Independent Afrikan Education

-amari

DP back on the block

My boys is back just in time for summer.  They got something for you:

i love Dead Prez for they commitment to principle.

Since their 2000 debut album, “Let’s Get Free,” Dead Prez (“Dead Prez means dead the muh’fuckin president”), with their unwavering dedication to Black liberation in a perfected blend of political commentary and lyrical hotness, have been hassled and harassed by all the major record labels in the game. 

Tupac: Rest in Uhuru

“June one-six, seven-one the day/momma push me out her womb/told me nigga get paid” – Tupac

-amari

Rev. Cleophus Ma’at shares the good word

For a country that’s only been around 233 years, it sure seem like forever. Shoot, even the people who lived here before 1776 was Americans. Americans before America: Native Americans—Native to America, like god almighty named this place America, not the founding fathers, and the natives wasn’t doing nothing but holding the place down for the white folks fore they got good and ready to come on over. And they did, ungrateful as they could be, just killing and raping them people like that when all they was doing was tending to the garden for them.  Watering plants and things like that. Perhaps all that time in those caves done made them ofays crazy. Or maybe they was mad cause the natives ain’t built up the good green land god left them to tend to for the duppies and the duppies got up-set. Either way, they was really mad. i’m talking diseases in blankets mad.

Harvest Time

I

Overcast daytime clouds conspire to block out the sun.

A dark faced, dark handed woman limps, hard
head wrapped in material matching flowing garments the color of far away;
the color of exile.

My mother tells me there’s nothing for her in the land that contains her
physical connection to forever, but somehow
i live to taste such soil.
Have i robbed her of this desire, selfishly making hers my own?

Don’t you know this place blocks out the sun?

We limp lifeless, either draping ourselves in longing, or
disrobing ourselves memory. All of it so heavy
for tired bones
in fading skin
whose yearning melanin is maliciously denied its lifeline.
Even the skies of this place conspire against us.

Oh great forces of the Universe! Are we beyond mercy?
Left here languishing in the land of the lost where even the skies conspire against us.

II

Babylon ain’t had no rivers till we showed up

Dragged cross land and sand and sea and Universe
Each one
With enough tears to make islands out of continents

But too little to drown
our soulless captors

A thought too magnificent for weary imaginations.

But neglected weeds choke the farmer

Rise mighty weeds
sown round the world and
cultivated in the patient soil of justice. Rise

Common seed of Creation
Shared seed of destruction. Rise!
Neglected weeds. Choke the farmer

Harvest

is long overdue.

-amari