viewpoint
BY MARK HARRIS
I Went to Africa
Finding wealth in history and culture
hen I’m in America, they remind me
I’m from Africa; when I’m in Africa,
they remind me I’m from America.
Travel is broadening, as they say, and I was
granted the opportunity to go to Africa
with a group of yoga practitioners.
Besides teaching classes about Africa
and Africans in America, I had to admire
a number of Africans who came to
America, ending up in Lane County,
where one dubbed his workplace as “a
training ground for learning how to deal
with institutional racism.” Another, whose
tribal totem was a mouse, left me with the
admonition to “stand tall.” I had to wonder at
their grace and endurance as they both became
American citizens; I speculated that Africa was the source of
their strength, and America of course, the test of that strength.
There is a difference between throwing out the British 230 years ago,
and 50 years ago. In America, only Natives recall having democracy
and civilization before 1492, or the Dark Ages. In Africa, the Dark
Ages came with colonization, and the struggle towards the light is all
around you in the people. It’s embedded and surviving amidst what we
consider grinding poverty, but they are not ground down. They are rich
in something else besides bling.
After my last column, someone sent a black dead mouse to the UO,
using my name and work address as the return address. UO Public
Safety asked me if I had any enemies. I was puzzled, not fearful. Instead
I was inspired by the thought of my Shona friend Derek, and I prepared
to go to Africa. Where had he come from, and gone through, wresting
his country back from the racist colonizers, only to lose it to a power-
mad despot, who left the people even more impoverished?
Well, in Africa culture and history are forms of wealth, and the land
itself is rich and fertile. I met people eking out a living sifting Togo sands,
who remember their ancestors living six millennia ago in the biblical
cities of present day Iraq. I met Vodun priests with images of the Hindu
god Ganesha on the walls of their temples, claiming 600 million fellow
practitioners, following a practice 100,000 years old.
They shrugged when I asked, “What’s up with all the White Jesus
pictures? Ieshua was an African.” “Of course he was,” they replied,
“but the infl uence of the colonizer is still very much present.” While the
tombs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah are tourist destinations,
some of their lessons have been lost. If millennia-old sacred grounds are
littered with trash, if Chinese nationals are allowed to use mercury to
extract gold (while the chief or king gets a kickback), what does it matter
if you have cell phone reception and your clean drinking water comes
out of plastic bags and bottles sold on the street?
Du Bois wrote that America had a lot to teach the world, but warned
of not bleaching, or losing touch with your African soul, in the continuing
struggle to improve the world.
W
Mark Harris is an instructor and substance abuse prevention coordinator at LCC.
letters
TO THE EDITOR
SHARED TEACHER
McKenzie Elementary School has
a similar classroom situation to that
described in Lowell in Gordon Lafer’s
viewpoint Sept. 29. McKenzie’s fourth
and fi fth grades share a teacher but not a
classroom — the kids I’ve talked with
are suffering the consequences, and these
children are usually a teacher’s dream,
not whiners. Their mothers just want the
administration “to set examples of positive
behavior, to be role models for our kids.”
Isn’t this kind of a perfect microcosm
of what’s going on with the protests on
Wall Street. The executives must have
their perks and infl ated salaries even at
the expense of health care for teachers and
reasonable student/teacher ratios.
Lia Gladstone
McKenzie Bridge
WALL STREET ANARCHY
I love what is happening on Wall Street
and elsewhere. It’s the coolest thing I’ve
seen in my lifetime after a different kind of
wall coming down in Germany. Occupiers
might benefi t from knowing this isn’t the
fi rst time Americans have protested the
evil practices of the subhuman parasites
on Wall Street and their co-opting of the
American political process. Whether by
design or coincidence, the Occupy Wall
Street movement began on Sept. 17; on
Sept. 16, 1920 a bomb went off on Wall
Street in front of J.P. Morgan’s bank,
killing 38 and wounding more than 100.
Tragically, Morgan was not one of them.
The bombing was one of the last acts of
“propaganda through deed” committed by
anarchists during the harsh government
crackdown that effectively ended organized
anarchism in the U.S.
I hope the Occupy Wall Street movement
maintains its beautiful, diversifi ed, vibrant
anarchist roots and doesn’t become just
another worthless reform movement.
Representative democracy is inherently
vulnerable to corruption and needs to be
replaced with something better. Like the
mutual aid societies people have lived in
since Paleolithic times connected together
by voluntary mutual aid agreements
where everyone has a say in government
and we can be responsible for our own
administration and public services at the
neighborhood level, even in the biggest
cities. Where there are work-at-home and
cottage industry opportunities for people
to not have to be wage slaves. A system
that can never be hijacked by any self-
appointed superior minority.
Warren Weisman
Eugene
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OCTOBER 20, 2011
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