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The following is a excerpt from the chapter "Freedom Africa"
of the forthcoming book
FREEDOM AFRICA
My whole life I had been reading about and immersing myself in Africa.
I have been forever fascinated by and deeply interested in the history
of Africa, about the current problems of Africa, about the political
situation in Africa… long before I made my first trip there. I was
always in tune with Africa and I was always upset about the separation
of our people,
the separation of those people who are considered part of the African
Diaspora from the Motherland.
The terrible effect of colonialism was to separate our people, and it
was always very painful for me because I saw the similarities in us,
not the differences. My dad always said that we would never be free as
a people until Africa is free; that’s the only time we will be strong,
when Africa is strong. But as long as Africa was weak, we would
continue to be weak, and that’s why we must help to rebuild Africa,
because we’re all black people of the world and we owe that to our
Motherland. I wanted to create a work of music to show that the
African people are global people, that what we do and who we are comes
from our collective experience, from our African cultural memory. And
no matter where we are… whether we’re in the Fiji Islands, whether
we’re in Brazil, or Cuba, or the United States, we all come from the
same African family, going all the way back to the very first
civilization.
I wanted “Uhuru
Afrika” to be performed by African people not only from different
parts of the world, but also from different areas of music.
This idea had been in my head for years, and finally in the late
fifties it started coming together. I once met a great Somali poet
named Musa and he told me “the first thing that changes is the music,
the music changes and everything else follows the music. Where does
the music come from? The music comes from the universe, the music
comes from our ancestors; we don’t know where.” The music that we tend
to take as ours is really coming from the creator and it comes at
certain points to give people inspiration, to set a tone for certain
serious things that are going to happen in world history.
The late 1950s and early 1960s was a very interesting period because
everybody was so full of fire. The civil rights movement was blooming,
the black student movement in the south was growing, Paul Robeson,
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. were making great sense and great
strides towards raising our consciousness, and it was an incredible
period. There was all this movement of energy for freedom of black
people.
It was also a time when several African nations were declaring their
independence from colonization. I wanted to create a work dedicated to
Mother Africa. My father taught me at a very young age that I was an
African born in America, that I have to understand African history.
So I decided to name this major work “Uhuru
Afrika,”
which is Swahili for freedom Africa.....
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