PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Greg Thomas

“One of the first objectives [of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program] was to ‘prevent the rise of a Mau Mau rebellion in the U.S.’”

-- Dhoruba Bin Wahad, “War Within”

“Peep tha math/Mau Mau’s be about land and freedom/Reparations and apologies/For Africa to America odysseys/Guerilla-type tactics/On socialistic fallacies...”

-- Hard Blak, “Blak Iz Blak”

Yeah. Here is that issue on our music, a nice slice of it anyway. There’s Hip-Hop, Calypso & Dancehall, with a lil’ bit of Afrobeat thrown in. Long Live Fela! We’ll call this one “Mau Mau Music.” The reason is simple.

The Mau Mau or Kenya Land and Freedom Army launched into our consciousness in the 1950s. They remain identified with opposition to “white-supremacy,” reclamation of land and affirmation of Afrika for Afrikans. They waged war against white settlers, fake leaders and colonial stooges alike. At home and abroad, they were the symbol and the reality of true and total liberation. The significance of their realism for the civil rights establishment of the U.S., apart from the Brutish/British empire, was captured in the persona and politics of Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Omowale.

While white media internationally denounced Mau Mau as “savage” and “bestial” for violence always condoned in the case of colonialists, Malcolm X Speaks: “Don’t you ever be ashamed of the Mau Mau! They’re not to be ashamed of. They are to be proud of. Those brothers were freedom fighters. Not only brothers, there were sisters over there. I met a lot of them. They’re brave. They hug you and kiss you—glad to see you. In fact, if they were over here, they’d get this problem straightened up just like that” (Pathfinder, 1989: 133-34). Brother Minister carries on: “In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau” (106).

So, for many of us, “Mau Mau” represents resistance, rebellion and revolution to the fullest, in the ecstatic extreme. Too many politicos, however, are one-dimensional in their politics. They can’t see resistance, rebellion or revolution, ironically, outside of rather mainstream political expressions. Politics, for them, often means voting in Babylon and middle-class social “values.” Like others, they see no resistance, rebellion and revolution to be had in matters of sex or eroticism, creative arts, spirit, styles of dress, speech or language as well as guerilla struggle in arms, especially when had among the masses. They can’t see all of the above as one great guerilla whole. Yet this is what PROUD FLESH will mean by Mau Mau, and “Mau Mau Music.” Love Live Mau Mau!

Half a century later, critics of Black music stay acting like they want some Mau Mau music. But they don’t really want none. None at all! And nothing in their little status-quo lives suggests otherwise. Many whine about there being no Public Enemy around Hip-Hop today, for example. But most never bought Public Enemy “back then” and they don’t buy dead prez, for instance, now. Many consume regular, un-revolutionary R&B instead. We don’t buy their critical routine. They stand for nothing outright, except to denounce Black youth in Dixie-like tones. We know they’ve been trained to hate Black people, themselves, young Black people in particular and most particularly young Black people who don’t buy into white bourgeois society wholesale. How safe it is to go after youth instead of power. For these critics, it ain’t even about Hip-Hop, or Calypso, or Dancehall (or Afrobeat). It’s about shame, their master emotion.

Look at Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). You’d think some Malcolm would jump off from the title. However, X is exploited again to make a bougie point. Lee claims to attack some “New Millennium Minstrel Show,” but Black popular culture, especially Hip-Hop, bears the brunt of the attack at least as much as the white music industry and white society at large. The on-screen rap crew known as “The Mau Mau’s” should be part of the solution here if “white-supremacy,” not the Black masses, were seen as the real culprit. Bamboozled dubs them “pseudo-revolutionaries” even though their revolutionism is by far the most radical thing the film has to offer. Lee never shows us any Mau Mau without putting malt liquor in their hands. The script shouts to them, “Y’all are embarrassing. Y’all ignorant.” When they perform “ Blak Iz Blak” in an audition that disrupts any possibility of “minstrelsy,” the main character responds: “Needless to say, ‘The Mau Mau’s’ did not fit into our plan...This is frightening…I don’t want anything to do with anything Black for at least a week.” So much for his criticism of white entertainment. When a Hip-Hop Mau Mau comes on the scene, the middle-class critique of media is completely shown up. The critic is more threatened by the Black majority than disturbed by white racism. During promotional interviews for Bamboozled, both filmmaker Lee and “conscious rapper” Mos Def (who plays Mau Mau, “Big Black Africa”) mocked the rap crew and dismissed them as “naïve” or misguided. They are therefore comic relief for Lee, who must make “minstrels” out of them (“savage” and “bestial”) even though this is supposedly an “anti-minstrel” film. Yet only these Mau Mau’s put an end to “minstrelsy” through action. They abduct the star “minstrel” and execute him, broadcasting his execution live and in living color. Lee’s script goes on to execute the main Black character after massacring our Mau Mau via white police violence. The white puppeteers are left alone, tellingly. Lee can kill no white characters at the hands of Black folk, evidently, and get his film made in Hollywood; or perhaps he has the desire to kill off Black people and preserve white life. In any case, in the end, it is the filmmaker who comes off as the “minstrel” since it is he who makes entertainment safe for “white-supremacy.” He is not Mau Mau by any means. Typical of the critic of Hip-Hop and Black popular culture globally, this critic fears the Black masses and our music far more than racism or empire.

