#blackafrican — Public Fediverse posts

Angelique Kidjo first Black African artist to gain Hollywood star

Five-time Grammy winner Angelique Kidjo made history as the first Black African performer to receive a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in Los Angeles. #News #Reuters #Newsfeed #AngeliqueKidjo #HollywoodWalkOfFame #BlackAfrican #FirstAfrican #Grammy #BeninMusic #AfricanMusic #WillemDafoe #HarveyMasonJr #UNICEFAmbassador #BatongoFoundation #WorldMusic #AfropOP #BreakingNews #WorldNews #MusicNews #Hollywood…

https://fllics.com/en/video/angelique-kidjo-first-black-african-artist-to-gain-hollywood-star/

This Time For the Africa Centre: Why protecting this historic institution matters for all of us

The Bounce Black Team

Some places are more than buildings. They become home…

Since 1964, The Africa Centre has been one of those places.

A space where African culture, heritage, creativity, community and possibility have been able to meet in the heart of London.

At Bounce Black, we know this because we have experienced it ourselves.

The Africa Centre has been a collaborator, a friend and an important part of the ecosystem that has supported our work. It has provided space for conversations, programmes, celebrations and connections, creating opportunities for people across African and Black communities to come together, share ideas and build something bigger than themselves.

That is why its current situation matters.

More than a building

When a cultural institution faces financial difficulty, it can be tempting to think about the problem simply in terms of a building, a venue or an organisation.

But community infrastructure is about much more than bricks and mortar.

It is about what happens inside those spaces.

It is about the young person attending an event and discovering a new possibility for their future.

It is about an artist finding an audience.

It is about a community organisation finding a place to gather.

It is about entrepreneurs, creatives, activists, professionals and community leaders meeting one another, forming relationships that lead to collaborations, opportunities and movements that reverberate years into the future.

It is about being able to walk into a space and feel that you belong there.

And for African and Black communities, those spaces matter. Massively.

In a world where our cultural institutions and community organisations are often asked to achieve extraordinary things with limited resources, protecting the infrastructure that enables this work is a collective responsibility.

A place with a legacy

The Africa Centre has been part of London’s cultural landscape for decades.

Its significance extends beyond any single programme or event. It represents a longstanding commitment to creating a platform for African culture, ideas, creativity and community.

That legacy deserves to be recognised, but it also needs to be protected.

Heritage is not simply something we preserve by looking backwards.

Heritage is something we carry forward.

The question, therefore, isn’t only what The Africa Centre has meant to previous generations.

It is what it means to us, now.

And what it could continue to mean to the next generation.

What happens when a young African Londoner walks through those doors ten years from now?

What conversations could happen there?

What businesses could be launched?

What artists could be discovered?

What friendships or romantic relationships could begin?

What ideas could become movements?

What futures could be imagined?

Those possibilities are worth investing in.

Why Bounce Black is showing up

Bounce Black exists because we believe that wellbeing, racial equity and social mobility are interconnected.

Our communities need opportunities to connect, develop, create and thrive. That requires more than individual resilience. It requires healthy ecosystems around people.

And ecosystems need infrastructure.

The Africa Centre has been part of that infrastructure for us.

As a collaborator and friend, we have seen the value of having a physical space where Black communities can gather and where organisations can do meaningful work.

So when we see an institution that has played such an important role facing an urgent financial challenge, we believe it is important to show up.

Not because one organisation can solve everything.

But because collective action starts with recognising what is worth protecting.

This is an invitation to show up

The Africa Centre has launched the “Our Africa Centre. Our Heritage. Our Future.“ fundraising campaign to help secure its future.

This is an opportunity for individuals, organisations, philanthropists, businesses and community members to contribute to the work of sustaining this important institution.

And support doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.

If you are able to donate, donate.

If you cannot donate right now, share the campaign.

If you have a platform, amplify it.

If you are connected to potential funders, philanthropists, businesses or institutions, make the introduction.

If you have benefited from The Africa Centre or from the wider ecosystem of African and Black cultural institutions, tell people why these spaces matter to you.

Sometimes solidarity looks like money.

Sometimes it looks like an introduction.

Sometimes it looks like a repost.

Sometimes it looks like simply refusing to let something important disappear quietly.

Our heritage. Our future.

There is a tendency to think of cultural institutions as something that can be dealt with later, something nice to have once the more urgent needs have been addressed.

