MF GALAXY

Across the world, modern peoples look towards the great civilisations of antiquity of their continent for answers about who they are now, and from what greatness they have arisen. East Asians gaze toward China; indigenous Americans recall the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and Inca; Europeans remember Greece and Rome... and Africans remember Nubia and Egypt.

Yet despite the obvious Africanity of Egypt, for more than two hundred years, Europe has taught an imperial racist mythology that erased who the Egyptians truly were, and thanks to Hollywood, has pinkwashed them into Europeans, a depiction never created by any ancient Egyptian painter or sculptor.

To re-establish Egypt, or Kemet, literally, the Black Land, as an African society and civilisation populated and led by racial Africans is a complex task, due to the crushing weight of more than two centuries of racial brainwashing. Doing so requires a multidisciplinary approach engaging Archeo-Linguistics, Philosophy, Comparative Religion, Physical and Cultural Anthropology, and blood-type analysis, to name only a few.

Few scholars were better suited to such labour than the late Dr. Martin Bernal, author of the monumental series Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation.

A maverick academic and historical investigator, Dr. Bernal employed thousands of modern and ancient documents, and addressed innumerable cultural, philosophical, scholarly, and scientific issues in order to re-establish what the Greeks and other ancient Europeans said: that the Egyptians were dark-skinned Africans whose vast genius formed the basis of Greek religion, philosophy, art, architecture, mathematics, science, and civilisation.

Bernal was a professor of Government at Cornell University. His career began in Chinese studies, but grew into the tradition of groundbreaking African scholars such as George G.M. James, St. Clair Drake, and Cheikh Anta Diop. While Bernal is primarily interested in understanding Greece so as to understand Europe, his work in clarifying the Egyptian influence on Greece has required him to establish Egypt’s Africanity.

I had the privilege of interviewing Martin Bernal in person way back in November 2000 in Edmonton, when he spoke at Edmonton Public Library Stanley Milner Branch. He was the guest of the Living History Project of which I was a member, a committee of the Council of Canadians of African & Caribbean Heritage.

He discusses:

• Why the ground-breaking Senegalese Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop, author of The African Origin of Civilisation, didn’t receive more credit in Black Athena
• His surprising turn-around on Diop’s linguistic analysis connecting Senegal to Ancient Egypt
• How Ancient Egyptian language connects with southern African Bantu languages, and West African languages such as Hausa
• The preservation by Freemasonry of knowledge connecting Greece as a student to Egypt as a master
• Plato as the student of African-Egyptian ideology
• His reactions to claims that Ancient Egyptians were incapable of developing philosophy, and the claim that philosophy and rational thought are exclusively Greek inventions, and
• His bold assertion of the link between philosophy and mummification

For more information on Martin Bernal and his work, visit mfgalaxy.org for the links. Martin Bernal died on June 9, 2013. He was a delightful man, and a brilliant scholar. I’ll always be grateful for his time.

To hear the 90-minute-long patrons-only BONUS CONTENT EDITION of my conversation with Martin Bernal, click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Martin Bernal discussing:

• His responses to the anti-Afrocentric work of Mary Lefkowitz, author of Not Out of Africa
• The reasons why Eurocentric scholars faked data through infamous hoaxes as the Piltdown Man fossil
• The degree to which the Eurocentric academic establishment in the US accepts the Africanity of Ancient Egyptian people and civilisation
• The continuing blight of Eurocentric racism on US culture
• The Eurocentric Aryanisation of Christianity
• The European cult of Black Madonnas, and the backlash one student faced for wanting to study them
• The anti-African nature of Stargate and Erik Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, and
• The Eurocentric fantasy of Classical Zimbabwe being the product of Phoenicians

COMING IN DECEMBER, don’t miss the serialized AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS of my cult-classic novels THE COYOTE KINGS and my award-winning SHRINKING THE HEROES, available exclusively on PATREON!

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The next time you feel like starting a blood feud, go to a Classics lecture on any American campus or to any American publishing house and say the following: “Egypt was a racially African civilisation. And it conquered and civilised Greece.”

