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Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Black Farmers Praise Ancestor Julian Bond
Sekou Osei on the beating of Elder BPP Warrior Dhoruba Bin Wahad
"As Ancestor Amiri Baraka would say, 'The only reason is no reason'."--Marvin X
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, New York Black Panther Party member, spent 19 years as a political prisoner. From: Sekou Osei
- To: Marvin X
While I never took the NBPP seriously beyond militant "protest
theater" of angry symbolism and with "no program." But this leads to
some very profane conclusions of "counter-revolution." I gather that
Dhoruba wanted to confront the use of the "name" that has nothing in
common with the original Black Panther Party, while the New Black
Panther Party came out of masonic leadership under the leadership of
Khalid Muhammad.
However, what I understood in my E-mal in June and July that the NBPP
was having an open round table discussion and Dhoruba felt that what
was needed was a full public disclosures of the origins of the NBPP and
its false actions of a radical tradition and as a revisionism of the
actual radical tradition.
What has to be noted, I guess Dhoruba felt he had to confront these
theater imposter himself, because there is no Black radical left to take
that on. The best that this so-called left does is call militant
protests as base building and relies on spontaneity that never comes.
They don't have the ability to analyze or critique and the best that
they do is create list of so-called Black radical theorist whose only
character is loquacious intellectual narcissism that provide no clarity
of anything and only provide academic feel-good speculation.
Perhaps from this, this was the background that Dhoruba felt he had to
take action to confront this stench of toads. While, Dhoruba may not of
had a full organization to carry out this ideological confrontation, it
would be a mistake to belittle Dhoruba confrontation as a silly
escapade of an old man and not see the counter-revolutionary character
and actions of the NBPP to attack a former political prisoner and never
lift a pinky to the agents and extra legal agents of the state that
murder Black people without consequence. And has taken this public
posture for the last 20 years...
Sekou
Monday, August 17, 2015
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Two poems by Julian Bond (RIP)
Post Publisher Paul Cobb and his longtime friend and comrade in the Civil Rights Movement, Julian Bond (RIP)
Poems by Julian Bond
LOOK AT THAT GIRLLook at that girl shake that thing,Copyright © Julian Bond, 1960, all rights reserved.
We can't all be Martin Luther King.
[This was written sometime in the very early '60s — or perhaps even '58 or '59, — when I was a Morehouse College student. From time to time, usually through the auspices of some religiously oriented campus group, we'd be invited to meet with our white counterparts at Emory or Agnes Scott. We'd wear our Sunday best and sip tea and eat cookies. Typically a well-meaning white student would say as we were parting — 'If only they were all like you.' That prompted the poem." — JBond.]
I TOO, HEAR AMERICA SINGING
[As published in the first issue of The Student Voice — SNCC's newsletter, summer, 1960.]
I too, hear America singingCopyright © Julian Bond, 1960, all rights reserved.
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
Or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don't mind standing
a little longer.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Prez candidate Dr. Ben Carson says Planned Parenthood is for Black Population Control
Republican presidential candidate Ben
Carson speaks at the National Sheriffs’ Association presidential forum,
Tuesday, June 30, 2015, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Planned Parenthood Clinics Are Set Up To Control The Black Population Says Dr. Ben Carson
By Nigel BoysIn an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” 63-year-old retired neurosurgeon and GOP presidential candidate, Ben Carson, said that Planned Parenthood sets up abortions clinics in black neighborhoods to “control that population.”
Tying the nation’s leading provider of abortions to eugenics, then eugenics to Hillary Clinton, the author and political pundit who retired from Johns Hopkins hospital told Cavuto, “Well, maybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood.”
The Hill reports that the Detroit, Michigan native also disputed claims that de-funding Planned Parenthood would harm women’s healthcare.
“Well, certainly women’s health is an important issue,” the White House hopeful in the upcoming 2016 election said. “There are a lot of women’s health organizations that don’t engage in abortion, by the way, so by no means is it a do-or-die situation.”
