Maintaining our African connection through a music video by our Youth

"During the period of servitude in the New World, the Negro race did not wholly forget the traditions and habits of thought that it brought from Africa. But it added to its ancestral stock certain new ideas." - Booker T. Washington
Dear friends,

In the past this blog has featured quite a bit of the work of scholar/educator/author Dr. Okey Ndibe, a Nigerian national who lives and works here in the US. Starting with the video on the link below, Djatajabs.org will be making a renewed emphasis on maintaining the connection between African peoples of all nationalities from the Continent to the Diaspora. After all, please remember the words of the great Booker T. Washington who insisted, "During the period of servitude in the New World, the Negro race did not wholly forget the traditions and habits of thought that it brought from Africa. But it added to its ancestral stock certain new ideas."

To be sure, there are many African Americans today who refuse to use that term, preferring to call themselves "Black". Yet, as recently as the Seventies, these same people and their families refused to call themselves "Black", instead using Negro and Colored. So people who argue about calling themselves "African American" are simply behind, as either themselves or their predecessors were. a few decades ago

Nevertheless, the crucial point to be made here is: African peoples who were forced to migrate to the Americas did not lose their African cultures. Instead, each cultural group merely took on a different developmental direction. In other words, African American captive workers (so-called “slaves”), for example, were still people. As a result, our forebears adapted to the new circumstances with which they were presented, within the context of their own cultural wisdom and experiences. Dig? Still, we are taught to hate ourselves, especially our African - ness.

One Love!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCCzugeSPPA