One Hundred Years of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm: Concerning Non-Violence

By Onwubiko Agozino 

 Abstract: 

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness, and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP. And Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers. As the African Union yearns for the guns to be silenced across Africa while the insurgencies rage across the wretched continent and lumpen bourgeois politicians spend hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans with, I advance the innovative interpretation that Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm were all adherents of the philosophy of Ubuntu as the non-Western path for the development of democracy in Africa. 

 Narrative: 

 100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP and progressive religious organizations. Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers. 

When I posted this message to a radical sociology discussion group, I received strong opposition that made me convinced that the thesis needs to be tested in an extensive research project for a book monograph. A response quickly followed from a graduate student at a flagship state university in the US, telling me that he is an admirer of all three brothers and therefore could not stomach my revisionism to suggest that they were advocates of nonviolence. He said that my revision of their work to emphasize non-violence could only be true ‘… if one exempts defensive violence (self-defense, overthrow of colonialism and Jim Crow) from "violence." He went on to assert that ‘Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" is a magnificently argued call for killing the colonizer, both mentally and physically.’ He added that Malcolm had no problem with violent self-defense, “By any means necessary”, including violent defense. He credited Lumumba with being a founding member of FRELIMO, “an organization dedicated to armed struggle to achieve Mozambique national independence.” Then he alluded to the claim by Malcolm that only the Black revolution claims to be a non-violent revolution whereas the American, French and Russian revolutions were very bloody. “The perpetrators of these revolutions are considered national and international heroes” he claimed, and added that “Fanon, Malcolm, and Lumumba asserted that Africans in America and in Africa had the same rights as white people.” In conclusion, he stated as follows: “Surely, it alters their contributions to say they were non-violent.” Yet he signed off with the greeting: ‘peace’ before his name. 

 I responded to the brother as follows: I agree with you that self-defense is no offence by any means necessary. I propose to read the Africana classics more strategically. Reading The Wretched of the Earth strategically, I propose to test the hypothesis that Fanon, the psychiatrist, emphasized that the frequency of the violence of the colonizers as causal in relation to the violence of the colonized against their own brothers and sisters, if x then y; if you do not wish to see y, then prevent x. It was the violence of the colonizers that drove Africans nuts and also drove the violent colonizers insane. It is still happening today all over neocolonial Africa and in the inner cities of internal colonies in the Diaspora, just as the colonial violence drove Europeans insane enough to embark on their tribal world wars over the greed for colonies in Africa that killed an estimated 80 million people, despite the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois against imperialism and its reckless greed for resources. 

 Moreover, when Fanon joined the national liberation movement after quitting his impossible job as a colonial psychiatrist, he dedicated himself to diplomacy, intellectual and moral leadership as a theorist and not as a suicide bomber. Same can be said about the rest of us intellectuals who write books rather than throw bombs. Antonio Gramsci concluded that even the bourgeoisie rules by consent mostly whereas when imperialists resort to violence, it is proof that they had lost the hegemonic struggle.

 Brother Malcolm never killed anyone that we know of. I propose to analyze his speeches to explain how he answered the provocative question that agents provocateurs may have posed to him, 'By the Ballot or By the Bullet?' By the ballot he chose even while defending the right to self-defense in a country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the liberal Constitution. There is no principle of armed violence in the 10-point program of the Black Panthers. Instead, they emphasized the principle of arming the people with knowledge, according to its former President, Elaine Brown, who gave this retort to a white woman who asked her why the Panthers fetishized the carrying of guns at a conference in the Schomberg Center, New York Public Library - carrying a gun did not make you a revolutionary or police officers will be the biggest revolutionaries, she said. 

 Same thing goes for Lumumba who campaigned against the violence of the colonizers and demanded reparative justice, just like Fanon, without calling for violence as a principle in the struggle to regain independence. Both FRELIMO and the ANC started as non-violent organizations before the violence of the colonizers drove them to adopt armed struggles which was suspended to allow negotiations. Those African states that were forced to adopt the armed struggle as a tactic do not compare more favorably with those that adopted the non-violent positive action of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his mentee, Kwame Nkrumah; though Nkrumah later wrote the Guerrilla warfare handbook after being overthrown by the same army he commanded. 