“I believe that abortion and paying for abortion with federal funding when so many people are against it is just not the right thing to do,” Carson said. Pointing out that Clinton says she admires Sanger, he added people should read about Sanger’s history. “Look up and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her, a great person.”
In an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Carson confirmed that he believes Planned Parenthood concentrates its clinics in black neighborhoods. The number one cause of death for black people is abortion, he told guest host Eric Bolling, according to Fox News.
After the release of a series of undercover videos, allegedly demonstrating how Planned Parenthood is in the business of selling fetal body parts, the organization has come under fierce scrutiny and demands to cease its federal funding. Carson believes that the important questions to be asked should be: “Why is that happening?” and “What can be done to alleviate the situation?”
“One of the ways they’re able to perpetrate the deceit is because people are not informed,” Carson said on the show. “The more people are informed, the less likely these kinds of things [are].”
Carson also told Cavuto that he was willing to have a discussion about when life begins, when he was asked about his views on de-funding Planned Parenthood in the light of the undercover videos.
“Certainly once the heart starts beating. Certainly at that point,” Carson said. “If we are willing to open up the discussion, both sides, I think we can come to accommodation.”
According to the National Review, in her 1922 book “The Pilot of Civilization,” Sanger wrote: “The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the “unfit” and the “fit” [is] admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization…”
“The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes,” Sanger continued. “On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Life Dynamics found in a 2011 study of the zip codes of every abortion or abortion-referral facility in the U.S., that the majority of these facilities were overwhelmingly located in zip codes with minority populations well above the state average. The pro-life organization reported that out of 94 facilities in Texas, 72 of those were located in zip codes with disproportionate black and/or Hispanic populations.
The study’s author noted, “There is not one state in the union without population control centers located in ZIP codes with higher percentages of blacks and/or Hispanics than the state’s overall percentage,” according to the National Review.
Fetus by Marvin X
Mama, please don't kill me
don't you see
I got your eyes
Mama, please don't kill me
don't you see
I got my daddy's hands, head feet
Mama, please don't flush me down the toilet
I might be a prophet
come to save the world
Mama, please
don't kill me.
--Marvin X
from Liberation Poems for North American Africans, Marvin X, Al Kitab Sudan Press (Black Bird Press), 1983.
The Truth About MARGARET SANGER
(This article first appeared in the January 20, 1992 edition of Citizen magazine)
How Planned Parenthood Duped America
At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against
White Supremacy.
Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian." And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America's human "breeding stock" and purging America's "bad strains." These "strains" included the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."
Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization.: And she also spoke of those who were "irresponsible and reckless," among whom she included those " whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She further contended that "there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment of Sanger considered "unfit" cannot be easily refuted.
While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.
These eugenic and racial origins are hardly what most people associate with the modern Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which gave its Margaret Sanger award to the late Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966, and whose current president, Faye Wattleton, is black, a former nurse, and attractive.
Though once a social pariah group, routinely castigated by religious and government leaders, the PPFA is now an established, high-profile, well-funded organization with ample organizational and ideological support in high places of American society and government. Its statistics are accepted by major media and public health officials as "gospel"; its full-page ads appear in major newspapers; its spokespeople are called upon to give authoritative analyses of what America's family policies should be and to prescribe official answers that congressmen, state legislator and Supreme Court justiices all accept as "social orthodoxy."
Blaming Families
Sanger's obsession with eugenics can be traced back to her own family. One of 11 children, she wrote in the autobiographical book, My Fight for Birth Control, that "I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families." Just as important was the impression in her childhood of an inferior family status, exacerbated by the iconoclastic, "free-thinking" views of her father, whose "anti-Catholic attitudes did not make for his popularity" in a predominantly Irish community.