But culture, community and belonging aren’t luxuries.

They are part of the infrastructure through which communities survive, connect and thrive.

The spaces we build today shape what becomes possible tomorrow.

That is why protecting The Africa Centre is not only about preserving the past. It is about investing in the future.

At Bounce Black, we are proud to stand with The Africa Centre as a collaborator and friend.

We hope our community will join us.

This is our Africa Centre.
Our heritage.
Our future!

Support the campaign

If you are able to contribute, please consider making a donation to the Our Africa Centre. Our Heritage. Our Future. campaign.

Donate to The Africa Centre’s GoFundMe campaign

And if you can’t donate, sharing the campaign can still make a difference.

Let’s help keep the doors open. For our communities, our culture and the generations still to come.

Become a friend to The Africa Centre

This theme is objectively fascinating, actually…

Writing what feels like home vs foraging for dimension in the wilderness?

For Recovering People-Pleasers: On Safety vs Writing

Writing truly opens our eyes to the safety or precarity of language.

We tend to say what feels safe (palatable or polite), in public, in daily life. But writing is the arena where all is said. And, sometimes, we don’t realise how we relate to certain things, symbols, concepts or people until we touch the language around them.

Politeness and respectability in every day life mean we remain safe and adequately accepted, though there may be some self-betrayal involved. Candidness means social contracts are broken; the way people see us, adjusted. We become exposed to rejection and attack, alliances forming against us. Our brains may tell us it will be the same after we’ve written candidly.

They create an illusion of catastrophe even when no real social fall out can happen -given that our readers are usually people who already can stomach what we write or are not repelled when they disagree with our perspective.

***

What you have trouble writing out loud tells you who that piece of writing is for -that is, who your desired audience is; usually, I write for myself but sometimes my essays feel like a one-sided conversation with my community whom I realise are steeped in cultures of male worship. Thus, I usually have trouble being candid when writing topics that take a closer look at patriarchy; I start bargaining in my writing, I start sugarcoating, reaching into my cultural conditioning, I make an utter mess of things, at worst I even start sounding like the opposite of how I talk or live in real life -which is allowed in writing but in essays it comes off as an illegal misrepresentation or cowardice.

Yet writing about any topic at all under the sun should be, among other things, a fun thought experiment. Fun in the sense that no one has to feel that it’s warranted or interesting, but some do and it’s always eye-opening to find out why they do. Cue all the books that ever got you shook yet the theme didn’t seem appealing, initially. The mind should be allowed to go where it wants and no one should be off limits. Yet it’s easier to critique religion than a group of mortals?

Still, there remains a personal mandate to say what I mean. After all, if not in writing, then where can total freedom be found? But the words get stuck at the tips of my fingers. Because it feels unsafe to let them go. Again, it’s supposed to be possible to critique all manner of characters in society just for the love of thinking -after all, everybody easily critiques women as a concept in society. But the logic of the people-pleasing subconscious is that if a topic will cause people to shut down and refuse to hear you, why would you write about it? “That alienation is too dangerous.”

Not being agreed with is neutral and then there are times when it feels like the beginning or the middle of something dangerous. At least, this is what our conditioning may say.

Learning the skill of showing up even when you cannot be safe/heard/agreed with: Apply the practice of NOT writing for an audience to all pieces and forms of writing, especially when there’s a group of people you’d like to ‘monologue with’ now or in future -if I may call this one-sided conversation that. You’ll be surprised who might decide to hear you -if that remains important after the exercise. These judgments are created despite what others are actually thinking. Social attitudes shift long before certain opinions become mainstream. Also, your own environment may be more stringent than others, leading you to project onto readers who wouldn’t have had the same hang ups as you. Forget the readers while writing, then give readers the benefit of the doubt afterwards. In fact, surrender the project. Maybe no one will read it. But you must tell the truth according to your genuine perspective, minus your conditioning.

Different writers are drawn to different topics and it is a tragedy to deprive your point of view of a theme it wants to examine. For instance, some writers may be intrigued by interrogating the rule of men and all it perpetuates in society -good, mild or bad. (Good in quotes for those in the West, good ol’ good for black African women; the former is ready to overhaul everything, the latter leans on the cultural perspective of duty, compromise and benevolent patriarchy. It’s a long story that I love to see examined because the assumed superiority of men has been the crux around which we’re all organised -not God- and it’s intriguing to see people wrap their minds around this and what it actually means, ignore it, attempt to consciously accept it, attempt to live otherwise or attempt to change it while living otherwise. It is simply interesting nomatter which way you go… especially if you distance yourself and think of it as if we were all characters in a novel.

