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::::When Black African children see a woman like OPRAH building schools in S. AFrica and bringing BLACK DOLLS with nappy hair to S. African children (she has a doll company that mass produces them)------they are being shown an image of Africa being saved by its OWN BLACK HAND. This is very important. If Whites really want to help Africa---they should finance BLACKS to bring these "gifts" as Nuruddin Farah calls them back to Africa. :::: I doubt that his message is that simplistic. And besides, his wife Amina Mama, chair of the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Cape Town, presumably where he now lives, is the wrong color for you anyway (and ABM, certainly). In fact, the University itself, the whole city of Cape Town, and the entire Cape Province (which at one time was, I believe, about 85 percent "coloured") are the wrong color for y'all. So don't go there. I remember that the great Olympic sprinter, Frankie Fredericks, who's from Namibia in Southern Africa and went to school at Brigham Young, also attended the University of the Western Cape, which, in order to attend, one had to be "coloured," which, in practical terms would make him a few shades darker, last time I looked, than Maurice Greene -- whose autograph, I must confess, I got at one of the first NYC Marathons I ran (but only because he was sitting next to Susie Favor Hamilton who was signing laminated 8x10 glossies, LOL she's so cool). Oh, and more possible evidence for Oprah being Zulu : ) is that she ran the Marine Corp Marathon in '94, in a respectable time as I remember, I think it was under 4 and a half hours, all the more impressive because her body type, like mine, is all wrong for distance running. And I'm no scientist but I don't believe there is a DNA test that identifies ethnicity, despite Christopher Munnion's chuckle piece in the Telegraph. The last I heard The Human Genome Project had just about solved the genetic code for Down's Syndrome and other things and were starting to amass a literature on the genetics of skin color, albeit incomplete, however, it wasn't designed to tell us anything about human differences, especially as specific as ethnicity. After all, what is ethnicity anyway, you mean there's a DNA test that can identify Tegla Laroupe as an indigene of a Pokot rather than a Nandi area of the Rift Valley? Which is all it is anyway, isn't it? And besides, the scientists on the human genome project aren't interested in human differences, they're just trying to get the human baseline. I mean, we all watched the OJ Simpson trial and heard the results of DNA tests on his blood. As I remember, there were statistical probabilities whether it was his blood, not whether he derives from a particular ethnic group in Africa. It's scientific myth and if not, is only good for one generation anyway. I'm half hunter, half gatherer. In Nurddin Farah's latest novel, the main character returns to Somalia against the wishes of his American wife and children. She calls Somalia "a jerkwater of a ruin" and he speaks to them by telephone throughout the novel, but never describing them by ethnicity or color, and without a signifier -- such as a name or a bit of slang -- which would identify them as anything other than "American." That is his choice, not mine. I may have missed something, but I don't think so. Once there, he reunites with his former friends, including Seamus, the Irish friend from his and his Somali best friend's college days in Italy. I don't remember the author identifying Seamus as "white," although he might of, I'm less sure than in the case of the American wife and daughters. In Seamus's case, the main character was anxiously anticipating the language in which Seamus would address him (because Italian was the language they spoke before Jeeblah moved to the States). Seamus addresses him in English, which is a nice part of the book. There's another UN worker who is described only as an "Italian-American." The 18 US Army Rangers who died in the clashes with the warlord he calls "Strongman South," are not described by color or ethnicity. http://web.uct.ac.za/org/agi/staff.htm She looks like the exact color of some of the women in Jean Toomer's "Cane" y'all are in denial about. And she's like really, really, smart : ) |