As amply demonstrated by the growth industry in anti-Afrocentric publishing, North America’s racially-poisoned debates about nearly everything have made the discussion of the racial identity of a people from six thousand years ago almost as vicious as the fight in Syria right now.

Why the controversy? Because of what Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, described as the contest between the Ancient Model and the Aryan model of ancient Greece and Egypt. The ancient Greeks made it clear that Egypt was their instructor and inspiration for nearly all the aspects of their civilisation; Europe believed this ancient testimony up until the age of imperialism. At that point it became morally and intellectually unfeasible to consider that those who were becoming the victims of the European Holocaust against Africa and the growing White world supremacy could be the grandfathers of European civilisation itself. The racism necessary to justify that conquest was never defeated, not even after the Nazis were, who were inspired by the same racist historical revisionism.

Enter Richard Poe, author of the controversial Black Spark, White Fire: Did African Explorers Civilise Ancient Europe?, a book whose trials of publication are almost as stunning as its revelations about the ancient world.

So, Poe must be an angry African writer with an Afrocentric spear to sharpen, right? The kind who wants nothing more than to smear and destroy the European canon? Hardly. Poe is an award-winning, pro-gun, pro-capitalism, right-wing American journalist, part Russian-Jewish, part Mexican, and best-selling author. So any notion that Poe is pandering to Black radicalism couldn’t be further from the truth. So is the idea that Poe cynically wrote the book to cash in on the Afrocentric movement.

In fact, Poe had a hell of a fight to get his book in print. White editors and publishers he approached either didn’t want a White writer to write the book, or didn’t want the book written at all. Some were upset of baffled by the notion of a African Egypt; one made bizarre reference to her fear that her mother might be mugged by Black criminals--as if this were relevant to an ancient civilisation thousands of kilometres away.

Some academics didn’t want to touch the issue--as Poe makes clear, established academics are sometimes professionally and personally vicious enough to young mavericks to destroy their careers; perhaps only a journalist, argues Poe, has the freedom to write such a book.

Some freedom--Poe ended up forking over $30,000 US of his own money to get the book researched, including the creation of artwork to display the forensic reconstruction of the face of an ancient Egyptian skull. And perhaps if famed Afrocentrist* professor, Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, head of Temple University’s African Studies Department, hadn’t written the introduction to this book, few Africans in the US might have taken the book seriously.

Neither White liberal nor Black radical, Poe is also unlike many Afrocentric Egyptologists in that he doesn’t regard the Greeks as mere historical plagiarists of greater, more ancient Egyptian genius. He is concerned neither with racial solidarity nor a political-academic agenda--his sole concern seems to be the truth, hence his sacrifices.

Highly accessible and jargon-free, Richard Poe’s Black Spark, White Fire is a dazzling voyage through the genealogy of human civilisation with forays into race, mysticism, science, philosophy, culture, and technology that one needn’t be a specialist or a classicist in order to follow.

I went far below the pharaoh’s chamber in the Grand Lodge of Imhotep archives for today’s conversation. Richard Poe spoke with me by telephone way back in April, 2000. He discussed:

• His reactions to the attacks against Afrocentric historiography by people such as Mary Lefkowitz, author of Not Out of Africa
• The relevance of the classic text Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James, and
• Why there’s a pyramid on Greek soil, whom the ancient Greeks say is responsible for building it, and why most of us have never heard of it.

We began by discussing the eternal relevance of history.

*Molefi Kete Asante is the author of the classic book Afrocentricity. Many who identify with his work and ideology are called Afrocentrists. Critics of their inquiry mislabel the movement as Afrocentrism. Any use in this blog entry of the prefix “Afro-” refers to Asante’s work or his movement. I use the term “Africentric” simply to mean “centered on Africa and from an African perspective.

