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...to my new home over at WordPress! I'm leaving this blog open for now, but please add my new blog to your feed readers and blogrolls.
http://afrogeekchic.wordpress.com/feed/
I've been having an update frenzy today and I've just published 3 posts! (easy there girl)
Who moved my cheese?
Yes peoples, Nigerians really are EVERYWHERE!
Where is the Power List 2009?
See you there!
The day has finally come. I've stopped messing around with themes, imported all my posts over and am now officially a WP blogger!
The address www.afrogeekchic.com now points to my new blog.
The direct WP link is http://afrogeekchic.wordpress.com.
If you subscribe to me using a feed reader or email, please click on to the new site using either of the links above and follow the instructions via the RSS icon.
This blog will be alive for a period of time, but eventually I will be shutting it down.
It's been a while! I'm sure I've often mentioned being a slow blogger of sorts, but still, I'm trying not to take the biscuit.
I've been working on migrating my blog to WordPress, I'm finding blogger just slightly limiting, but my progress is very slow! Finding a good theme is hard work, and I'm doing quite a bit of that for my salaried employment at present so please bear with me.
Thought I would use this opportunity to mention a few bits and bobs around blogville that have kept my summer ticking over....
Loving Bandele Zuberi's new blog, it's very glamorous and sexy, just like his photography.
I'm getting all Le Coil-ed up. Every hair style on this site gives me inspiration. Speaking of which, yay to Solange Knowles for chopping all her hair off!
Loomnie pointed me towards this BBC article about Nigerian soldiers who fought in the Second World War. It's sad but oh so typical of the treatment of armed forces from ex-colonies.
Maker Faire Africa'09 has been going on in Accra this week. Check out their website and Afrigadget to see all the wonderfully ingenious inventions from the continent. I'm hoping there will be other MakerFaires in years to come so I can add it to my conferences to go to list (after TED :-).
Talking about inventions, looks like the Segway has lost it's way...or been led astray by its consumers! Just goes to show, if you put something out there, someone somewhere will find a way to abuse it. What am I talking about? Guns on Segways. (via StreetUse)
I'm desperately seeking a place to watch Skin - a film about Sandra Laing a 'coloured' South-African born to white parents as a result of genetic throwback. Check out this review at Afripop. It's not on general release here in London, which is a shame, but if you know where it's showing, please let me know!
And finally, I recently had a birthday party with a very good friend of mine and fellow Leo. We riskily decided to make it a fancy dress party because we love a good dress up! Despite the grumbles, and comments of what can I wear? and can't I come as James Bond? (invites specifically said No James Bonds!) we had a rocking show. It was an inspirational turnout in terms of effort!
The theme was Who's Who - Come as a celebrity, famous person or fictional character (but please go all out!).
Alongside the usual batmans and catwomen, we had myself as Foxxy Cleopatra, my darling friend as Queen Cleopatra, and noted guests such as Xena, The Joker, Alice and The Mad Hatter (a couple effort), an African Geisha, Tina Turner, Erykah Badu, Rick James, Jimi Hendrix, Eve, Kelly Rowland, Pocahontas, Left Eye, Lady Gaga, GI Joe, A Werewolf, TuPac, Zorro, Danny and Sandy (from Grease), Superwoman and even Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham) graced the occassion!...I can't event name all the outfits, I'd say at least 80-90% of everyone who came was in fancy dress. Everyone genuinely made a huge effort to get the hair, clothes accessories and make-up spot on!
Apparently it was quite a sight on the Southbank as people made their way to the venue!
I'm sharing with you the Best Male Outfit for the evening (oh yes, we gave out prizes). Just goes to show, with a little gentle prodding, black people WILL do fancy dress!
Umpa Lumpa - bet you didn't know you could get one of these to show up at your parties eh?!
DannyB brought it to my attention that my habit of not posting for ages then doing two posts at a time might mean that some of you are missing some of my topics. If you find me via blogrolls then it's only going to show you my most recent post.
I'm also guessing some of you will not be using RSS feed readers like Google Reader or NetVibes either. Well I'd like to recommend you think about it.