The fact that the wealthy families in her hometown of Corning, N.Y., had relatively few children, Sanger took as prima facie evidence of the impoverishing effect of larger families. The personal impact of this belief was heightened 1899, at the age of 48. Sanger was convinced that the "ordeals of motherhood" had caused the death of her mother. The lingering consumption (tuberculosis) that took her mother's life visited Sanger at the birth of her own first child on Nov. 18, 1905. The diagnosis forced her to seek refuge in the Adirondacks to strengthen her for the impending birth. Despite the precautions, the birth of baby Grant was "agonizing," the mere memory of which Sanger described as "mental torture" more than 25 years later. She once described the experience as a factor "to be reckoned with" in her zealous campaign for birth control.
From the beginning, Sanger advocacy of sex education reflected her interest in population control and birth prevention among the "unfit." Her first handbook, published for adolescents in 1915 and entitled, What Every Boy and Girl Should Know, featured a jarring afterword:
It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stoop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them.
To Sanger, the ebbing away of moral and religious codes over sexual conduct was a natural consequence of the worthlessness of such codes in the individual's search for self-fulfillment. "Instead of laying down hard and fast rules of sexual conduct," Sanger wrote in her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, "sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself." Her attitude is appropriately described as libertarianism, but sex knowledge was not the same as individual liberty, as her writings on procreation emphasized.
The second edition of Sanger's life story, An Autobiography, appeared in 1938. There Sanger described her first cross-country lecture tour in 1916. Her standard speech asserted seven conditions of life that "mandated" the use of birth control: the third was "when parents, though normal, had subnormal children"; the fourth, "when husband and wife were adolescent"; the fifth, "when the earning capacity of the father was inadequate." No right existed to exercise sex knowledge to advance procreation. Sanger described the fact that "anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent."
Religious Bigotry
In the 1910's and 1920's, the entire social order–religion, law, politics, medicine, and the media–was arrayed against the idea and practice of birth control. This opposition began in 1873 when an overwhelmingly Protestant Congress passed, and a Protestant president signed into law, a bill that became known as the Comstock Law, named after its main proponent, Anthony Comstock. The U.S. Congress classified obscene writing, along with drugs, and devices and articles that prevented conception or caused abortion, under the same net of criminality and forbade their importation or mailing.
Sanger set out to have such legislation abolished or amended. Her initial efforts were directed at the Congress with the opening of a Washington, D.C., office of her American Birth Control League in 1926. Sanger wanted to amend section 211 of the U.S. criminal code to allow the interstate shipment and mailing of contraceptives among physicians, druggists and drug manufacturers.
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Friday, August 14, 2015
Black Lives Matter and Political Correctness in Seattle WA
Black lives trump “politeness”:The disruption of a Bernie Sanders speech in Seattle
There has been a great deal of
heated debate on social media and elsewhere about Black Lives Matter
(BLM) activists shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech in Seattle on
August 8. As attendees at this rally celebrating Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid, we admire the courage of the two young Black
women who took over the stage to demand that Sanders, and other
candidates for U.S. president, address the epidemic of violence and
oppression faced by black communities across the nation.
At the Seattle event Sanders made no attempt to speak with
the BLM activists, have a dialogue, or address the crowd on this
burning issue of our times. If he’d desired, surely one of the rally
organizers could have walked a mic over to him. Instead, he stood aside
and shook his head, and then walked off the stage without speaking.
Sanders’ reputation as a
progressive should in no way give him a pass on racial justice issues.
He voted for Bill Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act, which props up the racist prison-industrial complex. He voted to
extradite Assata Shakur, an African American freedom fighter who is
living in exile in Cuba. And his refusal to denounce Israel’s war
against Palestinians gives tacit consent to some of the most racist
repression on the planet. (See the Freedom Socialist Party statement,
distributed at the Sanders rally, that critiques his run to be
Democratic presidential nominee: www.socialism.com.)