If it wasn’t men and it was anything or anyone else it would still be interesting to dissect because imagine a world running on a core philosophy for thousands of years only for people to decide otherwise… imagine everything that could happen next.

I’m enthralled with this movie. I hope more people are starting to understand that there are more themes to explore concerning patriarchy than dating and marriage -even though that’s a major theme and will draw the most public interest. The pervasive nature of patriarchy means the mainstream has only scratched the surface.) All this to say, this is a topic like any other and should never be too hot to handle. It’s intriguing when it psychologically comes across that it is. The ‘why’ of this is worth examining and writing, whenever the conviction is there. Yes, patriarchy has real consequences; yes it fosters a culture of all forms of violence and domination from emotional to physical and yes, we all perpetuate it whether through indifference towards toxic norms or by being the -usually- man who violated somebody (girl, woman, boy, man, nonbinary). It’s crucial that some are writing about all those perspectives.

What fascinates me is how different cultures either come to terms with it or alter it and why. (I doubt it will be truly dismantled in our lifetime. And there won’t be matriarchies popping up everywhere in our lifetime, either; no, having a president who is a woman does not automatically mean matriarchy. I doubt the rule of women is wanted; rather, people seem to be leaning towards a third option…) The English-speaking Internet tends to make the modern world sound so philosophically uniform, yet it’s really not still.

For instance, it’s not really that any of the epiphanies on social media are a surprise to Africans. There’ve been feminist movements on the continent even in precolonial histories. And men and women are more obvious about their patriarchal conditioning on the continent than in the West. The intriguing thing is the brand of stoic that modern African women are about these patriarchal dynamics for various reasons and how it influences the way they’d live a movement when they do actively participate…

That said, write what you want to nomatter how personally daunting that particular topic may be to you for whatever reason, given that you’re not in any real physical danger. Challenge your psychological alarm bells because therein lies a story, or maybe a lesson on writing through resistance, or on writing without lying to yourself -which is a skill in itself.

I think some alarm bells mean that certain writers are still shy to be objective about particular topics. The key to unlocking that type of writer’s block is in finding out *why* this is even happening, why certain subjects of thought experiments are culturally supposed to be sided with -or cast aside. Suspend any assumptions you already have, and inspiration will come flooding in.

@newinghanatourism, Black Royalty, shared the text and images below.

UN Member States have voted to endorse Ghana’s Resolution to recognize Slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and the demand for reparation.

In favor: 123
Against: 3
Abstention: 53

US voted against, Israel voted against, EU abstained.

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#blackafrican #blackhistory #whitepeople #reparations #blackmastodon

South African scientists outperform heavyweights Princeton, Oxford and Stanford in Antarctic research
https://www.academicjobs.com/za/research-publication-news/south-african-excellence-antarctic-research-outperforms-princeton-oxford-stanford-trends-report-9398

#blackpeople #blackafrican #southafrica #blackscientists #blackmastodon

@powerofafrica_, Black Royalty, shared the text and video below.

🇿🇦Highlighting this beautiful young girl performing a Zulu dance once more because it deserves attention 💃✨
🎥 X

#blackgirlsrock #southafrica #blackafrican #blackmusic #blackdancehistory #BlackCultureMatters #blackmastodon

https://hive.blog/history/@activistpost/king-leopold-ii-s-genocide-of-the-belgian-congo

#belgium #whitehistory #blackafrican #blackpeople #humanzoo #blackmastodon

@jeanjones7579, Black Royalty, shared the text and video below.

Look y'all a Black Ariel is for real. Her name is Tatiana Mendes.

#blackwomen #blackafrican #blackportuguese #capeverde #blackmastodon

@qsun__art wrote:

Apartheid = Broadbased White Economic Empowerment it wasn't just hate and racism it created generational wealth for white people‼️

@lncstrlgnd added:

Oh... let me clarify... WEE/Apartheid was and is not

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#blackhistory #whitehistory #blackafrican #blackmastodon

Black South Africans under apartheid

https://www.cjpmefoundation.org/blacks_under_apartheid_south_africa

#blackpeople #blackafrican #blackmastodon

Sidney Poitier would have been 99 today.

Nancy Wilson would have been 89 today.