Malcolm X made his identification with Mau Mau plain, of course, Lee’s second major distortion of him notwithstanding. “Don’t you ever be ashamed of the Mau Mau!” For X, they are not “embarrassing” or “ignorant,” as they are for middle-class Blacks or Browns. This goes for music as well as politics. As a revolutionary organizer, Malcolm is famous for saying that in a revolution, “you ain’t singin’, you swingin’.” On December 20, 1964, nonetheless, he introduced Fannie Lou Hammer and some Freedom Singers “At the Audubon,” with these words: “I’m not one who goes for ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I just don’t believe we’re going to overcome, singing. If you’re going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I’m with you. But I’m not for singing that doesn’t at the same time tell you how to get something to use after you get through singing.” (Malcolm X Speaks, 135). How many critics of Hip-Hop, Calypso and Dancehall are packing a Mau Mau-type of heat? Long Live Malcolm X!

His love for Chinese Revolution is renown, and it comes back to us today in rhyme: “The Chinese Communist Party will repackage Mao Tse-tung as a rap artist, in an appeal to Chinese youth” (http://www.allhiphop.com/hiphopnews/?ID=2615). Mao Mao Music, too, then? No doubt.

Mau Mau music in Malcolm as opposed to Bamboozled must bust lyrical guns against status-quo politics, and white middle-class “morals and manners.” It is high time we see and hear how the well-mannered moralism of this status-quo is political indeed; it is politics itself. It was “fine ladies and gentlemen,” “good men and women,” with “class,” distinction” and “taste,” who manufactured our enslavement and colonization; and who continue it as we speak. Their sensibility and system of “values” must be Mau Mau’d like everything else. So we can revel further, ever more effectively in resistance, rebellion and revolution in matters of sex or eroticism, creative arts, spirit, styles of dress, speech or language as well as guerilla struggle in arms, especially among the masses.

Where it already exists, Mau Mau music requires commercial appropriation and distortion by the enemies of Mau Mau struggle. Pseudo-critics of our music always miss the point. The appropriation or distortion is a sign of its Mau Mau history and potential. Showing much love for Calypso in particular throughout Ready for Revolution, Kwame Ture remarks: “Today, so I’m told, the steel bands come lavishly attired and equipped courtesy of their multinational corporate sponsors, the marriages of capitalism and local culture. The Shell Oil Invaders and Mobil Corp’s Casa Blanca? Somehow it doesn’t ring quite right, given the militant history out of which the bands evolved” (Scribner, 2003: 41). Now, why should we denounce Calypso instead of its partial domestication, those forces responsible for any distortion and domestication? Don’t we see the same arguments play out over Dancehall? Still, the criticisms come typically from persons more versed in colonial bourgeois sensibilities than in Mau Mau. Long Live Kwame Ture!

Tired critics are rarely to be found when it’s time to take on the latest Tarzan or Elvis in Hip-Hop, for example, even when they use our music to broadcast their hatred for us. Their musical racism often becomes another excuse to criticize Black people some more, for making such rowdy, raunchy music in the first place. Tarzan and the settlers swing on. The problem remains the same, from one context to another.

Powerfully, Sylvia Wynter unpacks what she terms “the minstrel stereotype” in “Sambo and Minstrel” (Social Text 1, 1979: 149-56). She does not accept white bourgeois society’s definition of “minstrelsy” and then force it upon Black people’s mass culture, as does the “Black” pseudo-bourgeoisie. It routinely frames a discussion of “Hip-Hop and stereotypes” as if Hip-Hop is responsible for anti-Black stereotypes; as if anti-Black stereotypes didn’t exist until Hip-Hop; as if anti-Black racism is actually rational, logical; as if white bourgeois assimilation is the solution; and as if Black people en masse are the real problem! Wynter writes, by contrast: “The American Minstrel show is a direct development out of the popular folk cultures of Africa” (155). The “minstrel” had to be stereotyped as a “minstrel” to promote white and middle-class models of identity and society for “America,” slave state and settler colony. The popular folk cultures of Afrika in Diaspora, Black and fundamentally anti-bourgeois, continue to provide a “counter-culture” which, according to Wynter, provides “forms of social revolution needed in America [and beyond] today” (156). The minstrel stereotype is never to be confused with the Mau Mau, musically or otherwise. Yo! Long Live Sylvia Wynter!

Toward Mau Mau, from the past: Long Live Hip-Hop! Long Live Calypso! Long Live Dancehall! Long Live Afrobeat & Hip-Life! Long Live Black Folk, Here and There! Afrikans, at home and abroad…

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 3, 2004