Black Culture Discussion Thread

[tay1]

The Japanese are a very homogenous people, so it's expected.

 

[tay1]

[h1]Chinese restaurant owner in Kenya arrested after 'No Africans' uproar[/h1]
"The owner of a Chinese restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya has been arrested following an uproar over its policy of banning African customers at night, according to reports.

Owner Zhao Yang was arrested for operating a restaurant without a valid license shortly after local press ran a story alleging that Kenyan reporters were turned away from the restaurant -- for being African.

Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper carried a story Monday that its reporters had been barred entry to the restaurant, being told by a guard at the entrance that "the time for Africans is over" when the journalists arrived at 7 p.m.

Only locals accompanied by Chinese, European or Indian patrons would be admitted, the newspaper reported."

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/25/africa/kenyan-chinese-restaurant-discrimination-arrest/

 

[Quincy McCall]

^Heard about that one to too... they really don't give many dambs

 

[trueprada]

smh

 

[tay1]

 
^Heard about that one to too... they really don't give many dambs

That's the definition of not giving any dambs.

 

[trueprada]

Oklahoma civil rights pioneer Nancy Randolph Davis dies 88

 

[trueprada]

[h2]Black America Is Still In A Deep Recession[/h2]
By Bryce Covert  @brycecovert

The black unemployment rate is higher today than the national rate at the worst of the recession.

 

[trueprada]

 

[Quincy McCall]

Don't really watch this thing but I heard it had Boyce 

 

[dathbgboy]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

 

[Rootin4EverybodyBlack]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

As long as our schools remain a day late and a dollar short it's kind of hard to expect change. We have schools in the nation's capital that don't even have enough books, but then we're shocked when kids can't read.

 

[dathbgboy]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

As long as our schools remain a day late and a dollar short it's kind of hard to expect change. We have schools in the nation's capital that don't even have enough books, but then we're shocked when kids can't read.

I feel you, the thing that grinds my gears is the fact that the neighborhoods know this, they know that the government isn't doing anything because they aren't really for them, and yet, they still wait for the government to do things instead of taking charge.

 

[tay1]

[h1]How Ethiopia Is Shaking Off Its Famine-Stricken Image[/h1]
"Ethiopia's planned new airport on the outskirts of the capital is still years from becoming a reality but Tewodros Dawit can already envision how grand it will look.

"The airport we are planning to build is going to be huge. Very huge," Tewodros said one recent afternoon as he examined project plans in his office in Addis Ababa. "It will be one of the biggest airports in the world. I don't know what other countries are planning in this regard for the future but no country has created this much capacity so far in Africa."

Ethiopia, once known for epic famines that sparked global appeals for help, has a booming economy and big plans these days. The planned airport is one of several muscular, forward-looking infrastructure projects undertaken by the government that have fueled talk of this East African country as a rising African giant.

Addis Ababa increasingly looks like an enormous construction site, with cranes and building blocks springing up in many corners of the city. Britain, long a source of charitable aid for Ethiopia, announced last month that Ethiopia's growing economy means the time has come for "transitioning support toward economic development to help generate jobs, income and growth."

Over the last decade Ethiopia's economy has grown at an average of 11 percent, more than double the rate for sub-Saharan Africa, according to U.N. figures. The growth is fueled in part by huge public expenditure on energy and infrastructure projects that make the country attractive to long-term private investment. The projects are being funded mostly through loans obtained from partners such as China, India and the World Bank."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/...ml?ir=Black+Voices&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000047

 

[AEA18]

 

[Nouss]

Man, I love what Ethiopia is doing.

I prefer traveling to and from Africa with Ethiopian Airlines, their Boeing 777/787 lines have been great. Plus the food has a little ethiopian ethnic twist to it. I still hate airplane food tho in general.

They're just as good as Air France and almost half the price.

A couple years ago you would get connecting flights where you slept in Addis Ababa. They would shuttle you to the hotel and back to the airport in the morning.

 

[smangalang]

 

[smangalang]

[h1]Africa summit in India to counter China[/h1]

Spoiler: Africa summit in India to counter China

Originally scheduled for last December, the India-Africa Forum was cancelled over fears on the Ebola virus
China's decision to contribute troops to protect its commercial interests in Africa and committing to link nations in the dark continent with railway, road and regional aviation, has woken India up. India is set to put behind its Ebola fears and host a summit with leaders from Africa's 54 countries in New Delhi in late October. This was originally scheduled for last year in December, where nations were told that New Delhi would not host the India-Africa Forum Summit due to a scare over the Ebola virus, that had hit Africa. Some of these nations had questioned India's wisdom in putting off the summit, observing that the same Ebola scare did not deter the United Nations from hosting the UN General Assembly in New York or the United States hosting African leaders in Washington. Prime minister Narendra Modi is understood to have specifically directed the ministry of external affairs (MEA) to begin preparations for such a summit, to join both the US and China, who are aggressively pumping money into the continent, widely seen as a key future global economic engine.