I've been using Google Reader for a while now and subscribe to about 100+ blogs and website feeds. It gets just a tad overwhelming. In two days I can build up about 150+ unread posts, mainly because some of the sites I follow update at a ridiculous pace. But the good thing is I never miss a post unless I decide not to read it.
About 1 month ago I discovered Feedly. It's sort of like NetVibes but much more LoloBloggs friendly! It imports all your feeds from Google Reader and gives you a magazine style layout showing you all the picture posts, video posts as well as previews of all your unread posts (rather than just the title which Google Reader does) and synchronises with your twitter as well.
The downside is that it's a FireFox plugin so for now that's the only place you can use it. The upside of it being a FireFox plugin is that it 'follows' you across tabs and the web. If you google a topic or go to a new website, and somebody has mentioned it in a post or a tweet then your feedly-mini at the bottom of the browser lets you know.
Last week I Googled Maxwell and was immediately pointed to this fab write-up of his album on the Soulculture website. So even if you get a large build up of unread posts, Feedly lets you see when there is a gem in there that you might want to read first.
It doesn't 'follow' you around sites that are security enabled (like paying for things or online banking) but just to be on the safe side I'd open those kinds of things in a different browser.
So anyhoo, less of my going on and more of my lecturing. To make the most of your blog following experience sign up for a feed reader. Google Reader, NetVibes are the best online clients and Feedly (my new best friend) is a fab browser plugin. Any other cool products out there that you guys are using? There can never be too many!
I won't be doing two posts today, decided I might go to the park and pretend grey and overcast doesn't mean rain but fabulous summer! :-s
For the history course I mention in my earlier post (Restoration and Realisation of Self) one of the main requirements of the work is that everybody teaches everybody else. We have a syllabus and at the end of each class, we split the topics of the next class amongst each other and each person goes away and do the research to teach everyone.
To be honest, if it wasn't like this, they would have lost me a long time ago, I'm fickle like that, if there are no expectations on me, I find it way easier to slip out of things.
The difficulty for me is this, I love the internet (LOVE!), its the couch slouch's dream, I need never go anywhere to find out about anything....except....it makes it harder to tell fact from fiction from opinion!
I use a lot of wikipedia links in my posts, too many to be honest, but wikipedia often proves to be the easiest link as most of what you want to communicate is there in one place. But wikipedia is a series of opinions based on fact presented in a factual way, and that is dangerous. When you're trying to learn about something for the first time, if wikipedia is your only source, you're just gonna get something fundamental plain wrong (I'm trying to use it less in my posts, but it's just so...there!).
The other issue are blogs. As I blogger, I love me, no problems, but there are blogs set up where people play the part of a historical figure and fictionalise real events, or the blogs have better search engine ratings (usually from menitoning the search term more times) than the more reliable sources, meaning they show up on page 1, but the thing you need to rely on is on page 17. So how do you know what's what?
Well I'm being drawn back to the library! Remember those? Building, lots of books, bit smelly, dodgy lady keeping an eye on you? Yeah, those. Problem is that libraries these days are full of Jackie Collins, Harry Potter and trash books (no offence). Actually finding the books on my reading list is proving difficult, not least because many of them are written by black scholars or contradict populist history books.
So I'm gonna have to get academic on this, get my lists, go and join lots of libraries and do a thorough hunt in the hope of finding reliable material, I don't exactly know where I'll find the time, but I'm gonna try.
Also, I'm gonna use Google Scholar more often as this is a repository of published papers rather than just weblinks. Some of them aren't free, but you get a synopsis and know what you're looking for.
Have you guys tried out Wolfram Alpha yet? It's a Google style search for facts, figures and stats. For example, put in your birthday and it will tell you exactly how many days, minutes you've been alive, what interisting things happened on that day and what time the sun rose and set! Geek heaven! If I was still in school, this would be my dream right about now...*sigh....
I'm feeling in a particularly solem mood today. I had grand designs for this Sunday afternoon and every single one of them has gone out of the window! I had thought I would go to work (try and save myself from a hell on earth Monday), put up some shelves, finish some geeky stuff but it was all pulled to a full halt after my history class.
So I've been on the Black History trail this year, starting with my brief course with Professor Robin Walker and moving on to a full on 18 week Black and World History Course with the author Onyeka. The latter is a serious journey, the course is also called Realisation and Restoration of Self and boy oh boy does it tear you to bits!
