Things That Catch My Eye!!

This June, Colombia passed a law to enhance its ability to trace cattle that have been grazing on illegally deforested land. Officials will be able to implement stricter registration and monitoring in deforestation hot spots and within the next two years all parts of the cattle and meat-packing industries will be required to implement due diligence measures.

Zeinab Badawi - An African History of Africa

John Parker - Great Kingdoms of Africa

Kellie Carter Jackson - We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

Dipo Faloyin - Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent

DK Definitive Visual Histories - Africa: The Definitive Visual History of a Continent

Susan Williams - White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa

Cheikh Anta Diop - Precolonial Black Africa

Walter Rodney - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Ivan Van Sertima - They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Journal of African Civilizations)

How is it that we had not been taught — that it had not been a standard feature of American history— that Memorial Day, this most American of holidays, the unofficial start of summer, a day when the most observant among us will go to the cemetery and leave flowers on headstones or hang a flag in honor of those who sacrificed their lives in the military, actually began with African-Americans in the ashes of the Civil War?

The holiday we now call Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, where thousands of newly freed slaves marched, prayed and laid flowers in gratitude to the fallen Union soldiers whose sacrifice had helped secure their freedom.

That spring, after the Confederates had evacuated Charleston at the end of the war, black residents cleaned the site of a mass grave of 257 Union soldiers. The laborers sifted through the rubble, dug out the bodies and gave the soldiers a proper burial.

That May 1, nearly 10,000 souls, most of them formerly enslaved black people, joined by union troops and northern white missionaries, gathered to dedicate the burial ground and to honor the fallen. Among the former slaves were 3,000 black children, like those pictured here, who would become among the first African-Americans permitted to attend school in the South with the opening of Freedom Schools.

The people sang hymns and spirituals and prayed. They laid flowers on the gravesite. The New York Tribune described it as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

In their reverence for the ideals of liberty, they claimed their right to a country that they and their ancestors had built without pay. But this exclusion from the American narrative meant that few people over succeeding generations realized their contribution to something so indelible.

THERE IS NO "DEMON" IN TRADITIONAL SPIRITUALITY

One of the greatest misconceptions about African spirituality is the attempt to explain it through foreign spiritual frameworks.

In many traditional African cultures, there is no exact equivalent to the Christian concept of a demon a fallen being whose purpose is to oppose humanity and wage war against the Creator. African spirituality developed its own understanding of the unseen world long before the arrival of foreign religions.

The ancestors taught that existence is built upon relationships: the relationship between the living and the departed, between humanity and nature, between individuals and the community, and between the visible and invisible worlds.

When misfortune, confusion, or hardship appeared, the question was often not, "Which demon is responsible?" Instead, wisdom keepers would ask: What balance has been disturbed? What relationship has been neglected? What lesson is seeking attention?

This does not mean African spirituality denies the existence of harmful spiritual forces. Many traditions recognize disruptive energies, wandering spirits, spiritual pollution, and forces that bring disorder. However, these are generally not understood as demons in the way Abrahamic religions describe them.

It is rooted in the principle of harmony. A healthy life is one where the ancestors are honored, the community is respected, nature is protected, and one's conduct remains aligned with truth and responsibility.

The unseen world is not viewed as a battlefield between absolute good and absolute evil. Rather, it is understood as a living spiritual ecosystem where every action creates consequences and every imbalance seeks correction.