OUR ANCESTORS HAVE NAMES
Dedication to Our Ancestors Who Have Names
Dedicated to Our Ancestors Who Have Names; lynched, outraged, raped, and murdered by Euro-American oppressors in the United State Empire (the U.S.E.): With this work/project we offer to them libation and commend their souls and spirits to Lord God, Almighty who will meet out Divine Justice in that “Great Git’in-Up Morning!” Their spilled blood cries up continually from the Earth and from the Oceans to the Throne of the Lord God Almighty, as affirmed by Holy Scripture: When the Lamb opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been killed for the sake of the word of God and for the testimony of the Lamb they had kept. They cried with a loud voice, saying, “How long, holy and true Master, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” A long white robe was given to them. They were told to rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow bondservants and brethren (who would also be killed as they were) should be fulfilled. When the Lamb opened the sixth seal, I saw that there was a great earthquake. The sun became black as a coarse sackcloth, and the whole moon became as blood. The stars of the sky fell to the earth, like a fig tree dropping its unripe figs when it is shaken by a great wind. The sky was removed from its place. At this, the kings of the earth, every slave, and every free person sought to hide themselves in the caves and the rocks of the mountains. They said to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of his wrath has come, and who is able to stand?” [Revelation 6:9-17, EOB, my Italics]. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. [Revelation 2:17, KJV, my Italics]
In the meantime “with the jawbone of an ass, we fight against the enemies of God.” In the immortal words of the South African martyr Steve Biko who declared “I write what I like” in this work and project “we write what we like” as one way of fighting for Divine Justice, for God-given Freedom, for our children, for our posterity, and for Our Ancestors Who Have Names. In this hypocritical PC culture of disrespect writing what you like can at the very least subject your person and/or ideas to public shaming and at worst lead to loss of employment as those who affirm that you have freedom of speech seek to destroy you (i.e. your career, job, etc.) for saying things opposed to what they believe or what they do not want to hear. Of course this was nothing like what Steve Biko had to face as he spoke out publicly against South African apartheid. Steve Biko faced death itself which was very real and often immediate. He finally paid the ultimate price for using words to fight for his people and for God-giving human freedom. “Steve Biko died in 1977 at the age of thirty from a head wound suffered while in the custody of police. For his steadfast refusal to keep silent about the heinous crimes of apartheid, he is honored as the martyred hero of the South African liberation movement.” 1 In the late 1960s and earlier 1970s the Black Power Movement fired the imagination of Nu Africans led by Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Ture (1941-1998), a youth leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and erstwhile follower of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. About the same time the Black Consciousness Movement began to fire the imagination of black South Africans led by Steve Biko. In his paper Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity Steve Biko stated:
1
Steve Biko. I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), Backcover.
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