In Black America; Heman Sweatt Symposium: Beyond Kente: From Ghana To Texas

Subscribe for more videos! From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. This year I went to talk with Professor with President Verdal and I took my wish list with me and one of the things I wished for was an exchange with an African University, to which he said, oh, of course, that makes sense.

That was at 9 o'clock on a Friday morning. At 4.30 on that same Friday, the Minister of Culture from Ghana, Dr. Ben Abdullah, went to see President Verdal and he had with him a letter from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana at Legon, suggesting that there be an exchange, to which President Verdal said, well, of course. And several days later, I learned that the President and the other executive officers of the University had decided that we would have an exchange with the University of Ghana at Legon. And as of today, the agreement has been signed and we have an exchange with the University of Ghana at Legon. Dr. Sheila Walker, Director of the University of Texas at Austin, Center for African and Afro-American Studies. Culture and political links between Africa and the Americas with an emphasis on the Republic of Ghana was the focus of this year's seventh annual Human Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights, held this past March at the University. In years past, the symposium's focus on the civil rights movement in its country, but now addresses broad issues of the African and African-American struggle for freedom and

equality around the globe. The Human Sweat Symposium this year sent around the presence of Ghanaian drama and dance companies and scholars as part of a three-greet culture exchange program. I'm John E. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, the Human Sweat Symposium, beyond Kentay, from Ghana to Texas, a culture continuum in Black America. I'm pleased to welcome you to this seventh annual Human Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights, a brief summary of the significance of the persistence of human-marrying sweat in the life of this university and to equal educational opportunity at all levels of the American educational enterprise is printed in your program. I would add only to that summary, my own perception of human sweat as a man of great courage and dignity who exemplified the irrepressibility of the human spirit, who through our study of his example continues to teach us that the American value of inalienable rights is

not limited in any sense by race or creed or color. The self-evident truth of inalienable human rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence has never been fully realized in America. It remains, however, an ideal that we must strive for constantly challenging us in the struggle like that of human sweat. Dr. Robert Emberdaw, president of the University of Texas at Austin. In 1946, he and him sweat applied for admission to the University of Texas at Austin Law School, what was denied admission on the basis of his race. A four-year court battle ensued, culminating in a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and sweat v. Painter, thereby making him and him sweat the first African-American admitted to the law school at the University of Texas at Austin. This year's human sweat symposium on civil rights reflects the culture connection between Africa and the Americas.

Those attending the symposium receives valuable information on Africa and its influence on African-American culture in this country. The symposium also provided an opportunity to understand the U.S. civil rights movement within the context of a larger African and African-American freedom struggle of the 20th century. The following program is highlight of the first day of the symposium. Dr. Muhammad Ben Abdullah, currently minister of culture of Ghana, is a graduate of the University of Texas, and he thought that he should bring more Ghanaians to Texas, and here we are. The Ghanaians are here. He did this in conjunction with faculty member in the School of Performing Arts, and he would like to bring a few remarks this evening concerning the relationship between culture and politics, and I would like to welcome Dr. Ben Abdullah and ask him to speak to us a bit. Mr. President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, for the first time I really found myself at a loss for words, I'm going to try and be very brief because I know that you are

here to listen to some very important scholarly presentations. As I look at the program for this event, one thing that is very clear is the attractive nature of the cover of this program. The painting, the famous Kente cloth, which is of Ghanaian origin, Kente has come to mean a lot, not just to Ghanaians, not just to Africans on the continent, but Africans all over the world. In fact, Kente is produced in a very large scale manner in the Far East, in Taiwan, in Korea, in other places, in print form.

What you see hanging there is a real hand woven Kente, and on the back of your program it says, beyond Kente, and that's what I would like to draw your attention to, and I would ask you to toss in your minds in the course of this symposium. I have studied the development of this struggle of African people and people of African descent from the very beginning of mankind until the present. In Ghana, we have a combination of symbols that are used by the Akhan people to communicate great wisdom and ideas.

One of these symbols is a bird that has turned its head backward, picking its own tail, and is now come to be famous as the Sankofa bird. Sankofa in the Akhan language means go back and get it. It comes from a proverb of the Akhan people, and the proverb says, when you forget something, it is not wrong to go back and pick it up. One in the history of the development of Western civilization, things got blurred. What happened before Western civilization could really stand again and move forward was when Europe began to put into practice the wisdom of the Sankofa, which was to go back and get it.

When Europe decided in those days to go all the way back to Greek scholarship and Roman scholarship in order to get itself back on course, and that was the beginning of what has now come to be called modern world civilization. The roots of the Latin and Greek civilization that they went to pick up were also deeply buried in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Kush, Nubia, Ethiopia, Meroi, and so many others that are all over the black continent and other continents. I crave your indulgence for taking you on this little journey. What I mean is that the restlessness that characterise the people of the African diaspora

is not just some accidental phenomenon. It is something that is deeply rooted in the human psyche. When you approach a whole generation of people from their roots and place them somewhere else under conditions that are unacceptable, that are inhumane and force them over a period of time to lose that most important horse of culture, language, force them to lose that very important repository of culture, religion, music, dance, art, their whole traditional systems and leave that person empty in those areas.