Officials concede that deferring the summit over Ebola is crude, and only shows disrespect and arrogance. They believe that with the Middle East crisis, the traditional energy bowl for India, African destinations Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Egypt, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Sudan have become all the more important for the supply of crude oil and gas. The third edition of the India-Africa summit is already a year behind schedule after it was postponed in 2014. But there are others in the MEA, who say the summit was postponed after due deliberations and not aimed to show disrespect. Some 1,000 delegates from African countries were supposed to have participated. "Since these countries had reported Ebola cases, there was concern that excessive screening of attending dignitaries at airports could sully the mood and they may find it disrespectful," said an official.

Both China and India are already locked in competition to secure sea lanes in the Indian Ocean Region. Over the past year, China has secured docking rights for commercial and naval shipping to conducting naval patrols and joint training exercises with countries in the region. Besides India and China, countries like Japan, Brazil, Turkey and South Korea, as well as organisations such as the European Union (EU), the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, have been regularly hosting Africa-focused summits. Last year, US president Barack Obama also hosted over 40 African leaders in Washington. In 2007, the US army created the Africa Command (Africom), which has been steadily expanding its presence in the continent.

MEA officials said they didn't now want to wait for longer. "We simply could not put off our commitments with Africa any longer. It is too important –something we could not afford to push back further," said secretary (West) Navtej Sarna. The Summits have become a platform where the Government of India and African partners identify areas of cooperation, and where such cooperation exists, monitor and expand it.

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-india-on-track-to-hold-africa-summit-2072718

 

[smangalang]

Spoiler: ‘Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa’ – Thomas Sankara

By Paula Akugizibwe on July 23, 2012 — A week before he died, Sankara said, “revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, but you cannot kill ideas”. And so, for us today, the final challenge rests not in finding more Sankaras, but in becoming them – in bringing these ideas to life

Thomas Sankara. Photo: AFP







Thomas Sankara, former leader of Burkina Faso, was the apparent opposite of everything we are often told that success should look like. Mansions? Cars? Who? What? Get out of here. As Prime Minister and later as President, Sankara rode a bicycle to work before he upgraded, at his Cabinet’s insistence, to a Renault 5 – one of the cheapest cars available in Burkina Faso at the time. He lived in a small brick house and wore only cotton that was produced, weaved and sewn in Burkina Faso.


Going by his lifestyle, Sankara was the antithesis of success, but it is this very distinction that enabled him to become the most successful president Africa has ever seen, in terms of what he accomplished for and with his people. Sankara would not have chopped P-Square’s money given twice a chance – in fact, he might have sat him down and taught him a thing or two about the creeping menace of pop culture patriarchy – because Thomas Sankara, “The Upright Man”, was a feminist. In this and many other ways, Sankara was the African dream come true, the only living proof that hopes of African independence are not dead on arrival.
Going by his lifestyle, Sankara was the antithesis of success
His life ended with a bullet which, according to the testimony of some involved in his assassination, was ordered by former Liberian president Charles Taylor with the support of the French and American governments, and delivered via Blaise Compaoré – Sankara’s long-time friend and colleague, and the current president of Burkina Faso. Four years prior, when Compaoré and Sankara had jointly staged the popular coup of 1983 that made Sankara president, Burkina Faso was one of the poorest countries in the world. Under Compaoré it still is – so much so that the dire circumstances led to a series of violent protests last year.


During the years of Sankara’s administration, things were turning around, especially in the areas of health, education and the environment. Mass vaccination campaigns were rolled out with a level of rapidity and success that was unprecedented for an African country at that time. Infant mortality rates dropped. School attendance rates doubled. Millions of trees were planted in a far-sighted effort to counter deforestation. Feminism was a core element of political ideology, manifested through improved access to education for girls, and inclusion of women in leadership roles. Sankara introduced a day of solidarity in which men switched traditional gender roles – going to the market, running the household – so as to better empathise with what women handle on a daily basis. It was Africa’s greatest success story.