To hear the hour-long, patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Richard Poe, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Richard Poe discussing:

• The Egyptian pharaohs named Senwosret who had a huge impact on Ancient Europe
• The African colonists of Egyptian descent who settled around the Black Sea in ancient times
• His take on the work of Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation
• A forensic reconstruction of a high-ranking Ancient Egyptian named Natsef-Amun that casts light on his race
• The extreme and often emotional resistance of Eurocentric academics to acknowledging the Africanity of Ancient Egypt’s population
• The Afroasiatic language family that includes Ancient Egyptian, Ethiopian languages, and Hebrew and Arabic
• The extensive cultural similarities between Ancient Egypt and other African civilisations
• The publicity freeze-out against Black Spark, White Fire, and
• The reaction of the Oprah Book Club against the book

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While comic books pay creators nowhere near what most professionals get in movies, television, or video games, countless comic books fans yearn to be creators and spend years honing their skills, creating characters and stories, and sometimes even publishing entire works online or in print.

For a determined, highly-skilled, and lucky few, the result is getting hired by the major publishers or long-term success as an independent backed by crowdfunding, great sales, or both.

To stay determined and rack up skills, one needs a strategy, and that’s where our guests come in, who comment on how to do the job, and how to get the job.

Matt Hawkins, president and chief operating officer at Top Cow productions, discusses:

Dani Dixon, a creator and publisher at Tumble Creek Press, discusses:

Ray Anthony Height, creator of Midnight Tiger, discusses:

Mark and Mike Davis, also known as the Madtwiinz, are the creators of Blokhedz, a four-issue indie comic limited series from 2004 and its 2009 companion webisode series that includes voicing by Talib Kweli and Dorian Harewood. They’ve gone on to freelance for Sony, Fox, and Disney, and have worked on The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and GI Joe.
They discuss how they co-created Blokhedz.

All of this episode’s guests spoke on a panel at Eagle Con in May, 2015 at California State University at Los Angeles, except for the Davis Brothers, who spoke with me at San Diego Comic Con in July 2004.

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Chuck D. is the leader of Public Enemy, one of the contemporary music’s most influential acts, and creator of two of hip hop’s most powerful albums: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back from 1988, and Fear of a Black Planet from 1990.

Born in 1960 in Long Island, New York, Chuck D. attended Adelphi University where he contributed poster artwork to the growing hip hop scene, and where he hosted a hip hop radio show on WBAU.

Forming Public Enemy with collaborators Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, DJ Terminator X, and the martial artists the Security of the First World, Chuck D. led a bold new aesthetic into hip hop, combining the look and messages of the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam.

The group enjoyed enormous success and weathered enormous controversy, creating classic anthems such as 1989’s “Fight the Power” and 2004’s “Son of a Bush.” Chuck D. became a pioneer of digital music distribution, launching SlamJamz and HipHopGods to help artists free themselves from corporate control, bad contracts, and terrible pay.

Just as Public Enemy has toured widely and performed thousands of concerts, Chuck D. lectures widely at universities around the world. He was also a guest on my CJSR FM Edmonton radio show The Terrordome in 1999 and in 2005. The last time Public Enemy came to the Big E was 2010, and that’s when I caught up with Chuck D, at the Edmonton Event Centre, which was the exact place I’d met to interview him in 1999. He discussed:

Note that you’ll hear a strange jump in the ambient noise after the first set of questions. That’s because we conducted the interview at two different times: in the afternoon before the concert, and then an hour before Chuck D. was to hit the stage.

We began by discussing how his then-new music portals She Movement and Hip Hop Gods innovated upon the work he began with SlamJamz.

To hear the ONE HOUR LONG patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Chuck D. of Public Enemy, click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes a further interview with Chuck D. and with the legendary Public Enemy S1W Pop Diesel.

Chuck D discusses:

S1W Pop Diesel discusses:

Dr. Ganz Ferrance is a psychologist specialising in human potential, and family and marriage therapy.

Over my decades of radio broadcasting and now podcasting, I’ve spoken with scores of people about the structural and systemic barriers to the freedom, prosperity, and happiness of Africans and other groups.

