One evening, as the sun began to set, a Dogon priest called a “diviner” traced an intricate drawing in the ochre sands that lie at the foot of Bandiagara Cliffs. A series of six connected squares and an elaborate set of symbols were drawn in a pattern that represent the potential futures of the family, the village, regional peace and harmony, life and death, and the wishes of God.
The diviner next placed tiny sticks in the sand panels, representing God and the family. Several “I”-shaped tracings symbolized peace and death. Small heaps of sand with minute holes represented other concerns: harmony within the village, illness, next season’s harvest, even one’s own mortality.
As the diviner priest drew the patterns into the sand, he chanted to invoke the sacred fox to come weave a path of prophecy for his village across his creation:
“Fox, tell me please
is there something?
Will there be shame next year?
Fox, speak clearly.
Let the people coming to the field
stand eye to eye.
Throw your traces.
Give me your nails to mark the sand.
Be clear. Whatever you see, tell me
Give me your footprints.
The Dogon priest finished his chant as the last light of the day lingered in the western sky and then disappeared. The priest returned to his village. Nightfall invited the fox to visit the sacred Dogon markings.
At dawn the following day, sunlight traced the shadows of the fox path across the sand drawing. Indeed, the fox had visited in the night during our trip and with its tracings had foretold the future of the village of Yougou Piri. With these fortuitous markings, the fox had symbolically acted out the ritual of an oracle, a Dogon tradition that keeps life in balance for yet another year.
Top: Dogon woman winnowing millet. It has been pounded in a mortar to remove the husks.
Bottom: A woman in South Carolina winnowing chaff from grain using a fanning basket. Courtesy of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, Georgia.
Our schools don’t teach us how knowledge, traditions and culture from Africa are present in the Americas. I mean, they DO, but I swear it seems like they glance over or whisper the info to students. That’s why it’s important for our families and communities to relay this info to our youth and not depend on our schools to do so.
Please support my campaign. I am working on "going back to Africa" with the aim of re-connecting directly with my Ancestral roots. This is the final research phase as part of The Bible With Complexion (TBWC) family research project which began in 1988. Thank you for your consideration! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sankofa-repatriation-project/x/14574448#/
Mali boasts some of the world’s most fascinating architectural traditions and historic sites. When armed conflict began in the northern regions of Mali in April 2012, the country became emblematic of the dangers that warfare can pose to cultural heritage. Historic Malian sites in Gao and Kidal suffered significant destruction in the struggle, and the Great Toguna in the city of Douenza was ruined. Nine of the 16 mausoleums within the World Heritage Site boundaries of Timbuktu were destroyed by rebel forces between May and July of 2012, and even those sites not directly impacted by the fighting had been damaged. Rebels occupied parts of the Land of Dogons, encroaching on the Bandiagara Escarpment. Tourism—a major source of income in Mali— diminished dramatically, and the national crisis drained government coffers. The conditions were dire and resources scarce for conservation throughout the country when the entirety of Mali’s cultural heritage was included on the 2014 World Monuments Watch. In recognizing these sites, we declared our commitment to advocating for the protection of the country’s many significant sites, and raised a call for action by the global community.
Answers to the Black-White Achievement Gap Brown’s most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown’s implementation destroyed. What are the answers? Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. It is astonishing how many Black children …
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The 9-0 decision was hailed as a major victory for the civil rights of African-Americans, paving the way for the integration of the nation’s schools. But in retrospect, while there was reason to celebrate the court decision, there were also many things the Black community lost after the Brown decision.
Effective Black Schools Were Closed
The superior education that many Black schools provided before integration is a source of fierce pride for alumni of those schools, in addition to the subject of a growing body of scholarship, according to journalist Jonathan Tilove. Remarkably, Black communities, under the thumb and under the radar of oppression, created schools that imbued Black children with a sense of confidence and possibility in the very midst of a system determined to limit them.