Members of a crowd hold a placard written ‘Thomas Sankara, look at your sons. We carry on your fight’. Photo: Gardens of Freedom/Twitter



How was this achieved? In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Sankara reflected on the state of Burkina Faso at the time that he had come to power, stating that “The diagnosis was clearly sombre. The root of the disease was political. The treatment could only be political.” And Sankara did not hold back with the treatment. As soon as he came into power, he set about razing the conventional structures of power and inequality.


Gone were the days of politicians living lavish lives sponsored by taxpayers’ money – Sankara issued salary cuts across the board, including for himself. The fleet of Mercedes Benzes for high-ranking officials was done away with, and the cars replaced by Renault 5s. Land and oil wealth were nationalised. While the masses celebrated, the country’s elite was enraged as decades of class inequality, which had previously favoured them, suddenly came into jeopardy.


The international community, whose interests were vested in the status quo, were also disturbed by Sankara’s radicalism, not least when he started calling for African countries to reject debt repayments. From the 1970s onwards, newly-independent African governments had begun to rapidly accumulate huge amounts of debt from rich countries and the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As the Cold War intensified, such loans were increasingly used as a tool for securing political support from key countries – even governments that were patently corrupt and would inevitably default on repayment, such as Mobutu’s in the DRC, were readily provided with billions of dollars in credit.


In one of his most famous speeches [above], delivered at the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa in 1987, Sankara issued a passionate call for a United Front Against Debt. “We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before,” he declared. “Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave…”


At the time of his speech it was clear, just a couple of decades into independence, that African countries were quickly becoming financial slaves. Interest rates rose sharply in the 1980s, but governments continued to borrow more and more. Between 1982 and 1990, African debt doubled from US$140 billion to US$270 billion. Sankara rightly predicted that this would cripple African development for generations to come. Despite debt relief programs, which have resulted in increased spending on health and education in African countries, Jubilee Debt Campaign estimates that in 2008, low income countries paid over US $20 million a day to rich countries.


Their decision-making power is also constrained within the limits of orders given by the institutions and countries to which they are indebted. Strangely enough, while these orders demand decreased public spending for example on health, they don’t seem to have made a dent on the perpetual rise of Africa’s waBenzi clan: politicians rolling in flashy Mercedes Benzes bought with taxpayers’ money. And to make matters worse, with access to new creditors – especially China – many African governments are once again sinking into the vicious cycle of debt dependency that Sankara foresaw.


His Foreign Policy Advisor, Fidèle Kientega, explains how this foresight was shared with ordinary people. “Sankara did not dictate to people or force them to work. He told them about the mechanisms of getting loans…He said that they could relax at home and ask him to borrow money from the neo-colonialists, but that they would have to bear in mind that they and their children would have to pay back the loans with interests. Consequently, his government would find it difficult to provide universal education and health care because he would have to spend a greater chunk of the meagre tax revenues in servicing the debt. They could also beg for aid but then they would remain beggars forever. The people got the message and were motivated into working harder.”



Stories of Sankara tend to focus on his radical policies, but it is this approach that was probably the most radical of all – his efforts to bring discussions and decisions, “the apparatus of democracy” as Kientega puts it, to ordinary people. He was able to do this not only because he had political commitment to the proverbial grassroots – as many leaders claim to do – but because, through the choices he made, he positioned himself as their equal. Sankara made personal sacrifices that no other president has ever made, and did not view them as sacrifices, but as an act of solidarity, of African pride. In his view it was only through collective commitment to such sacrifices, which he hoped would one day be viewed as “normal and simple” actions, that Africans could begin to work their way towards self-reliance.


Despite Sankara’s incredible oratorical gift, the message came across even more eloquently through his actions: it is better to live a simple life in freedom, than a fabulous lifestyle in economic chains. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, most African governments did not share his philosophy. In a recent series of debates on democracy organised by TIA, people from Ghana, Kenya and South Africa all expressed a lack of faith in their countries’ democratic systems. Why? Because, they said, existing political systems across the world don’t answer to ordinary people – they answer to money. African governments are first accountable to rich countries, then to their own local elites; and finally, if convenient, to the people.
Africa’s heavily indebted poor countries. Graphic: World Bank



In a world that only answers to money, everything is for sale – democracy, freedom, dignity, integrity. Thomas Sankara bucked this trend, and in so doing struck at the very core of the international system of control – because for once, the world was faced with an African leader it could neither buy nor co-opt.