What you are calling for is not any sort of lunacy. What is baffling is why we are worried, why we wonder why those convulsions that have plagued those societies in which the descendants of this leave find themselves. For us, in this exchange, in this program, there is a very important lesson. There is a very important benefit, whether we like it or not. In this great country of yours, live more Africans than in that small country of us called Ghana. If you think of it that way, it is very important that those souls that live in this country

that are no less citizens of this country than any Irishman, Frenchman, German, Spaniard, you name it, whose great-great-great grandparents came to live here and bestowed upon him or her citizenship of this country. For us, in ease in their pain, in finding solace for their souls, lies the salvation of this country. This country is very important for us and we believe for the entire world what happens to this country will have serious repercussions to all of us.

So if we are interested in preserving the peace, the harmony and the beauty of this country, the potentials of the development of this country into the dream that was dreamed by the founding fathers of this country, for us it is not something we wish on you alone, but it is something that we wish on the entire world because in the fulfillment of the dreams of this country, lies great possibilities for the dreams of human civilization. I would like to hope that I contrary to my colleague here that the human-sweet symposium on civil rights is still very relevant.

I would like to stretch the definition of civil rights to include our rights to create a world that would reflect this beautiful piece of cloth that hang there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Venabella. When we were trying to put this symposium together, we had a given, which was the relationship between Ghana and the United States, and one of the issues was what is the relationship between Ghana and the United States, and had the African country been Botswana. It would have been somewhat difficult to decide what the relationship is, and I'm just choosing Botswana as an example.

But with Ghana, it wasn't really very difficult because there are natural relationships. The most fundamental relationship is people. One of the places from which Africans were taken in Africa was the area that is now known as Ghana, and ways in which we can know that are kinds of cultural forms. It still exists in the United States. It's a don't exist intentionally that just exists because they didn't go away. One of the things that you might notice is that two of the members of the Ghanaian delegation are called Kofi. That's not because they don't have very many names in Ghana. That's because Kofi means something specific. To me, Kofi is meaningful because I went to school with somebody named Kofi, William Kofi, and somebody else Kofi, John Kofi, I think their name was. If you look back in African-American history, the first back to African-Africa movement was in the early 1700s, and it was led by Peter, I believe his first name was Kofi. Kofi is a name that represents the day of birth, and so anybody who's called Kofi, Kofi, and Ghana, was born on a Friday.

Those kinds of cultural carryovers have remained among the African-American population just because they didn't go away in spite of all efforts to eliminate African culture. And if we look, there are other elements of specifically a con culture, other elements of various other African cultures in the United States. So it wasn't that difficult to think, why Ghana? How Ghana to Texas? It's not really contrived. It's real. When I was thinking of who would be a good person to talk about the issue of Ghana and Texas, the first person who came to my mind was Ambassador Kofi O'Wooner. When thinking of Ghana and the United States, I had to think of Ambassador O'Wooner in his dual capacity, one as a major literary figure in Africa, poet and novelist whose most recent novel, Come the Voyager at Last, is about the relationship between Africa and Afro-American, about the return of an African-American to the African continent. And I thought of all of him also in his role as Ambassador from Ghana, not only to the United States, but earlier to essentially the rest of the African diaspora, who was recently Ambassador

to Cuba, prior to which he was Ambassador to the second largest African country in the world, which is Brazil. The United States is only the third after Nigeria. So without further ado, let me present Ambassador Kofi O'Wooner. I thank you very much, Professor Walker, for those very kind words. I wanted very much to spend a little time I have been told by the task mistress here that I have only 15 minutes, and I was wondering whether he knew where I was coming from, the United Nations. We never thought for 15 minutes. We hold forth a great length, and at the end of about five hours of peroration, if you got the sense of what we said, that you are a very lucky person. But that is part of the game of nations.

And I thought I would spend a little time talking about the United Nations and the place of Africa or the developing world in it. In affirmation of what I think is a task that we had signaled today that we will undertake, the collaboration between Texas and Ghana. It's an international task, and the only organization in the world today that is devoted to, in a larger framework, this task is a UN. I would like to begin by pointing out that the San Francisco charter which gave birth to the UN was conceived on the ash heap of one of the most devastating wars fought on our planet.

The horror of that war can be ultimately measured by the great scientific feat of the splitting of the atom and the detonation of its bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is my health view and I'm sure you shared with me that that feat was not accomplished in the pursuit of peaceful or beneficial goals. But before that war ended, the world, our world in the most recent recorded segment of human history has known over 500 years of depredation, wars and destruction. Why is measured in terms of human civilization is underwritten, is underwritten by a persistent account of human misery imposed invariably by those who developed and appropriated a persuasive and undisputable monopoly over violence.

