My debut novel Enter the Fray is partially set on a planet where the colonists were influenced by the hunters (simbons) of West Africa. As a group they are among the most important of the social organizations of West Africa, after the blacksmiths, gr
Read more…Hey History for Black Scifi!
Thank you all for watching my film "The Visitor" for the Hollywood Black Film Festival mobile challenge. We truly appreciate your support!
We (the cast & crew) are very excited that we had the opportunity to be apart of suc
Ansar Dine, a radical Islamist militia, has set about destroying mausoleums and shrines in the historic Malian city of Timbuktu, which was once a great center of Islamic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries
After my last posting on Anti-Fascist dieselpunk and the Spanish Civil War, which owed much to Steampunk Emma Goldman’s original blog, I began thinking about the other great anti-fascist struggle also lost in the shadow of WWII. In 1935, before the
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The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is a conflict that is almost lost in the long shadow cast by WW2. Yet like Mussolini’s brutal campaign against Ethiopia, it was one of the first battlegrounds against fascism. While Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supp
Read more…Photographer Philippe Bordas spent several years with Mali's hunters capturing on film their mastery of their trade. Now he brings some of his wonderful prints to Paris
They be
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A repost, as this week marks the 220th anniversary of the beginnings of the slave rebellion turned revolution in St. Domingue (Hayti).
The transformation of slaves, trembling in the hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize
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from the September 2011 edition of National Geographic
Their hands stained by the indigo dye in their new clothes, Tuareg women celebrate Read more…
This past spring, television viewers in Britain were treated to a six-
Very interesting article about blacks who spied on the Confederacy. Some very engrossing tales of speculative fiction can be weaved from this rich factual raw material!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=137291418
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Around 200 million people who identify themselves as being of African descent live in the Americas. Many millions more live in other parts of the world, outside of the African continent. In proclaiming t
Read more…http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/hms-pgr052411.php
More than just a tool for predicting health, modern genetics is upending long-held assumptions about who we are. A new study by Harvard rese
Read more…MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But wher
Read more…an article from 2003 on the popular Willie Lynch document (most likely a forgery) by historian Jelani Cobb.
Willie Lynch is Dead (1712?-2003)
I long ago stopped listening to sentences that began with “The problem with black people” or ended with “and
Read more…"There was always a crowd before the cage, most of the time roaring with laughter, and from almost every corner of the garden could be heard the question 'Where is the Pygmy?" and the answer was, 'in the monkey house.' ....Several times the pushing a
Read more…150 Years After Fort Sumter: Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War
A few weeks before Captain George S. James sent the first mortar round arcing through the predawn darkness toward Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln cas
Read more…*book review added per another discussion on BSFS on a related topic.
This book might come as a s
Read more…Among the most persistent European myths about Africa...is that homosexuality is "absent or incidental" in African societies. Since black Africans were felt to be the most primitive of people--the closest to nature--it followed that they must be the
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/science/15language.html
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human langu
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