And because he was not for sale, Sankara had to be eliminated, buried in an unmarked grave whose whereabouts are still unknown. To this day, Sankara’s family and supporters in Burkina Faso and around the world are still fighting for justice, some in the face of death threats. Meanwhile, despite the fact that some of the fastest growing economies in the world are now African, and the fact that poverty rates are falling, so much of our energy now and for the foreseeable future will have to be devoted to further reducing poverty levels relating to decades of political selling out. And the selling out continues, even as our economies are bouncing back. Why do our leaders keep selling us out? Same reason we all sell out – for nice things. “Where does this debt come from anyway?” Sankara asked. “Did we need to build mansions…or foster the mentality of overpaid men among our officers?” This last question, in particular, has become more relevant as we learn of just how much money Africa’s elite have been salting away in foreign accounts even as their countries’ foreign debts mount: ‘Capgemini and Merrill Lynch estimate in their latest World Wealth Report that Africa has about 100,000 “high net worth individuals” with a total of $1.2 trillion in liquid assets. The debts, on the other hand, are owed by the African people as a whole through their governments.’


Of all the holy cows in the world today, materialism is probably the deepest and most universally entrenched – from home to school to pop culture. This entrenchment is necessary to preserve the current system of inequality, because it opens us all up to compromise, to co-option. How much would you sell your values for? How much do you sell your values for? Sankara demonstrated that the make-or-break of freedom is not so much about heroes and politics as it is about the very personal struggle between principles and cash-money.


A week before he died, Sankara said, “revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, but you cannot kill ideas”. And so, for us today, the final challenge rests not in finding more Sankaras, but in becoming them – in bringing these ideas to life. “You have to dare to look reality in the face and take a whack at some of the long-standing privileges,” Sankara said, “so long-standing in fact that they seem to have become normal, unquestionable.” And that’s the most daunting thing of all, because it requires a struggle with the person in the mirror.


For more information on Thomas Sankara, visit www.thomassankara.ne t and http://****yeahthomassankar a.tumblr.com

 

[smangalang]

We had peaceful elections in Nigeria this week. The first shift in presidential power from the incumbent to challenger in this iteration of civilian rule. We've had many coups and setbacks so this is a big moment for Africans world over. The mood is very optimistic all over. We have some work ahead of us as a people but this is a major step in the correct direction.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/africa/nigeria-presidential-election/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...es-cabinet-to-boost-economy-battle-boko-haram

 

[Nouss]

Damn bro, i like where this thread is headed.

 

[big panda]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

I would say poverty is the main issue that we can blame for this. Without poverty blacks would be further ahead then where the are now and that has to do with economics and us not having any business of our own in our own communities

 

[teamjordan79]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

I would say poverty is the main issue that we can blame for this. Without poverty blacks would be further ahead then where the are now and that has to do with economics and us not having any business of our own in our own communities

poverty is not a cause though. It's an effect.

 

[dathbgboy]

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

I would say poverty is the main issue that we can blame for this. Without poverty blacks would be further ahead then where the are now and that has to do with economics and us not having any business of our own in our own communities

There's no doubt that poverty is a key, if not THE key issue. Education is still a foundational element though. When i made the above statement I made it in the sense that more and more young black children are desiring post-secondsry education or even want to graduate from high school and do it well; the post reference the article about that is proof.

The Millinials generation sparked an indirect movement of the desire for education, desire to run for public office, and the desire for entrepreneurship. Gen X was complacent with what big brother told em, we're hungry for more. Now granted it's not all of us, but more than our parents. This will in turn keep fueling the desire for more and can eliminate poverty in our neighborhoods.

Many of us are breaking the generational curse of ignorance in our communities and our families. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, my little cousins seen that and pushed for the same.

 

[gwap]

 

 

Who do u blame for this though?

I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

I would say poverty is the main issue that we can blame for this. Without poverty blacks would be further ahead then where the are now and that has to do with economics and us not having any business of our own in our own communities

poverty is not a cause though. It's an effect.

how can it be an effect when your are born into it?

 

[dathbgboy]

 

 

Who do u blame for this though?


I believe that education wise, it's going to take us at least another 50 years to start seeing more educated black men and women to combat those that lack education.

I would say poverty is the main issue that we can blame for this. Without poverty blacks would be further ahead then where the are now and that has to do with economics and us not having any business of our own in our own communities

poverty is not a cause though. It's an effect.

how can it be an effect when your are born into it?

Education or rather lack thereof is the cause, poverty is the effect