrait of Charlotte by the Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay, showing the Queen of England in regal robes aged 17, the year after she married George III.
Charlotte is intrigued by its namesake. Some Charlotteans even find her lovable. "We think your queen speaks to us on lots of levels," says Cheryl Palmer, director of education at the Mint museum. "As a woman, an immigrant, a person who may have had African forebears, botanist, a queen who opposed slavery - she speaks to Americans, especially in a city in the south like Charlotte that is trying to redefine itself."
Yet Charlotte (1744-1818) has much less resonance in the land where she was actually queen. If she is known at all here, it is from her depiction in Alan Bennett's play as the wife of "mad" King George III. We have forgotten or perhaps never knew that she founded Kew Gardens, that she bore 15 children (13 of whom survived to adulthood), and that she was a patron of the arts who may have commissioned Mozart.
Here, Charlotte is a woman who hasn't so much intrigued as been regularly damned. In the opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities she is dismissed in the second paragraph: "There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England." Historian John H Plumb described her as "plain and undesirable". Even her physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, reportedly described the elderly queen as "small and crooked, with a true mulatto face".
"She was famously ugly," says Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen's pictures. "One courtier once said of Charlotte late in life: 'Her Majesty's ugliness has quite faded.' There was quite a miaow factor at court."
Charlotte's name was given to thoroughfares throughout Georgian Britain - most notably Charlotte Square in Edinburgh's New Town - but her lack of resonance and glamour in the minds of Londoners is typified by the fact that there is a little square in Bloomsbury called Queen's Square. In the middle is a sculpture of a queen. For much of the 19th century, the sculpture was thought to depict Queen Anne and, as a result, the square was known as Queen Anne's Square. Only later was it realised that the sculpture actually depicted Charlotte and the square renamed Queen Square.
Hold on, you might be saying. Britain has had a black queen? Did I miss something? Surely Helen Mirren played Charlotte in the film The Madness of King George and she was, last time I looked, white? Yet the theory that Queen Charlotte may have been black, albeit sketchy, is nonetheless one that is gaining currency.
If you google Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, you'll quickly come across a historian called Mario de Valdes y Cocom. He argues that her features, as seen in royal portraits, were conspicuously African, and contends that they were noted by numerous contemporaries. He claims that the queen, though German, was directly descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family, related to Margarita de Castro e Souza, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman nine generations removed, whose ancestry she traces from the 13th-century ruler Alfonso III and his lover Madragana, whom Valdes takes to have been a Moor and thus a black African.
It is a great "what if" of history. "If she was black," says the historian Kate Williams, "this raises a lot of important suggestions about not only our royal family but those of most of Europe, considering that Queen Victoria's descendants are spread across most of the royal families of Europe and beyond. If we class Charlotte as black, then ergo Queen Victoria and our entire royal family, [down] to Prince Harry, are also black ... a very interesting concept."
That said, Williams and many other historians are very sceptical about Valdes's theory. They argue the generational distance between Charlotte and her presumed African forebear is so great as to make the suggestion ridiculous. Furthermore, they say even the evidence that Madragana was black is thin.
But Valdes suggests that the way Queen Charlotte is depicted in Ramsay's 1762 portrait - which US artist Ken Aptekar is now using as the starting point for a new art project called Charlotte's Charlotte - supports the view she had African ancestors.
Valdes writes: "Artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate undesirable features in a subject's face. [But] Sir Allan Ramsay was the artist responsible for the majority of the paintings of the queen, and his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits."
Valdes's suggestion is that Ramsay was an anti-slavery campaigner who would not have suppressed any "African characteristics" but perhaps might have stressed them for political reasons. "I can't see it to be honest," says Shawe-Taylor. "We've got a version of the same portrait. I look at it pretty often and it's never occurred to me that she's got African features of any kind. It sounds like the ancestry is there and it's not impossible it was reflected in her features, but I can't see it."
Is it possible that other portraitists of Queen Charlotte might have soft-pedalled her African features? "That makes much more sense. It's quite possible. The thing about Ramsay is that, unlike Reynolds and Gainsborough, who were quite imprecise in their portraits, he was a very accurate depicter of his subjects, so that if she looked slightly more African in his portraits than others, that might be because she was more well depicted. How can you tell? She's dead!"
Shawe-Taylor says that a more instructive source of images of Queen Charlotte might well be the many caricatures of her held at the British Museum. "None of them shows her as African, and you'd suspect they would if she was visibly of African descent. You'd expect they would have a field day if she was."
In fact, Charlotte may not have been our first black queen: there is another theory that suggests that Philippa of Hainault (1314-69), consort of Edward III and a woman who may have had African ancestry, holds that title.
As for Valdes, he turns out to be an independent historian of the African diaspora who has argued that Peter Ustinov, Heather Locklear, the Medicis, and the Vanderbilts have African ancestry. His theory about Charlotte even pops up on www.100greatblackbritons.c
Perhaps she should get more. The suggestion that Queen Charlotte was black implies that her granddaughter (Queen Victoria) and her great-great-great-great-gr
Or would our royal family be threatened if it were shown they had African forebears? "I don't think so at all. There would be no shame attached to it all," says the royal historian Hugo Vickers. "The theory does not impress me, but even if it were true, the whole thing would have been so diluted by this stage that it couldn't matter less to our royal family. It certainly wouldn't show that they are significantly black."