I was startled recently by a casual remark by a panelist on the talk show discussing the militially appropriate subject of Western alienation, that is the West Europe and its allies, that this alienation or that the West and Europe through the course of that alienation was the first political culture to translate the notion of freedom into real terms. I agree almost instantly with a Earth-shaking notion that indeed the West gave meaning to the notion of freedom and however seized on reflection with a crushing sense of panic upon recognizing that this grand claim for historical attachment and addiction to freedom which many Western scholars make for the West somehow did not include me, a man of the South, a man of the Third World, a man of Africa.

If it were so, why was I at the very height of the so-called European Enlightenment and Christian party visited with so much suffering, degradation and genocidal enterprises? If it were so, why after so many centuries have elapsed since those dark days and even after we have, and I have, at the course of so much blood, freed ourselves from our freedom loving conquerors, why I ask, have we been consigned today to the dustbin of history in the matters of global resource allocation, global distribution of accumulated wealth, much of it produced by my sweat or even in the small matter of our rights as citizens of a free and an equal world? We hear today a lot about a new world order.

The concept comes to signify an important fixture in the foreign policy constructs of Western industrialized nations. With reference to the end of the East-West divide, the idea is used in a general sense to mean the opening of a new chapter in international cooperation wherein the fundamental principles of democracy is essentially conforming to a long-held Western liberal democratic concept and the rule of law will reign. The former communist enemies of this magnificent concept and its historical adherence it is deemed will contract the democratic virus, adopt market-oriented economic policies and enthrone multi-partisan political practices. So also it is said, will the former colonies who have made such an unmitigated mess of their independence and in the course equally made an use of themselves all over the place?

When Mr. Bush picked up the concept in the last but two general assembly sessions, it had significantly come to signify a triumphant capitalist ideology and almost millennial expression of confidence in a superb capacity of Western liberal democracy, cocooned by a convenient amnesia of its predatory global economic conduct, a conduct that has not changed much since the first discovery ships left Europe and since the inhuman trading slaves was launched by the kidnapped gangs on the west coast of Africa. This triumphantism that has come to accompany Western perceptions of our global reality hides my good friends, the grim realities of the conditions of the Eswile colonies, of a great part of Africa.

Set starkly against the backdrop of this reality, we make bold to state that a specter is talking the world. The Iron Curtain has given way to the poverty curtain. The devastation that the latter is causing makes the former's impact on the human spirit pale into historical insignificance. By nightfall, my good friends, today over 40,000 children will die in the ex colonies mainly from intestinal disorders. More million people will die by the end of this year from diarrhoea ailments. 1.3 billion people have no access to safe drinking water. 2.3 billion live without access to sanitation services. Yet, the rich democratic north, comprising 25% of the world's population, earns 85% of the world's income.

The global gulf between the rich and the poor surfaces most dramatically when we look at the consumption pattern of a certain democratic and free and advanced nation. With 5% of the world's population, that country consumes 25% of the fossil fuel burned annually. 33% of the world's paper, 24% of the world's aluminum, 13% of the fertilizer, a child born into a typical middle-class home in that country, will in his or her lifetime consume 120,000 paper grocery bags, drive more than 700,000 miles in automobiles, and burn 28,000 gallons of gasoline in doing so. That same person in that country, in his or her lifetime, will wear and discard 250 shirts or upper garments, 115 pairs of shoes, purchase 12 automobiles, and throw away 110,250 pounds

of trash. And in that one country, which I must tell you, is being emulated by not only others in Europe and elsewhere, but also in my country, that country promotes a consumer culture as the most desirable component of a democratic world. I'm sure by now you know which country I'm talking of. The new world is predicated on the premise that the world is now rid of an unmitigated evil, that indeed the Cold War with its rattling nuclear arsenals is over, and the world is united at last in the poet's word by a tumult of a mighty harmony. But there is something simple-minded or suspiciously deceptive about this picture. Has the world really become safer because communism is dead?

How many conventional arms have crossed how many borders since Mr. Yeltsin mounted the barricades on the streets of Moscow? We hear he's getting ready to mount another barricade. How close did we get to a catastrophic global war in the Gulf? In the palpable execution of a just crusade against a brutal and a well-ammed dictator equipped by almost all the so-called democracies, when he invaded a sister country that happened to have petroleum instead of bananas for sale? Dr. Kofiwana, Ghana's ambassador to the United Nations, speaking at the 7th annual Hemenswet Symposium on Civil Rights. If you have a question or comment or suggestions to future in-black America programs, write us. Views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for in-black America's technical producer David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson Jr., please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in-black America

cassettes. Unicorn Horn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in-black America cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson Jr., join me this week on in-black America. I agree almost instantly with a shaking notion that indeed the West gave meaning to the notion of freedom.

I'm however seized on reflection with a crushing sense of panic. John Kentay, from Ghana to Texas, a culture continuum this week on in-black America.