Besides, politeness was in
short supply when many in the largely white audience reacted to the BLM
action with intense hostility. Some shouted racist and sexist invectives
like “tase them,” “get these Black bitches off the stage,” and “call
CPS” (Child Protective Services). It was chilling.
Members and supporters of
Radical Women and Freedom Socialist Party, and some others in the crowd,
began loudly chanting to support the Black Lives Matter protesters. We
debated those around us. When someone said they could not understand why
the BLM activists were taking over, one of our contingent shot back,
“Have you had a family member arrested or killed by the police?” The
answer was no, and a discussion began on why the fight for racial
equality can’t wait.
We could feel the majority of
the rally crowd grow tense when the BLM protestors leveled charges of
white supremacist liberalism. We see a difference between liberals and
those with an explicitly racist ideology. But racism is racism. At times
some of the viciously hostile responses sounded like a KKK rally.
That's not so surprising in a country built on the foundations of
genocide and slavery, where racism, which is essential to keeping the
profit system alive, permeates everyday life. But it was downright
hypocritical at a social justice event.
It is imperative that we tackle
head-on the racism and sexism that reared its head in Seattle’s
progressive movement. And that we focus on the critical issues the BLM activists raised and Sanders skirted.
For inspiration, let us
remember that the history of the civil rights movement includes
courageous multi-racial organizers who were not polite. Folks of all
colors risked their lives in the effort. We know that white folks
committed to social change can channel their inner John Brown, a white
man who collaborated with Harriet Tubman to free slaves and gave his
life trying to spark an armed slave rebellion.
The “ill-mannered” disruption
of the rally sparked a new national discussion about racism. It’s time
for everyone to link arms with the BLM movement in the fight for radical
change now.
Steve Hoffman, Seattle Freedom Socialist Party
Anne Slater, Seattle Radical Women
Freedom Socialist Party statement
Bernie Sanders’ Bid for President: What Would Eugene Debs Think?
It’s clear why fed-up voters are attracted
to Bernie Sanders. He rails against the billionaires and calls for a
U.S. political revolution. Who doesn’t want to end the rule of banksters
and CEOs? Who doesn’t want to stop the corporate harvesting of all
things profitable at the expense of people and the planet? Who doesn’t
want to hear the needs of working people promoted for a change?
 The Republican and Democratic parties … are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principle. With either of these parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle. … The ignorant workingman who supports either of these parties forges his own fetters and is the unconscious author of his own misery.
In contrast, Sanders is running as a
Democrat; he has chosen to hitch his wagon to the overlords in the
saddle. He has promised to support whoever wins the Democratic primary.
In Congress, he votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, and he
consistently supports their presidential candidates.
His function in this election is the same
as left-identified Democratic presidential contenders like Jesse
Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, and others before him. It is to bleed off
protest against the two-party chokehold over U.S. politics and to make
sure that unionists and progressives once again vote — against their own
interests — for a Democrat acceptable to big business.
And what about Sanders’ actual record? It’s seriously at odds with his image.
Wall Street — Sanders
promises to reform Wall Street. But this can’t be done through tweaks
such as taxing certain financial transactions, as Sanders proposes.
Given the devastating power they wield over people’s lives, the banks
need to be nationalized under workers’ control! Also, Sanders aims his
anti-corporate fury almost entirely against Republicans, while giving a
pass to Democratic friends of finance capital.
War — Sanders accepts the
U.S. role as World Cop. In Congress, he has voted to fund nearly every
imperialist military action by the U.S., from Iraq and Somalia to
Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He refuses to denounce Israel’s war on
Palestinians, and endorsed the sanctions that killed over a million
Iraqi civilians.
Labor — Sanders’ version
of defending U.S. workers is of the jingoistic, “America First” variety.
He points to immigrants and foreign workers as the source of job loss,
rather than the bosses’ policies of speedup, automation, and the global
“race to the bottom.” But, internationally, an injury to one truly is an
injury to all! Even when it comes to U.S. workers, Sanders hasn’t
stepped up to the plate when it counts. Earlier this year, he didn’t
resist when the Democratic governor of Vermont, his ally, pushed through
a budget that meant cutting hundreds of union jobs.
