While in college, I read The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) and did not make much of it.  Recently, someone told me that Chinua Achebe, the famous Igbo writer, claimed that Olaudah is an Igbo. I asked him how Achebe came to this conclusion and he did not know.  I thought about it for a while and thought that Achebe is probably full of it. Why? Though I am an Igbo, I have a love-hate relationship with Igbos; I tend to be suspicious of whatever Igbos say.  I had concluded that…

By Onima Institute http://onimainstituteusa.org/OLAUDA.htm Olauda Equiano Was a Son of Etsako in Edo Land : In Today Nigeria, and Yes, He Was Out of Africa  A Rebuttal to Claims and Faulty Analyses Made by Two Eminent Scholars Here is an interesting argument about the true birth place of Olauda Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Below is our humble presentation which we believe stands to liquidate the claims that have been made by some eminent scholars which to me seem to amount to academic and intellectual dishonesty in this matter. Olauda Equiano was one of those taken away into slavery…

    “Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal poverty threshold but still do not have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses, according to a survey of government and industry data. The survey, released on Tuesday by the advocacy group Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), found that 45 percent of U.S. residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children, the group found.” November 23, 2011 Reuters http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29803.htm      As we experience…

The news is broken that Saif al-Islam, has been arrested in Libya without being brutally killed like other members of his family. The media have published gory and offensive images of the killing of his father and former Libyan leader, Muammar Ghaddafi without warning for discretion. Viewers including children have been treated to disgusting, sickening and barbaric display of how Gaddafi met his untimely death after he was brutalised, slapped, tortured, sodomized with a knife (gay-like) and shot with bullets. His body was later dragged on the road and kicked amid jeering crowd and cheering rebels. Those displays happened in…

I think the majority of Black men whom I speak with on a daily basis are not African American men.  I regularly interface, via phone and internet, with Nigerian, Ghanaian, Haitian, and Puerto Rican dark-skinned, thick lipped, and very well educated brothers.  This is in addition to the people I speak with on an ongoing basis over writing projects and publishing.  I don’t know how this happened that most of my professional male contacts are black but not Black.  But it has.  It’s probably something to do with me and how I prefer to keep things congenial yet formal and…