What's fascinating about Aptekar's project is that he started by conducting focus group meetings with people from Charlotte to find out what the Queen and her portrait meant to citizens of the US city. "I took my cues from the passionate responses of individuals whom I asked to help me understand what Queen Charlotte represents to them."
The resulting suite of paintings is a series of riffs on that Ramsay portrait of Charlotte. In one, a reworked portion of the portrait shows the queen's face overlaid with the words "Black White Other". Another Aptekar canvas features an even tighter close up, in which the queen's face is overlaid with the words "Oh Yeah She Is".
Among those who attended Aptekar's focus groups is congressman Mel Watt, one of very few African-Americans in the House of Representatives and who represents the 12th district of North Carolina which includes Charlotte. "In private conversations, African-Americans have always acknowledged and found a sense of pride in this 'secret'," says Watt. "It's great that this discussion can now come out of the closet into the public places of Charlotte, so we all can acknowledge and celebrate it."
What about the idea that she was an immigrant - a German teenager who had to make a new life in England in the late 18th century?
"We were a lot more immigrant-friendly in those days than we were friendly to people of colour," says Watt. "We all recognised that we all came from some place else. But there was always a sense of denial, even ostracism, about being black. Putting the history on top of the table should make for opportunities for provocative, healing conversations."
Does Valdes's theory conclusively determine that Queen Charlotte had African forebears? Hardly. And if she had African forebears, would that mean we could readily infer she was black? That, surely, depends on how we define what it is to be black. In the US, there was for many decades a much-derided "one-drop rule", whereby any white-looking person with any percentage of "black blood" was not regarded as being really white. Although now just a historical curio, it was controversially invoked recently by the African-American lawyer Alton Maddox Jr, who argued that under the one-drop rule, Barack Obama wouldn't be the first black president.
In an era of mixed-race celebrities such as Tiger Woods and Mariah Carey, and at a time when in the US, the UK and any other racially diverse countries mixed-raced relationships are common, this rule seems absurd. But without such a rule, how do we determine Charlotte's ethnicity? If she is black, aren't we all?
It's striking that on US and UK census forms, respondents are asked to choose their own race by ticking the box with which they most closely identify (though there can be problems with this: some people in Cornwall are angry that the 2011 census form will not allow them to self-define as Cornish because only 37,000 ticked that box in the 2001 census and that figure has been deemed too small to constitute a separate ethnic group). We will never know which box Queen Charlotte would have ticked, though we can take a good guess. But maybe that isn't the most important issue, anyway.
For congressman Watt's wife Eulada, along with some other African-Americans in Charlotte, the most important issue is what the possibility that Queen Charlotte was black may mean for people in the city now. "I believe African-American Charlotteans have always been proud of Queen Charlotte's heritage and acknowledge it with a smile and a wink," she says. "Many of us are now enjoying a bit of 'I told you so', now that the story is out."
But isn't her heritage too sketchy to be used to heal old wounds? "Hopefully, the sketchiness will inspire others to further research and documentation of our rich history. Knowing more about an old dead queen can play a part in reconciliation."
And if an old dead queen can help improve racial trust in an American city, perhaps she could do something similar over here. Whether she will, though, is much less certain.
Alessandro de' Medici, “Il Moro” - (1510–1537) - Duke of Florence
Clement VII chose the nineteen-year-old Alessandro to become the first Duke of Florence in 1529. Pope Clement at that time was at odds not only with the Florentines who had driven out the Medici family in 1497, but also with the emperor Charles V. To solidify the allegiance that the papacy owed to the Holy Roman Empire, Alessandro was named Duke of Florence and promised the emperor's daughter Margaret. With the help of Charles V, Clement could restore the rule of the Medici family in Florence in 1530 and make Alessandro the first reigning Duke. Supported initially by the best families, Alessandro became an absolute prince, overthrowing the city’s’ republican government.
According to most historians the young duke’s reign did not begin very well. His arrogant personality, the bad behaviour of his entourage, and his licentiousness -- with both women and feasting -- soon gave Alessandro an unsavoury reputation. In addition, he made some highly unpopular political decisions including limiting the number of remunerative positions in his government. This decision alone forced many patrician families to go into exile and become enemies of his rule.
Alessandro’s situation grew worse when his protector and benefactor Clement VII died in 1534. In response he took more repressive measures against his enemies, probably due to his growing fear of them and uncertainty of his support. Meanwhile, resistance against Alessandro's reign grew among the exiles and even his cousin Ippolito plotted against the Duke. When Ippolito died unexpectedly in 1535, speculations arose that Alessandro had poisoned him. In June 1536, however, Charles V visited Florence and married his daughter to Alessandro, consolidating the Duke's position. Nonetheless one year later, Alessandro was murdered by his own cousin Lorenzino, who fled to Venice and was hailed among the exiles as the “New Brutus.”
T.F. Earle and K.J. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); J.A. Rogers, World's Greatest Men of Color, Volume II (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
University of Augsburg