One of the things that attracted me to the latter was the breadth of study, you cover world history, everybody, every major event, as many civilisations as possible, major steppings stones everything from the 100 years war to the Berlin conference, the Greek Myths to Nubia and Kemet. It's a hell of a lot to take in, and quite a few people are doing the course for the second and third time, because it's never possible to know everything.
This course doesn't do any glossing, facts are facts, rape, genocide, murder, slavery, war, you name it, mankind has done it and we will learn about it. Today's class was about the slave revolts and the period leading up to and after the American Civil War.
1st point of clarity/shame/shock (I'm not quite sure why the shame, but the full emotion I can't describe) was the content of a speech given by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in 1857 after a case brought by Dred Scott, a slave who was legally challenging his slave status. I quote
"..They [Africans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Update: Full Speech text can be found here Scott v. Sandford (via Cornell Website). HT to David W, in my comments.
Obviously before this, this idea was always implied and acted upon, but not really expressed so clearly; even the Willie Lynch speech is believed to be false, so to have a supreme court judge be so candid as to spell it out, makes it imutable. It shouldn't be a shock, because it was so obvious anyway, but it still struck me.
Taney was refering to the recent Declaration of Independence, citing that the rights of Americans did not include Africans, period. The idea that an African could bring a case all the way to the supreme court to claim his freedom was therefore preposterous. I'm missing out huge chunks here, but to be brief, this was one of the factors leading up to the civil war.
So the idea that Africans were 3/5 human was carried all the way into the 19th Century and was probably an opinion held by Lincoln himself (remember almost all wars are economic; the American civil war was about financial imbalance between the north and the south, not about any kind of philanthropy, but if you have a PR worthy cause, heck use it!).
The next step in my trauma build up were the details of the lynchings of men who started slave revolts and many others after who were unlucky enough to be caught by a mob or charged with some stupid trump charge in reaction to growing insolence from the slaves and Africans.
Nat Tuner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and many many others; these men (and sometimes women and children) were not just captured and killed by hanging, they were castrated, made to eat their own genitals, boiled alive, burned with hot iron pokes, beaten, sodomised and goodness knows what else. I cannot tell you how I felt when we read newspaper accounts of lynchings out of the book 100 Years of Lynchings.
Seeing some of the pictures (none of which I'm going to put here, I'm sorry) showing the burnt, beaten and hanging bodies of Africans, surrounded by smiling white families (note men women and children) is something I can't get out of my head. Simple google search will show you a few of them.
So this is where I'm at. Traumatised. My reasons for doing this course are to become a better person, if you don't know your history, you don't know who you are, or can be. In the last 7 weeks, I've had amazing highs learning about African civilisations and kingdoms that flourished, knowing about the positivity, the technology the advances and then the tragedies that ended each one. The wars, the slavery, the colour pyramids, the economic de-stabilisations, the white-washing of facts, the burning of books, artefacts and desecration of identity.
Today's class was like one piece of information too many and since I'm not the stand on the street corner and rant person, I actually came home and cried, then slept for 2 hours.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, everybody should know about their history, no matter what your race, your identity is based on something and not knowing means never realising your full potential. As a black African, my history is more traumatic and more hidden than other races, so the distance I have to travel feels further and the affect it has on me is gonna be more pronounced....guess I just wasn't ready for it today.
It takes a lot to mean something to everyone, it takes genius.
You know where you were when you heard that song.
One of those albums is the soundtrack to the summer/winter/time of your life.
He was the only other English speaking artist your parents knew about apart from Bob Marley.
You tried to mimic him, you were glued to the screen for Smooth Criminal.
Your Aunty who doesn't speak English has a dusty vinyl in her house and thinks she knows the words to Billie Jean.
Problem is, that kind of genius is cursed. Cursed to fame, cursed to despair, cursed to vanity, cursed with money and ultimately cursed never to have a peaceful death.
They sacrifice our boundaries of 'sanity' to give us something we can't give ourselves, but in doing so, they become the worst of what we are.
He didn't have my respect in the latter days of his life, but his memory will always have the utmost respect in my heart.