Effective Black Teachers Were Fired
In Black communities, desegregation lost support when thousands of teachers and principals lost jobs when their schools were closed. Jerome Morris of the University of Georgia spoke to Tilove about the impact these teachers had on their students at a huge number of these Black schools. Morris said one of the teachers was a godmother to certain students; other teachers lived in the Black community and knew the “parents and grandparents on a personal basis,” thus making them “comfortable calling or visiting the families” if a student acted up at school.
A Consistent Record of Black Achievement
As early as the 1970s, economist Thomas Sowell, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was writing about “patterns of black excellence” at segregated schools like Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington, which produced Martin Luther King Jr.; Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, which produced Thurgood Marshall; McDonough 35 in New Orleans, which produced the first Black state superintendent of schools (California’s Wilson Riles); and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. Dunbar, the first Black high school in America, produced the first Black Cabinet member (Robert C. Weaver); the first Black general (Benjamin O. Davis); the discoverer of blood plasma (Charles R. Drew); the first Black senator since Reconstruction (Edward W. Brooke, R-Mass.); Charles Hamilton Houston, the first special counsel to the NAACP and chief architect of the assault on Jim Crow that led to Brown; and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia delegate to Congress. In 1899, students at Dunbar – then called the M Street School – scored higher on citywide tests than white students in Washington.
Answers to the Black-White Achievement Gap
Brown’s most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown’s implementation destroyed. What are the answers? Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. It is astonishing how many Black children attended schools during segregation that delivered on these objectives, and how few do so now.
No Such Thing as “Acting White”
As Black children were put into an environment perceived as controlled by whites, the phenomenon of young Black kids equating academic excellence with “acting white” arose. In the Black schools, Black students largely cheered their classmates for achievements. But after desegregation created a clear division of white and Black, the association shifted and Black students began to tease one another by pushing their smart peers into the ‘white’ category. Ever since then, we have seen that Black kids tended to perform more poorly when mixed with whites.
Portraits of the women of Botswana's heavy metal subculture
South African photographer Paul Shiakallis produced a series of photos, “Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts,” of the “queens” of Botswana’s heavy metal “Marok” scene, mostly in their homes.
The portraits were shot in the Gaborone, the capital city, and display the tension between traditional Botswanan patriarchy and transgressive self-expression. The Maroks cross over with Botswana’s biker scene, which, in turn, borrows elements from the country’s farmers, like leather vests.
“There’s a secret language between black girls destined to move mountains and cross rivers when the world sometimes tells you to belong to the valleys that surround you.
You learn it very young, and it has no words, but you hear it and see it all around you. You sense it when you walk into rooms, your hair elevated with every exalted coil, your sway a little too swift, and your shoulders a little too proud. You feel it like a rhythm you can’t shake if you even dared to quiet the sounds around you. Amandla (@amandlastenberg) knows it all too well, “I think that when you’re a black girl and you grow up you internalize all these messages. Everywhere you look that tell you that you shouldn’t accept your hair, or your natural features, or that you shouldn’t have a voice, or that you aren’t smart. In terms of my evolution I think those internalized messages built up in my mind until I was given the tools to recognize the situation. And understand that no, there’s nothing wrong with me, these are just that these are just messages that we’re fed. I feel like the best way to deal with that has been just to be myself and connect with all these other black girls who are awakening and realizing that they’ve been trying to conform; and the only way to fight that is to be themselves on the most genuine level. ”
So here we are, connecting as non conforming black gals. Connecting as girls who recognize the borders that have been built around us, but tearing them down while coloring outside every line. Connecting as lovers of wearing the color sienna orange. Connecting as two chicks exhausted by talking about our hair, although we of course know, it’s bad ass. Connecting as humans who are both trying to figure out the mathematics of composer Steve Reich’s - “Violin Phase ”. Connecting as two descendants of powerful Queens, who roamed the journey before us, and we hold the most high.
I may not have felt prepared, but I sure as hell felt inspired, deeply moved by the honesty shared between us, and ready to take on the world sprinkling black girl magic in every crevice of the universe.“
-Solange
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