Someone emailed to remind me that black power kung-fu has a distinguished pedigree. In brief: my friend Dan Matlin's ground-breaking article on the writer and organiser Amiri Baraka, leading light of the 1960s Black Arts movement and intellectual inspiration for a raft of Black Power figures, describes the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN), a self-help organisation established by Baraka in New Jersey in 1968. As I understand it, CFUN drew on an idiosyncratic post-colonial mix of Marxist ideology and a collection of bastardised Bantu and Zulu traditions called Kawaida, espoused by a former associate of Malcolm X. True to its black power connections, CFUN had a disciplined martial wing, Black Community Defense and Development, whose boy members received fortnightly training with handguns and rifles, and were instructed in tabura, "a form of African drills", and yangumi..."a form of karate".
So there you go. Although I'm not sure that Baraka - author of such widely performed works as Black Dada Nihilismus and Junkies are Full of (SHHH...) - has ever got as much popular exposure as Africa Magic TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment