Harriet’s Return: The Afrikanity of Women’s History
Month!
by ‘bro.zayid’
Perspective is everything!
Women’s History Month should be an
amazing moment of engagement and enrichment for our people as should and once
was so-called Black History Month…until the commercials came.
Although Women’s History Month is
considered the correct blowing up, or expansion of International Working
Women’s Day (IWW Day, observed on March
8th) a day marked to the launching of the Women’s Liberation
Movement in a context of the larger struggle to liberate ‘the working
class’, people of Afrikan origin have a
perspective based on their global experience
that may sharpen that in ways other women, and we mean here white woman,
who are not ready relinquish their handle on white privilege even in the
context of a quest to liberate ‘the working class’, may not understand!
Let us remember that our ancestors
endured a colossal genocidal atrocity that has done more violence to women
oppressed and exploited for their labor than any other oppressed paradigm in
human history!
My God they have not just been raped
and bred…They have been raped and bred for centuries! Centuries!
So I encourage our people to engage
and embrace Women’s History Month whole and heavy because in spite of that
colossal criminal violence perpetrated on our female ancestors, they managed
somehow to continue to cradle our skies and even produce some of our greatest
liberators!...
Perhaps you have heard of Harriet
Tubman!
The military genius of the
Underground Railroad, who risked her life, many times by herself, to go back
into enemy territory numerous times to liberate others in bondage. In the end,
she may have liberated nearly one thousand captive Afrikan people from bondage.
(She rescued nearly 800 alone in the Combahee River Mission during the Civil
War!)
Harriet becomes an ancestor on March 10th, 1913 going into
her 91st north amerikkkan winter 91st.
So for many of Afrikan descent, the
core date in Women’s History Month has not been March 8th, IWW Day. It has been March 10th! Based on the tortured yet brilliant legacy
of Harriet, both a survivor and legendary combatant in that colossal criminal
context of oppression!
One of the proudest ceremonial
moments in my life on my walk in the Panther tradition was when I was asked to
go to the Association for the Study of Classical Afrikan Civilization’s Eastern
Regional Retreat that they did at the Auburn, NY home of Harriet Tubman in
2002. I went, of course in full uniform. ( I was nat'l minister of culture and regional chief of staff of the New Black Panther Party at the time, and I had just finished calling out the first Black superintendent of the racist NJ State Police, Carson Dunbar, for calling for Assata's return and not calling out the seminal virulent racism within that arm of the state.) When it came for us to go her
gravesite, I did what a soldier ought to do in that scenario…I saluted the
incredible ancestor, militarily, and then I have to admit I went to a knee and
brokedown!
Several years later, the late great
John Watusi Branch, a regal Black man and personal mentor whom I treasured and longtime
unsung keeper of the culture at the underappreciated Afrikan Poetry Theatre in
Jamaica Queens where I got my starts as both a poet and later as an actor,
would usher in an another incredible moment, the reconnecting of Harriet’s surviving
descendants back to her Afrikan origins in Ghana! It had just been learned that Harriet’s
grandmother, Modesty, was of the Ashanti in Ghana, a dimension still hardly acknowledged
in treatment’s of her incredible audacious legacy to this day.
Ah!
But there’s more to this story. At the time of ‘return to Harriet's Afrikan
roots’, the Ashanti had just enstooled their first female chief! It was this
chief who not only directed Harriet’s
family being properly being received by the Ashanti’s royal bearers,
that chief also decided that Harriet would be bestowed with the honor of ‘Nana’ or
Queen Mother, the first to receive such an honor posthumously!
So let us please appreciate the now
PanAfrikan dimensions of this incredible ancestor’s legacy!
Leaping ahead to this moment, just
months ago, another regal comrade, a church-bred 'lady of grace' from Newark, NJ,
educator activist Annette Alston just did a Harriet Tubman For Beginners!
Annette right from the beginning captures the Afrikan beginnings of Harriet’s
captured grandmother Modesty from Ghana, but she also may have captured Harriet’s
birthdate, March 15, 1822!
So, yes, we salute Women’s History Month
and we salute the call from which it
springs…IWW Day, proudly with reasons waaay beyond the imaginations of European
women, no matter their degree of radicalism, but we must do so in an Afrikan
way, honoring our unique global Afrikan experience. They say March 8th. We say today, March 10th and now March 15th!...All due
respect…
We will give u a little more on Nana
Harriet in five days…
As u were…
©2018