What the brothers were teaching us is evident today - wherever Africana people are armed, they tend to use the arms to kill one another in genocidal proportions while western arms companies laugh at us all the way to their banks with huge profits. On the other hand, those who have adopted the Ubuntu philosophy of what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable (to which Tutu responded that nthere is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu), such as Columbia after the bloody civil war from 1958-2016, or Northern Ireland after the troubles, have reaped greater dividends than those who continued fratricidal violence with western weapons of mass destruction. 

 I propose that non-violence, the philosophy that Gandhi claimed that he learned from the warlike Zulu, is one of the greatest contributions of Africans to world civilization. Kassala Kamara attributed its origin to classical African civilization when the rulers of Kemet granted independence to the rebellious principality of Damascus rather than seek to crush their rebellion. Maulana Karenga illustrated it with the case of the eloquent peasant who used logic to seek the recovery of his stolen property rather than take up arms against the government officials that robbed him. Chinua Achebe illustrated this with the case of Ezulu in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and hunger strike to resist being forced to become a colonial chief among the democratic Igbo who brag that they know no kings. 

 Even Karl Marx, according to Friedrich Engles' preface to the first English edition of Capital, observed that a non-violent revolution, such as the abolition of slavery, was possible in England provided that the enslavers did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion as they did in the US. I propose to test the original hypothesis about the centrality of non-violence in African civilizations. Rasta philosophy of One Love will back me up with the example of how Bob Marley refused to call ‘Babylonian’ forces to arrest the youth man who came to ask for forgiveness for having tried to assassinate him. One Love for All! Peace and Love! Can this philosophy be extended to resolve the insurgencies ravaging Africa today from state violence to Boko Haram, ISWA, and al Shabab militants? 

 Steve Biko denied instigating violence as alleged by the apartheid prosecutor in court. He was accused of calling for the people to confront apartheid. Biko answered that he was being confronted by the prosecutor but there was no violence in the court room. Anyone who wishes to ‘waste … time in sterile litanies and the nauseating mimicry’ of the European tradition of genocidal violence will need to re-read more carefully the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth where Dr. Fanon, the psychiatrist, precisely and unambiguously prescribed that we should shun violence as follows: 

"Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration." - Fanon, Conclusion, The Wretched of the Earth.

For Oga BJ in Admiration

On A Soyinka Prize In ‘Illiteracy’, By Biko Agozino

by Premium Times  July 14, 2018 Reading Time: 11 mins read

 0

I will admit to a ‘strategic misreading’ that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial.

On July 13, 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honoured him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marveling about the ‘Author’s Note’ that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman. Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of their play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts would misread the play. He took the unusual authoritarian step of stipulating how the play should be interpreted but the critics appear not to notice and have continued to misread the play, in my own humble opinion. Soyinka leaves clues that would guide readers to decode his original intention in writing the play but most literary critics miss the point and some accuse me of being the mis-reader.

The very first sentence in the Author’s Note may have led many critics astray by stating that the play is based on real historical “events which took place in Oyo”, which the author defines as “an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. This is misleading in a number of ways that literary critics should have been able to understand. To say that the events took place in 1946 would be to localise the time and space of the dramatic events, whereas in the world of theatre, events do not take place exclusively in the setting but also on every stage where the play is produced. Soyinka expected that literary theorists would understand that the playscript is not simply an archival document or ethnographic report but the work of original creation, even when based on real events. The play was not expected to be read as the verbatim report of a tragic case that took place once upon a time. This is true of all works of creative writing that are supposed to be inventive, no matter how much resemblance there may be between fiction and reality. In fact, many writers include a disclaimer that any resemblances to real events are unintentional. As a matter of fact, the same can be said about reality genres that are full of inventions too. Soyinka clearly states in the first paragraph of his Author’s Note that he made “changes” in the narrative “in matters of detail, sequence and of course characterisation.”

He also informs the illiterate critics that he deliberately set the play back a few years “while the war was still on, for minor reasons of dramaturgy.” Here, Soyinka is guiding the would-be producer away from a simplistic historical interpretation of the play as being only relevant to the case of 1946, given that dramaturgy grants artistic license that defies the laws of historical specificity. In addition, Soyinka may have misled the interpreters of the play by saying that Oyo was an “ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria.” Here he could be challenged by historians who may point out that Oyo was an ancient Yoruba Empire and not simply a city and that by 1946, it was no longer simply a Yoruba city but a multicultural one. Moreover, nothing ‘of Nigeria’ can be said to be ancient because Nigeria itself is a modernist invention by colonisers. The hint about the Nigerian setting of the play should have encouraged the critics to understand that the play is not only about a Yoruba tragedy but about a Nigerian tragedy. The reference to “while the war was still on” should have massaged the memory of the critics to remind them that the play was published only five years after a tragic genocidal war in Nigeria in which Yoruba elites played a leading aggressive role, along with other ethnic elites in Nigeria. This play, in my lay opinion, is better understood as part of the soul-searching by Soyinka after he was released from solitary confinement for opposing the genocidal war against the Igbo. Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?