Civil rights — The
Vermont senator has supported racist federal legislation, like Bill
Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which props up
the prison-industrial complex. He has not championed the Black Lives
Matter movement or other groups aimed at ending police murders and the
criminalization of youth of color.
In his campaign speeches, this supposed
socialist generally has refused to pinpoint capitalism as the problem
and socialism as the solution. While more and more voters are
identifying their affiliation as “independent,” Sanders is headed in the
opposite direction.
He excels at rousing populist oratory, but
considers Hillary Clinton, warmonger of U.S. foreign policy, his “good
friend.” Sanders is the man for the job for the beleaguered Democratic
Party in these times of growing anger and dissent. Not as president,
mind you, but as the latest in a series of perennial false hopes for a
kinder, gentler party — and social system.
On the socialist Left, there are groups,
like the Socialist Alternative of Seattle City Council member Kshama
Sawant, who give Sanders direct or indirect support, ignoring or
downplaying the ugly parts of his record and wishing away his longtime
collusion with the Democratic Party. This is no way to build a movement
for lasting fundamental change.
What would be productive is left cooperation
rather than competition on the electoral battlefield. By joining
forces, it would be much more possible to give people opportunities to
vote for bold, honest, radical opponents of the profit system and its
ravages at home and abroad.
A big part of any joint anti-capitalist effort would have to be
challenging the tangle of state and federal laws that keep Left and
independent labor candidates off the ballot. And a possible outcome of
such an effort could be the launch of a new national party to defend
working people and the oppressed. The Freedom Socialist Party is for a
national conference that could discuss these ideas and get something
moving. And the sooner the better! U.S. voters need relief! |
Fidel Castro and Cuba as Pan African
dDid America support Malcolm X? Did America support Nelson Mandela and the ANC? No, no, no, but Fidel and the Cuban did. Today the Great Shaitan returns to Cuba, raising the flag of imperialism and white supremacy. Yankee/Gringo go home!
Oba Okunade Sijuwade, the Oni of Ife has joined the ancestors
The Oni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, has passed away.The monarch died at the age of 85 in a London hospital on Tuesday, Punch reports.
A source told the newspaper that Oba Sijuwade was flown out of the country from Ibadan about five days ago in an unconscious state.
“Kabiyesi was flown out of the country about five days ago in an air ambulance. He was unconscious; his situation was critical.
“As a matter of fact, some people have been weeping in the palace since the weekend because of his situation when he was flown out from Ibadan in that air ambulance,” he said.
Oba Sijuwade became the fiftieth traditional ruler or Ife in 1980.
| Ilé-Ifẹ̀ Ifè Oòyè |
|
|---|---|
Ilé-Ifẹ̀
|
|
| Coordinates: 7°28′N 4°34′E | |
| Government | |
| • Ọọ̀ni | Olubuse II |
| • Local Government Chairman of Ife Central | Taiwo Olaiya |
| • Local Government Chairman of Ife North | Lanre Ogunyimika |
| • Local Government Chairman of Ife South | Timothy Fayemi |
| • Local Government Chairman of Ife East | Tajudeen Lawal |
Contents
History
Yoruba Copper mask for King Obalufon, Ife, Nigeria c. 1300 C.E.