On this episode of MF GALAXY we’ll hear about another set of barriers, which, while being influenced by the structural and the systemic, are a distinct problem unto themselves. They’re also usually more difficult to perceive and define. I’m talking about psychological barriers inside the human community generally and African-Canadian communities specifically, barriers which have been passed intergenerationally and are the legacy of the horrors of colonialism across the African continent, and of the continent-wide rape-gulag in the US and in the Caribbean.

Ganz Ferrance is ideally suited to discuss these intergenerational barriers to our individual and collective health and success, and the means to overcome them. He’s been teaching mind-body health for over two decades in Canada and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in Counselling Psychology from Andrews University in Michigan and an MA in Educational and Developmental Psychology.

He’s also an increasingly well-known media figure, having appeared on CBC Radio, CHED Radio, CTV Edmonton and CTV’s Good Morning Canada, ByuRadio, Canadian Learning Television, and Sirius XM, and in the pages of P&G Every Day, Our Weekly, and Ebony Magazine.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Ganz Ferrance discusses:

Today’s show comes from deep inside the archives of the Grand Lodge of Imhotep. Ganz Ferrance spoke with me at his office in Edmonton in September, 2008.

To hear the exclusive patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Ganz Ferrance, click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Dr. Ganz Ferrance discussing:

To contact Dr. Ganz Ferrance, book him for counselling or a speaking engagement, attend his classes, or to purchase his CDs and DVDs, visit doctorganz.com.
 

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Charlie Kernaghan is the executive director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a Pittsburgh-based NGO of global labour advocates. They risk their own safety in pursuit of justice for some of the most exploited workers in the world through exposing human and labour rights abuses perpetrated by US companies producing goods in poor countries.

Kernaghan has made his living as furniture mover, carpenter, cab driver, and university instructor, but he began his crusade for workers’ rights in 1985 after participating in a peace march through Central America. In 1990, he became the director of the US-based National Labor Committee, the fore-runner to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

Kernaghan’s international fame came from rattling the chains of one particular celebrity: Kathie Lee Gifford of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. Gifford’s name was on a line of clothing from whose profits a portion of proceeds was used to aid disadvantaged American children. The problem? The clothes were made in Honduran sweatshops. By thirteen year-old girls working thirteen-hour shifts for 31 cents an hour. Under armed guard.

After Kernaghan broke that story, Gifford broke into tears on North American television, and she threatened to sue him and the tiny NLC. Her threats crumbled into defeat when she was eventually forced to sign a code of conduct that included independent monitoring, a story detailed in the Canadian documentary The Corporation (http://www.thecorporation.com).

Being known as “the man who made Kathie Lee cry” is enough to endear Kernaghan to many; he’s been written up in Mother Jones magazine, been featured on David Barsamian’s Alternative Radio and gives somewhere around seventy speeches a year while he and the Institute maximise their pressure against plutocrats such as the owners of Wal-Mart and the NBA to ensure justice for the people who make the the products that elevate them to the global top 1% inside the global 1%.

In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, Charlie Kernaghan discusses:

Today’s conversation is from sub-level ten inside the archives of the Grand Lodge of Imhotep. Way back during the Christmas shopping rush of December 2004, Charlie Kernaghan spoke with me from his office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by telephone. Please note that back then, his organisation was called the National Labour Committee.

I began by asking Kernaghan about the amount of money US consumers spend on others and themselves to purchase their Christmas cheer, and how little reward would go to the people who actually produced those gifts.

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Ann Vriend is a superb, independent songwriter-musician who’s toured the world and has created six albums including her most recent and critically-acclaimed release, For the People in the Mean Time. Her vocals are a fusion of Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin, and her lyrical skill is a standout for her generation. She’s the winner of the 2013 Canadian “She’s the One” contest.

In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, Ann Vriend discusses:

Throughout the show we’ll hear excerpts from the album For the People in the Mean Time, specifically “A Long Road,” “A Need So Wide,” “The Greatest Killer,” and “Wonder Why.”

