Black culture is facing assault from the unrelenting demands of modernity. The cherished ethos and ethical underpinnings of our existence as Africans are disappearing under the counterfeit alternatives of Western lifestyle. As black cultural power recedes, here comes the captivating Euro trash that has equally made captives of millions of black wanabes. From the starry-eyed teenagers with obsession for Brazilian and Indian hair, to the sugar mums in Levi jean trousers, the seduction to appear chic and ooze street credibility have all combined to make us cultural thieves or if you like, Euro trash slaves.
In the heady 60’s and 70’s, there was a vanguard movement appropriately named Black Power. Its glorifying mandate was to reclaim the loss and gloss of black pride and dignity, stolen and vandalised by slavery and black oppression. Then, this emerging tsunami of lust for Western cultural decadence was resisted. Then we had Afro-hair. Black people were proud of African heritage, colour, food, smell, ruggedness and power. Not anymore. In the place of our old collective pride as Africans is the rising hostility to anything ethnic. We are becoming a race of revisionists in less than 60 years of our twilight domination of the social and cultural space. We are now reading our history backwards.
There are multi-legged assaults on black culture and pride in the Western world. First is the denigration of anything authentically African by Western media as backward, crude, dirty, phoney, mysterious and distasteful. Worse, Africans are being ring fenced into believing in this hidden racism against their culture and black pride. When reporters, editors and documentary makers fan into Africa for stories, their idea of black culture and pride is our mysterious exoticism, diseases, want, poverty, tribal wars, corruption, barbarism, savagery, infrastructural decay, prostitution, witchcraft, fake evangelism, violence, political instability, official greed and early death. Scepticism toward African culture is still dictated by narrow, egotistical and racial binoculars. Africa to the West still implies a vision of doom and disaster on a large scale. In fact, they are still on the Darwinian path to link us to animals. This gratuitous and unrelenting media deceptions still go on until today. An ugly seam indeed!
Secondly, there is an ongoing cultural rebels among our youths and even among our adult population. Once the Western media has carried out its cultural crusading sorties against African culture, once our history, customs and practices have been bombed out; once black heritage has been tagged barbaric and savage, then imagine the damage on the free flowing spirit of younger generation of Africans both at home and in the Diaspora. Their young minds are forever neutered and neutralised into accepting white trash as reality.
Daily, we embrace the white man’s delusions and hallucinations against black pride and dignity. These delusions then grow into millstones which we then carry into every areas of our lives as people and as a race. In the western Diaspora, I have never seen any race that has betrayed its cultural roots like black people. We are like a collection of frustrated humanity with confused identity. The dominant white cultural Euro trash is whacking us and whacking us badly.
On the sporting field, you could count hundreds of black cultural rebels. Strategic footballing victory on the field is not replicated on the marriage altars. Rather, black soccer stars in their own subtle acceptance of white delusions of beauty, or if you like, marriage engineering, systemically strip our pride away by marrying white trash. I struggle when I see these thin white girls running into the arms of successful sporting soul brothers. Albert Haynesworth, Michael Jordan, Andy Cole, Sol Campbell, Chris Eubank, Frank Bruno and countless others. I disagree with LSE psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and his stereotypical assumption that black British women are generally undesirable. This love black out and cultural lock down among our richest black sporting folks is an affront. It is forming a kind of contesting struggle with our rich heritage and the natural, unvarnished beauty of a black woman.
At a time when you think that our women will seize the cultural ground and reclaim our lost pride, they have become the worse cultural vandalisers. They are rediscovering the meaning of beauty through white lenses. The cultural failure of black women globally is the ready invasion of their cultural space by western idea of what constitute beauty. Retreating from their own cultural heritage, black women have become helpless accomplice to the popular bigotry of black ugliness. The cultural tenacity of the black race is lost through the disempowering acceptance of white beauty as model.
There are no more retro chics with low cut afro hair. The Modupe Debbie Ariyo look is fading under the weight of collective black amnesia. There are no more ethnic, costume jewelleries to adorn black female skin. There are no more authentic African braids and cornrows like Bob Marley, Ghanaian weaving, water melon, kinky braids, basket weaving or Alicia Keys on the heads of our children, wives and colleagues. Braid, that authentic natural look, is cool, manageable, versatile, convenient, attractive, projects culture and even allows air to circulate to the scalps.
Rather the new cultural rebels on the block are embracing weave on. Yes, women are more susceptible to gullibility in matters of tastes and beauty. There is no revolution that has swept our children, wives and colleagues away than the advent of wave on. Wave on is a cultural language of rebellious rebuke to our black ethnicity. It is a form of rebellion to the idea of African beauty. Wave on gives minute assent to the popular but stereotypical, Euro trash assumption that long hair make women more beautiful and attractive.
This facile notion has made our women alienated, captives and slaves to Brazilian, Indian and Peruvian hairstyles. Black celebrities – majority of whom are emptiers of black culture – who wear wave on become ready models for our teenagers, wives and colleagues. This disabling conflict of looking beautiful on white prescriptions have made our mothers, sisters, wives, sisters and daughters naive, blind and slaves to the demands of modern living.
Even in our homes and restaurants, black cultural rebels are turning their backs against African cuisine in preference for Oriental, Indian and continental dishes. In my unborn and born again years as a restaurant crawler, I have never ever come across an African woman eating abula, amala or eba in a restaurant. It is either the overrated jollof rice/dodo and fried rice/moin moin. At home, we are proud to show our cultural rebelliousness with tart comment like…”Ah…don’t mind that Ayo he doesn’t eat African food”. What? Yes, cultural rebels among us have hijacked Chinese food, Indian Curry and barbecue as standard requirements for birthdays, naming ceremonies, graduation party gatherings and work promotion parties. In this clash of civilisation, why are black people losing ground while other races are holding fast to their cultural heritage in the West.
Why these expressions of rejection of our black pride? Why this incomprehensible and disempowering attitudes toward our own cultural sovereignty? Why are we slaves, captives and vandalisers of other people’s heritage? Why are we cultural rebels within and without, in the Diaspora and even in Africa. It is time we re-embraced our lost custom, values, heritage, pride, power, prestige, beauty and food. Can we stage the return of black power?
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