Nuts & Nucs v Christmas

 

We began 2007 with all the best wishes for the incoming year and resolved to deliver improvements on conditions in our communities, particularly when a wave of violent death gripped our youth as they turn on each other with suicidal intent.

We are all alarmed by these developments as we question and review where we went wrong. Our failure to protect our youth exposes how deep the problems are and how far gone alienation of family values has eroded community structures in Britain and rendered them too ineffective to provide solutions to this crisis which is only a manifestation of the multifarious attacks black communities suffer from because we are deprived of political, social, economic, cultural and historical grounding.

The current crisis underpins a long tradition of victimisation of black communities by institutionalized racism which as a community we are still far from addressing despite many schemes and projects put in place by the UK government and those concerned at community level. This was a gloomy pattern that carried on from previous years and into 2007.

Throughout 2007, the discourse on green products was everywhere with “natural” and “organic” being the cliché words to entice people into “healthier” lifestyles. Television screens are filled with all sort of programmes directed at both converted and willing audiences keen to be in tune with new trends and fashions. We also witnessed the creation of a new business field as we were tutored on how to dress, how to eat, how to walk, how to shop, how to look after our children, how to do your make up, etc. Lifestyles programmes are now the in-thing!

But what I really want to reflect on is how I began to pay attention to such developments and noticed how much of the synthetic and harmful side of this industry is particularly targeted at Afrikan women and men. Every high street in predominantly Afrikan and black communities has a plethora of shops selling an amazing array of products ranging from soaps to hair extensions and relaxers, lip sticks, cream lotions and potions claiming all sorts of miraculous cures for acquiring immaculate skin including bleaching products which continue to grow in popularity in many sections of our community.

Health reports suggest that people who wear make up absorb up to five pounds of harmful chemicals a year. Unfortunately, this information does not reach the majority of young girls particularly those who consume these products in droves because they are cheap and readily available. Sadly, yet again we are unable to counter the nefarious power of the media and how it influences our life choices, from politics to the colour of our underwear. We are totally exposed!

As the year 2007 drew to a close it looked as if we moved full circle and returned back to the beginning with symbolism as we all find ourselves rejoicing with the bells of the season. We cherish that same white consumerism we’ve all grown fond of without questioning most things that happen around us. Powerful symbolism such as red - Santa’s with white beards sometimes plastered onto black faces with fashionable ‘kente’ cloth uniforms! Fake snow, white bald men surrounded by bright lights bringing stars in the sky down to earth on a mindless orgy of energy waste and a total frenzy of shop-till-you-drop.

What does this have to do with nuts and nucs I hear you ask? This “xmas” seasonal time of the year links it to nuts, and we see an array of them in every super market in line with winter foods, but as Afrikans, our yearly seasons are different and so are the food-stuffs. But curious enough there’s the invisibility of the mother of all nuts, the Kola-nut, a potent symbol of Afrika’s Ancestral communion. The kola-nut should be at every Afrikan family gathering including xmas and other occasions. Ironically it still ends up on our table albeit involuntarily as kola-nut remains the base ingredient in the creation of the drink that is the symbol of American imperialism and white supremacy “coca-cola” and also the reason for the emergence of one of the worlds’ most successful advertising campaign ever; the emblematic figure in red robes aka Santa Klaus.

The Christian season of ‘peace, harmony and man’s goodwill to man’ brings to mind the crude truth behind such symbolism as our red Afrikan blood is once again shed in Somalia, Congo DRC, Cabinda, Darfur, Kenya and so many other places. It makes me reflect on the continuing murderous history of the imperialist U.S. foreign policy establishment and their ‘Cold War’ in alliance with European powers banded together inside NATO and our inability to ward off their machinations.

Their chief architects were George Kennan and George Marshall in post “world war 2” leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan for “crafting… a... new... order that guarantees an acceptance of American power and ability to control events around the world”.

Today the same establishment co-opts Condoleezza Rice and co to carry out their criminal activities and proxy wars as her predecessors did decades before with the criminal atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mass-murderous shots across the bow of the emerging Cold War), the mass-murder and assaults on Korea and Indochina (3 million “enemy” dead), the U.S. restoration of fascist power in “liberated” Italy, the U.S. intervention against popular social revolution in Greece (smeared as a Soviet export by U.S. policymakers in order to “scare the hell out of the American people” to garner support for massive new imperial “defense” expenditures) and the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Iran (1953), Dominican Republic (1965), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1970-1973) the whole of Africa in the wake of independence (1958 to 2007), Indonesia (1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a list that goes on and on.

We can easily follow the re-enactment of these interventions with the most recent take over in the Balkans of Kosovo, Albania and Serbia, the threats on Korea and Iran and the fuelling of Middle East destabilization and so on. As we take stock of the old year in order to face the new year, we stand to face more of the same in Afrika with AFRICOM, the American Afrika High Command, now temporarily hosted in Germany but actively seeking home in the Gulf of Guinea. A few Afrikan heads of state are ready to host it on their soil, amongst them the sole African woman President of Liberia.

On the American side there’s a clear policy and renewed interest of the American ‘white’ establishment in grooming a brand new “black” president in the USA Barak Obama to close the rift of hostility across the world against USA’s foreign policies so that he will be able to ensure business as usual by bringing American presence ever so close and seemingly less threatening as he fits the role of the good cop.

Mawete Vo Teka Sala