I spoke with Ann Vriend in her home in the McCauley neighbourhood of Edmonton on September 20, 2015. You’ll hear ambient noise throughout our conversation, including at one point a dishwasher running, so I apologise for the below-average sound-quality of this episode. And now on MF Galaxy, my conversation with Ann Vriend.

Buy Ann Vriend’s singles and albums:

www.annvriend.com/music.html

To hear the full 80 minute, patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Ann Vriend, visit the MF GALAXY Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week. By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Ann Vriend discussing:

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Yves Engler is the author of eight books exploring injustice, Canadian-style. His latest is Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation. The book explores Canadian and proto-Canadian involvement in the European holocaust against Africa, support for apartheid in South Africa and Idi Amin’s coup in Uganda, support for overthrowing independence leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and destructive corporate exploitation across the continent today.

Yves Engler will be speaking at the University of Alberta in Edmonton on October 1st at 7 pm in room 158 of the Education South building (113 Street + 87 Avenue). In advance his talk, he spoke with me by Skype from his home in Montreal on September 15, 2015. Our conversation covered numerous topics including:

To put foreign aid into context, here are political representatives of Canada’s most important political, economic, and military ally. As quoted by Carol Off in her book Bitter Chocolate, US Senator Hubert Humphrey said:

"I have heard that people may become dependent on us for food.... If you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific."

US President John Kennedy said, “Foreign aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.”

And US President Richard Nixon said, “Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves.”

I’ll let Yves Engler explore how far from—or how close to—Canada is to those declarations of policy and morality.

We began by discussing the enormous political value of one Canada’s biggest lies about itself.

SPECIAL ONE-HOUR LONG EXTENDED EDITION BONUS CONTENT

To hear the nearly-hour-long, patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Yves Engler, click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week. By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Engler discussing:

DeWayne Copeland is a new-media indie filmmaker who embodies the Marcus Garvey ethic of “do for self.” With co-creator and series writer-director Scott F Evans, Copeland and their agile team launched CV Nationin 2012, and have produced a first season of six episodes and a second season of four.

The CV in CV Nation means “costumed vigilantes,” because the show is about superheroes and villains fighting for dominance in a world in which paranormal powers are merely expensive but highly dangerous commodities.

The series is a breakthrough not only for its indie aesthetics and production, but because it’s largely about superheroes and villains of African descent. Copeland and Evans didn’t wait around for someone else to do what they and so many others had been craving for years—they just did it themselves.

DeWayne Copeland is a remarkable artist, and a down-to-earth human being. He’s a key speaker in the must-see documentary Brave New Soulsby Agent Carter screenwriter Brandon Easton. I met DeWayne Copeland at Eagle Con in May 2015 held at the campus of California State University at Los Angeles. We spoke at the Con’s final moments during the tear-down, so throughout you’ll hear the sounds of lifting, loading, and even lurching.

Our conversation ranged over many topics, including:

But we began by discussing Copeland’s own personal origin story.

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A Lee Martinez has authored of ten acclaimed novels including Divine Misfortune, Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest,and Chasing the Moon. For his debut novel Gil’s All Fright Diner, he won the Alex Award, which is given to adult fiction that possesses special appeal to younger readers.

Martinez’s work mixes dynamic world-building with whimsical, hilarious, and touching storytelling. Martinez’s The Automatic Detectiveis one of my favourite books. It’s a noir crime thriller about a robot designed to destroy humanity, but he just doesn’t feel like it, so he drives a cab. But the work succeeds because it’s far more than just wacky—it’s got heart, and characters we can love.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Martinez discusses:

We began by discussing the craft of plotting and the dangers of hewing too closely to an outline.

To download the special PATRONS-ONLY edition of this episode with A Lee Martinez, visit MF GALAXY.org and click the Patreon link on the right. Sponsor the show for a dollar or more per episode and access all extended edition podcasts and bonus videos. In this extended episode, Martinez discusses his business advice for writers, and the real reason to attend book signings.

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