Also, Soyinka indicates that those who were interested only in the factual account of the case of 1946 should go and read it in the British National Archives in Kew. He also points out that those who want to read a more exact historical reenactment of the case should consult the “fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo.” In other words, Death and the King’s Horseman is not that kind of historical re-enactment nor is it the kind of ‘misbegotten’ German television film about the case. The play was a more urgent intervention while Soyinka was in exile following the end of the war and his release from solitary confinement for having the audacity to oppose tyranny. Unlike his other plays, he did not wait for the play to be produced before he published it. I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.

I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, “Season of Anomy”, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide.

In the third paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka declares that the “bane of themes of this genre” is that once the text appears, ‘they acquire the facile tag of “clash of cultures”’. He rejected such a label as “prejudicial” in the sense that it is prone to “frequent misapplication” and also because the label “presupposes a potential equality in every given situation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised ‘on the actual soil of the latter’”. Soyinka went on to award “the overseas prize in illiteracy and mental conditioning” to the writer of the blurb of the American edition of his novel, Season of Anomy, for ‘unblushingly’ stating that the novel is about the “clash between old values and new ways, between western methods and African traditions”. Soyinka explains that it is due to “this kind of perverse mentality” that he was forced to warn future producers (and critics) of the play to avoid “a sadly familiar reductionist tendency” and instead attempt to capture “the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence.” Experts on the work of Soyinka are baffled by this injunction and wonder openly what he was banging on about? What is Soyinka trying to hide, asked Anthony Kwame Appiah? He was trying to reveal something, in my own opinion.

To repeat, I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. In that novel, he mocked the archeologists for poking around in search of fossilised bones while fresh blood flowed like river Niger in the country and they did not seem to be bothered. He also challenged the sociologists who came with ‘erudite irrelevances’ about marriage and divorce but refused to join him in opposing a genocidal war. The novel depicts the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as a phrase-monger who failed to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rallied in support of the genocidal military dictatorship, rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war. To suggest that the novel was about the clash of cultures was a strategy to condition the mentality of Nigerian intellectuals towards the acceptance of the propaganda that the Igbo who led the struggle for decolonisation were primitive tribalists, perhaps because they had no chiefs, while the ethnic groups that ganged up against them were more civilized because they were monarchical, according to the ideologues of colonial domination, such as the Oxford colonial anthropologist, Margery Perham, who advised the military dictators to impose chiefs on the radically democratic Igbo in order to control them better. Walter Rodney also observed that to call the genocide against the Igbo a tribal war would be to call Shell BP an African tribe (along with the Labour Party government of the UK and the Soviet Union that generously supplied the weapons of mass destruction). Ikenna Nzimiro argued that the Marxists in Biafra were engaged in class struggles while the Marxist in Nigeria were engaged in national defencism. 

The ‘threnodic essence’ of the play refers to funeral songs in Greek tragedies and I believe that Soyinka was inviting the producers of the play to imagine a national mourning for the 3.1 million killed in Biafra that the country has refused to mourn. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo had been calling for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be recognised by the Nigerian government as part of the atonement.

In the final paragraph of the Author’s Note, Soyinka observes that an alternative structuralist interpretation of the play is to see it as a cruel joke on the British colonial District Officer. He quickly dismisses such a reading as distasteful and adds that he deliberately avoided writing dialogue or scenes that would support such a misinterpretation. He dictates that “No attempt should be made in production to suggest it’. This sounds like an angry response to critics who choose to misread his works for ideological reasons while ignoring the concrete conditions that his works address. 

A prominent Marxist literary theorist that I admire, Biodun Jeyifo, who is an expert on the work of Soyinka, was invited by the BBC to write about any work of literature that he saw as being representative of global culture. He chose to write beautifully about Death and the King’s Horseman as an anti-colonial play that tries to subvert the use of the Queen’s English by creating a ‘future’ tradition of the Anglophone that is more figurative than the English language. He invoked the work of Marxist Cultural Studies by Raymond Williams (but without mentioning the more relevant anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist work by Stuart Hall) to suggest that the other Englishes around the world serve to subvert the domination of the world by standard English. 