Mythic origin of Ife, the holy city: Creation of the world
According to Yoruba mythology, Olodumare, the Supreme God, ordered Obatala to create the earth but on his way he found palm wine which he drank and became intoxicated. Therefore the younger brother of the latter, Oduduwa, took the three items of creation from him, climbed down from the heavens on a chain and threw a handful of earth on the primordial ocean, then put a cockerel on it so that it would scatter the earth, thus creating the land on which Ile Ife would be built.[2] Oduduwa planted a palm nut in a hole in the newly formed land and from there sprang a great tree with sixteen branches, a symbolic representation of the clans of the early Ife city-state. The usurpation of creation by Oduduwa gave rise to the ever lasting conflict between him and his elder brother Obatala, which is still re-enacted in the modern era by the cult groups of the two clans during the Itapa New Year festival.[3] On account of his creation of the world Oduduwa became the ancestor of the first divine king of the Yoruba, while Obatala is believed to have created the first Yoruba people out of clay. The meaning of the word "ife" in Yoruba is "expansion"; "Ile-Ife" is therefore in reference to the myth of origin "The Land of Expansion".Origin of the regional states: Dispersal from the holy city, Ife
Oduduwa had sons, daughters, and a grandson who went on to found their own kingdoms and empires, namely Ila Orangun, Owu, Ketu, Sabe, Popo and Oyo. Oranmiyan, Oduduwa's last born, was one of his father's principal ministers and overseer of the nascent Edo empire after Oduduwa granted the plea of the Edo people for his governance. When Oranmiyan decided to go back to Ile Ife after a period of service in Benin, he left behind a child named Eweka that he had in the interim with an indigenous princess. The young boy went on to become the first legitimate ruler of the second Edo dynasty that has ruled what is now Benin from that day to this. Oranmiyan later went on to found the Oyo Empire that stretched at its height from the western banks of the river Niger to the Eastern banks of the river Volta. It would serve as one of the most powerful of Africa's medieval states prior to its collapse in the 19th century.Traditional setting
The King (Ooni)
The Oòni (or king) of Ife claims direct descent from Oduduwa, and is counted first among the Yoruba kings. He is traditionally considered the 401st spirit (Orisha), the only one that speaks. In fact, the royal dynasty of Ife traces its origin back to the founding of the city more than two thousand years ago. The present ruler is Alayeluwa Oba Okunade Sijuwade, Olubuse II, styled His Imperial Majesty by his subjects. The Ooni ascended his throne in 1980.[4] Following the formation of the Yoruba Orisha Congress in 1986, the Ooni acquired an international status the likes of which the holders of his title hadn't had since the city's colonisation by the British. Nationally he had always been prominent amongst the Federal Republic of Nigeria's company of royal Obas, being regarded as the chief priest and custodian of the holy city of all the Yorubas.[5] In former times, the palace of the Oni of Ife was a structure built of authentic enameled bricks, decorated with artistic porcelain tiles and all sorts of ornaments. [6]Cults for the spirits
Ife is well known as the city of 401 or 201 deities. It is said that every day of the year the traditional worshippers celebrate a festival of one of these deities. Often the festivals extend over more than one day and they involve both priestly activities in the palace and theatrical dramatisations in the rest of the kingdom. Historically the King only appeared in public during the annual Olojo festival; other important festivals here include the Itapa festival for Obatala and Obameri, the Edi festival for Moremi Ajasoro, and the Igare masqueraders.[7]Art history
Bronze Head from Ife, probably a king and dated around 1300 C.E., in the British Museum.
The city was a settlement of substantial size between the 12th and 14th centuries, with houses featuring potsherd pavements. Ilé-Ifè is known worldwide for its ancient and naturalistic bronze, stone and terracotta sculptures, which reached their peak of artistic expression between 1200 and 1400 A.D. In the period around 1300 C.E. the artists at Ife developed a refined and naturalistic sculptural tradition in terracotta, stone and copper alloy - copper, brass, and bronze many of which appear to have been created under the patronage of King Obalufon II, the man who today is identified as the Yoruba patron deity of brass casting, weaving and regalia. [9] After this period, production declined as political and economic power shifted to the nearby kingdom of Benin which, like the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, developed into a major empire.
Bronze and terracotta art created by this civilization are significant examples of naturalism in pre-colonial African art and are distinguished by their variations in regalia, facial marking patterns, and body proportions. Ancient Ife also was famous for its glass beads which have been found at sites as far away as Mali, Mauritania, and Ghana.
