by Mumia Abu-Jamal
"Concrete historical forms of ideological mobilization have given us clues about several sources the revolutionaries can draw on to mobilize. The most important source seems to be the 'dangerous' memory of conflict and exclusion. This memory has two dimensions: suffering as well as resistance and hope. The former draws from concrete memories of specific histories of oppression and suffering.... Past suffering hence becomes an indictment of existing economic and political systems. Memory of resistance and hope, on the other hand, chronicles actual or imagined instances of resistance and liberation."
-- Farhi Farideh, States and Urban Based Revolutions: Iran & Nicaragua (1990)
The usual instance of history, as taught by systematic teachers, is a dry affair, one that draws yawns as often as interest. What is it that students are forced to remember? Names. Dates. The Great Men. How the West was Won...etc.
How can history be made meaningful to young people, who are the inheritors of all human history? The Names, dates, and Great Man series isn't it.
History is a powerful thing, not something that bores. It is the life of the people that makes the present day possible, and that makes tomorrow inevitable. It is the reason we are the way we are, and a suggestion of what may be to come.
There are hidden histories. The histories of America's original peoples is very little known among millions of this land's current inhabitants. For millions of American people, the name "Indians" is still used to refer to the descendants of America's original tribes and nations, even though the word reflects the ignorance and arrogance of the namers, rather than the named. This ain't India. They ain't Indians. Not really.
Every year, there is a Black History Month celebrated, that is more of a mass marketing tool to sell hamburgers and trinkets, than it is about the history of a people who came here before Columbus (read Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus), came here on a boat with Columbus' son, Don Diego, rebelled and took to the forests of what's now called South Carolina to live amongst Indians (see?) -- so-called Indians, rebelled in virtually every country of the so-called New World for freedom from bondage, and the endless, continuing battles against injustice.
Former Black Panther leader, Assata Shakur, when a high school girl, learned about the Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831 Virginia, and was struck by the power of history:
"Until then my only knowledge of the history of Africans in amerika was about George Washington Carver making experiments with peanuts and about the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman had always been my heroine, and she had symbolized everything that was Black resistance for me. But it had never occurred to me that hundreds of Black people had got together to fight for their freedom. The day i found out about Nat Turner i was affected so strongly it was physical.... I tore through every book my mother had. Nowhere could i find the name Nat Turner."
To learn about a Black Rebel who fought for his freedom in the years of bondage touched her so deeply that,"I was so souped up on adrenalin i could barely contain myself." [Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Books, 1987), p. 175].
For her, learning history meant unlearning what she was taught in schools, for she was taught;
"I had grown up believing the slaves hadn't fought back. I remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in school. The teachers made it seem that Black people had nothing to do with the official 'emancipation' from slavery. White people had freed us." [p. 175]
From that point on, history was real for her. It motivated her, and it woke up her rebellious and revolutionary spirit.
History, real history -- the history of people fighting back against oppression, can wake us all up, and open our eyes to the repression we see today. Such a history fires up the spirit, as it did Assata, as scholar Farhi Farideh explains:
"The most important source seems to be the 'dangerous' memory of conflict and exclusion. This memory has two dimensions: suffering as well as resistance and hope. The former draws from concrete memories of specific histories of oppression and suffering.... Past suffering hence becomes an indictment of existing economic and political systems. Memory of resistance and hope, on the other hand, chronicles actual or imagined instances of resistance and liberation. These accounts are a declaration of the possibility of change, and they are examined continuously in an attempt to understand what enables resistance in specific, historical situations."
-- Farideh, States and Urban Based Revolutions (1990), p. 85
Farideh's ideas bear repeating, for it is important for us to see the power and impact of history.
#393 - Written 9 December1998
Copyright 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
[posted Fri, Jan 8, 1999]
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