I pointed out that Jeyifo's interpretation is too superficial for a Marxist because the ‘thredonic essence’ of the play is not to show that Africans can speak English better than the English. I suggested that a Cultural Studies reading of the play would not have focused exclusively on the beautiful writing or language of the play but would have tried to see the challenge to monarchism and oppressive traditions in the play. Jeyifo told me privately that I should go and read the play again because it is not against the monarchy or against ritual suicide but simply against the colonial domination of African cultures. Moreover, the melodrama about the coveting of the virgin bride of another man as a right in Esin Oba's rites of passage to ritual suicide appears to be the ridiculing by Soyinka of the rapaciousness of the genoicidist troops that forcibly took underage girls and the wives of other men and claimed them as 'wives', as Achebe recounted in There Was A Country, and as Boko Haram continues to do. I admitted that I could be accused of misreading the play but I called it a strategic misreading and wondered if it is possible for an expert on the work of Soyinka to misread it? Soyinka seems to think so and that is the whole point of his detailed telling off of the experts in his Author’s Note.

I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Contrary to the claim that Death and the King’s Horseman is only an anti-colonial play, Soyinka concludes his Author’s Note by stating that “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.” To him, the central ‘confrontation’ or conflict that he tried to resolve in the play was ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it played out in the world of “the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passages which links all: transition.” Soyinka was puzzling about the metaphysics of the Yoruba worldview that made it possible for the best educated characters in the play to be the ones who cheered most vociferously for Elesin to abide by the tradition that expected him to kill himself in honour of a dead king. Similarly, Soyinka was wondering why the best educated Yoruba were the cheer-leaders of the genocide against the Igbo. 

Soyinka advised producers to try and capture this tragedy by using music to represent the macabre dance to the “music from the abyss” by the intellectuals who danced while millions were being slaughtered in Biafra. In his Talakawa column, Jeyifo once wrote that while blood was flowing in Biafra, (1967-1970) he led his secret Pyrates fraternity, that Soyinka founded as a student at the University of Ibadan, in chanting, 'Give us this day, give us this day, our daily manya' (wine in Igbo). Were the elites drunk on power during the genocide? The play symbolizes this with the 'Not I bird' and the hunter who consumed many gallons of manya before trying to kill the innocent Not I bird.

I am not an expert in dramaturgy but I love the work of Soyinka. I cited his essay on Neo-Tarzanism in my criticism of the film, Black Panther, which I called an example of neo-Tarzanism. Following the serialisation of the criticism, I was invited by Assumpta Oturu to the KPFK public radio in Los Angeles to discuss the film with an Ethiopian publisher and an African American director of the Pan African Film Festival. During the discussion, the Ethiopian said that we should not condemn the presence of monarchies in Africa because there were popular emperors such as Mansa Musa and Haile Selessie who were admired by Africans and by the African diaspora. The director of the Pan African Film Festival questioned my reference to Soyinka because he saw Death and the King’s Horseman as an indication that Soyinka was a monarchist who supported even the tradition that the horseman should commit suicide to honour the dead king. 

As Killmonger asked derisively in the film, I asked, “This is your king?” Why must African brothers be expected to fight to the death to determine who should be the next king when we can just hold elections to select our leaders with term limits? I stated that Soyinka used that play and almost every play of his to undermine the institution of the monarchy and call for democracy, which he is on record as admiring in Igbo culture. He tried to spare the life of the horseman in the play and his other tragedies – Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, King Babu; his novels, his poetry and his memoirs all support my interpretation of his anti-monarchical orientation. Since the experts who have studied his work have focused almost exclusively on the structuralism, I propose to offer a post-structuralist or deconstruction radicalisation of his body of work to show that the tragedy of state violence, especially against the Igbo, is at the centre of the conflicts that he has been trying to resolve. Just as the genocidal war was waged without a cease fire for humanitarian interventions, the author coincidentally instructs on page 8 of Death and the King’s Horseman that ‘The play should run without an interval.’

I agree with critics who will charge that I am misreading Soyinka here. If so, I will admit to a strategic misreading that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial. Sociologists approach the work of writers by taking into consideration, the context of the private and the public lives of the authors, whereas literary theorists may concentrate exclusively on the technical, language, or structural aspects of the script as instructed by T.S. Eliot in his foundational essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. 