The modern town
Today a mid-sized city, Ife is home to both the Obafemi Awolowo University and the Natural History Museum of Nigeria. Its people are of the Yoruba ethnic group, one of the largest ethnolinguistic groups in Africa and its diaspora. Ife has a local television station called NTA Ife, and is home to various businesses. It is also the trade center for a farming region where yams, cassava, grain, cacao, and tobacco are grown. Cotton is also produced, and is used to weave cloth. Hotels in Ilé-Ife include Cameron Hotel, Hotel Diganga Ife-Ibadan road, Mayfair Hotel, Obafemi Awolowo University Guest House etc. Ilé-Ife has a stadium with a capacity of 9,000 and a second division professional league football team.Exhibition
A major exhibition entitled Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures of West Africa, displaying works of art found in Ife and the surrounding area, was held in the British Museum from 4 March to 4 July 2010.[10]See also
Notes
References
- Olubunmi, A.O. The Rise and Fall of The Yoruba Race 10,000BC-1960AD, The 199 Publishing Palace ISBN 978-2457-38-8
- ---: On Ijesa Racial Purity, The 199 Publishing Palace ISBN 978-2458-17-1
- Akinjogbin, I. A. (Hg.): The Cradle of a Race: Ife from the Beginning to 1980, Lagos 1992 (The book also has chapters on the present religious situation in the town).
- Blier,Suzanne Preston. Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity c.1300, Cambridge University Press 2015. ISBN=978-1107021662.
- Blier, Suzanne Preston. "Art in Ancient Ife Birthplace of the Yoruba" African Arts 2012 [1]
- Bascom, William: The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria, New York 1969 (The book mainly deals with Ife).
- --- "The Olojo festival at Ife, 1937", in: A. Falassi (ed.), Time out of Time. Essays on the Festival, Albuquerque, 1987, 62-73.
- Frobenius, Leo, The Voice of Africa, London 1913 (Frobenius stayed for nearly two months in Ife, in 1910-11).
- Johnson, Samuel: History of the Yorubas, London 1921.
- Lange, Dierk: "The dying and the rising God in the New Year Festival of Ife", in: Lange, Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa, Dettelbach 2004, pp. 343–376.
- ---: "Preservation of Canaanite creation culture in Ife", in: H.-P. Hahn and G. Spittler (eds.), Between Resistance and Expansion, Münster 2004, 125-158.
- ---: "Origin of the Yoruba and 'Lost Tribes of Israel'", Anthropos, 106, 2011, 579-595.
- Ogunyemi, Yemi D. (Yemi D. Prince), The Oral Traditions in Ile-Ife, ISBN 978-1-933146-65-2, Academica Press, 2009, Palo Alto, USA.
- ---: The Aura of Yoruba Philosophy, Religion and Literature, ISBN 0-9652860-4-5, Diaspora Press of America, 2003, Boston, USA.
- ---: Introduction to Yoruba Philosophy, Religion and Literature, ISBN 1-890157-14-7, Athelia Henrietta Press, 1998, New York, USA.
- ---: The Covenant of the Earth--Yoruba Religious & Philosophical Narratives, ISBN 1-890157-15-5, Athelia Henrietta Press, 1998, New York, USA.
- Olupona, Jacob K.: City of 201 Gods: Ile-Ife in Time, Space and Imagination, Berkeley 2011.
- Stride, G.T. and C. Ifeka: "Peoples and Empires of West Africa: West Africa in History 1000 - 1800", New York 1971.
- Walsh, M.J., "The Edi festival at Ile Ife", African affairs, 47 (1948), 231-8.
- Willett, Frank: Ife in the History of West African Sculpture, London 1967 (The book also deals with some oral traditions of Ile-Ife).
- Wyndham, John: "The creation", Man, 19 (1919), 107-8.
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