Charles Barkley is 63 today.

Rihanna is 38 today.

#blackwomen #bahamas #blackamerican #blackmovie #blackmusic #blacksports #barbados #guyana #africa #blackcaribbean #blackafrican #blackmastodon

@alley_katzenjammer shared:

“No matter how hungry you are, Never eat from a table where Disrespect is served.”

- African Proverb

#africa #blackpeople #blackafrican #blackmastodon

@jahkiatuareg, Black Royalty, shared the text and image below.

...the San people are from the Kalahari desert and Southern Africa, They are genetically the oldest people in the world. AND you can see by this sista's look, why it is said, [ #asian ] people descended from them.

#blackwomen #blackafrican #blackhistory #blackmastodon

23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo (born September 2, 1975) was struck with 19 of 41 rounds fired by [pigs]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Amadou_Diallo

[In 2010 pig killed] 38-year-old robbery victim Darrell Swain, who was Black.
https://whyy.org/articles/del-police-have-shot-56-people-since-2005-but-law-immunizes-them-from-prosecution/

#blackafrican

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#blackmen #blackbusiness #blackentrepreneurs #blackafrican #blackmastodon

Fanon released in 2024 set in Algeria

is magnificent

Algerians have since forgotten our Black Brother's contribution: https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/black-algerians-voices-from-a-community-that-is-still-too-invisible/

The French executed children too just like the I$raelis do in Palestine.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28545881

#movie #blackheroes #blackactors #cameroon #blackcameroonian #blackafrican #blackfrench #AlexandreBouyer #blackmastodon

Black Algerians: Voices from a Community that is Still Too Invisible

https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/black-algerians-voices-from-a-community-that-is-still-too-invisible/

#blackafrican #blackpeople #blackmastodon

Richard Adjei (30 January 1983 – 26 October 2020) was [an Afro] German bobsledder who competed since 2007.

Almike Moussa N'Diaye (born 26 October 1996) is a professional footballer. Born in Spain, he represents the Mauritania national team.

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#afrogerman #afrospaniard #blackafrican #blacksports

Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (6 January 1906 – 26 October 1947) was a South African novelist, linguist, a descendant of the Zulu royal family, and a radically innovative poet who created a combination of traditional and Romantic poetry in the Zulu language

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#blackmen #blackpeople #blackafrican #blacknovelists #blacklinguists #blackpoets #blackprofessors #blackfirsts

Joseph Nnalue died after [allegedly] falling from balcony in flat in Stockwell on October 23,1994 – police and immigration officials wee calling at his flat at the time

Source: Institute of Race Relations

#blacklivesstillmatter #blackwomen #blackpeople #blackbritish #police #whitepeople #whitedevil #blackmastodon #blackafrican

KH shared:

"I love my borough, here's how Brixton looked between 1981-82."

[before gentrification]

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#blackhistory #blackbritish #blackcaribbean #blackafrican #blackmastodon

#blackwomen #uzoaduba #blackamerican #blackafrican #naija #blackmastodon

The family escaped from Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 and settled in Scotland.

Mizero Ncuti Gatwa (born 15 October 1992) is a Rwandan-Scottish actor. He had his breakout role as gay teenager Eric Effiong in the comedy-drama series Sex Education

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#blackwomen #blackpeople #blackafrican #blackscottish #blackactors #blackgay #blackmastodon

Fela Kuti would have been 87 today

Ernest C. Withers (August 7, 1922 – October 15, 2007) was an African-American photojournalist. He documented over 60 years of African-American history in the

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#blackcreatives #naija #blackamerican #blackafrican #blackmastodon

#blackwomen #blackafrican #blackmastodon

Fred Tokunpor Akiyemi [was exeuted] on Oct 4 1996 after falling from 5th floor of flat; Peckham [pigs] were calling at his flat at the time

Source: Institute of Race Relations

#blacklivesstillmatter #blackmen #blackpeople #blackafrican #blackbritish #police #whitepeople #whitedevil #blackmastodon

Nuzo Onoh (born 22 September 1962)

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#blackwomen #blackpeople #blackbritish #britishnigerian #naija #blackwriters #spirituality #blackafrican #blackmastodon

Bantu Stephen Biko OMSG (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically

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#blacklivesstillmatter #blackmen #blackpeople #blackasouthafrican #blackafrican #blacktivists #police #whitepeople #whitedevil #blackhistory #xhosa #blackmastodon