To reiterate, what I am offering is a sociology of literary interpretation of Soyinka and I am certain that the rebel in him may force him to disagree with my interpretation and award me a national illiteracy prize. I am not contending that all existing interpretations of Soyinka are wrong. I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Biko Agozino is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in Virginia Tech, USA.

Originally published in massliteracy.blogspot.com. Republished as a tribute on the passing of Biodun Jeyifo at the age of 80 years.

Every Month Is Black History Month

 

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Remember contributions every month, not just one

Biko Agozino, guest columnist Feb 4, 2010 Updated Jan 19, 2017  0

Black History Month is every month because there is no month without a significant black history event.

The question of whether one month is enough to celebrate black history is possible today because of the success of activist scholars such as Carter G. Woodson, who started it as the Negro History Week in 1926. He chose the week in February that marks both the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln to honor their contributions to the abolition of slavery. From one week to one month is a leap that some may not have imagined possible when Woodson was starting the series because back then, otherwise learned scholars still believed the misinformation from philosophers such as Hegel that African people made no significant contribution to history.

It is good to know that the Collegiate Times is asking the rhetorical question whether one month is enough to celebrate the immense contributions of Africans to history. Such a question suggests that there is a genuine desire on the part of students to learn more about Africana people and so they wonder whether one month would be adequate to learn all that they need to know. In a sense, the question suggests that the students already hypothesize that every month is Black History Month.

This is a healthy thirst for knowledge that a program such as our Africana Studies Program in the Department of Sociology is here to satisfy with courses on subjects such as Introduction to African American Studies, Introduction to African Studies, African American History, The Black Woman in America, African and Caribbean Literature, The Black Church in America, Race and Social Policy, Special Topics, Africana Contributions to Science and Technology, Africana Research Methods, etc.

Students who take five such courses would qualify for a Minor in Africana studies. Such students could demonstrate diversity contents in the education received here at Tech, making employers look more favorably at them and equipping them with the diversity imagination that they would need to go into business for themselves if they choose.

In other words, people should not treat Black History Month events as rituals to be engaged in once a year but as a reminder of the immense contributions that people of African descent have made and continue to make to world history. A skeptic might wonder why we still need to celebrate a Black History Month if every month is indeed Black History Month. Such skepticism can be answered in two ways.

First, Black History Month is an African-American gift to the world that has since been internationalized following its adoption by Canada and the U.K. This is something for all Americans to be proud of — an innovation of theirs is becoming a truly international phenomenon. Someday, it may become a global event across the entire world.

Second, following the success of Black History Month, other groups have also innovated their specialized history months as opportunities to teach the immense contributions of other racial and ethnic groups to civilization and the enduring problems that others still face in an unequal world.

Such spin-offs serve to reassure people of African descent that the commemoration of history by people who were marginalized for a long time — and whose contributions were denied or denigrated — remains a worthwhile endeavor especially given that racial and gender inequalities still persist in addition to problems of poverty that tend to conceal the huge sacrifices and struggles that the marginalized have gone, and are still going, through.

The cost that the world paid for the ignorant propaganda that black men and black women made no significant contributions to civilization was that such false notions were used to support systems of racial, gender and class exclusion, oppression and exploitation that caused the world so much grief and also denied the world the greater contributions that many gifted people from the Africana community could have made for the betterment of all.

For instance, so many American students today are getting the opportunity to go to universities and better themselves; such opportunities were reserved for the rich until former enslaved Africans started demanding public funds to be spent on public higher education for the befit of all Americans.

According to W.E.B. Du Bois, this demand for land and learning by the Freedmen’s Associations resulted in the public universities that are responsible for the education of a lot of American college students today who could not have afforded the exorbitant costs of private colleges. Although there was a lot of opposition to this demand for publicly funded institutions of higher learning during the era of Black Reconstruction post Civil War, it is now obvious that public higher education does not benefit only black students.

Finally, all human beings descended from Africa and so the celebration of Black History Month should be supported by all as an opportunity to learn more about our common heritage. We all should resolve to adhere to the principles of community by avoiding hateful and harmful conducts that are the result of prejudice and ignorance. We should resolve that we will strive to study Black history as part of world history instead of clinging to the false notion that some people have not made significant contributions to civilization. Black History Month is not just for black people, it is for everyone and it is not just a single month, it is every month.

https://www.collegiatetimes.com/opinion/remember-contributions-every-month-not-just-one/article_c261d7f3-d257-5514-8970-776323b72b59.html