Today, you don’t have to be a princess or a multi millionaire to be able to dress up nicely. The missionary turned academic C. M. Doke proposed to the conference participants the establishing of An Academy of African Arts; a proposal that was to be re-discovered anew in the 1940s by Jordan Ngubane and Anton Lembede (1914-1947) in Inkundla ya Bantu (Bantu Forum) newspaper, the intellectual forum of the African nationalism of the ANC Youth League. This innovative idea of the Academy was in all probability related to the extraordinary linguistic work Clement Martyn Doke had undertaken in the study of African languages in Southern Africa which he anticipated could inspire African literature(s) in the African languages into creating a renaissance or renascences. Even so, in the midst of multicultural reading it can be a difficult task to find those universal characteristics for some readers. This is a major problem for multiculturalism. Sometimes differing cultures express the same universal concept but in irreconcilable forms. Furthermore, some readers have a difficult time putting aside everyday assumptions and breaking away from their familiar acceptance of the world (Buckingham et al., 2011). Thus, multicultural literature, which exclusively, yet not implicitly highlights differences between cultures, must instigate further misunderstandings. What else could possibly result from exclusively focusing on the differences between cultures other than building more barriers and separations? If readers cannot find the common connections in multicultural literature, then the sources of commonality or universality must be lost. This leads to stereotypes, otherness, and labels. From Blake Lively to Zendaya, these stars know exactly how to put on a fashion show from the sidewalk. Keep scrolling for celebrity street style moments too good to miss. We cannot hope and wish that we should be accepted by our enemies as just human beings without our identity of being African always the first thing the enemy sees. We cannot wish for acceptance into a culture of consuming, of going to their churches, of imbibing their culture by merely stating that we do not see color, nor acknowledge color. A lot of manufacturers are also reproducing the vintage vest designs, focusing on designs and materials from the early 1800’s up to the 1970’s. Classic vest designs are the inspiration for many of the modern ones, and the old styles still look great, a timeless article of clothing for sure. “Mass media send messages to us and about us that are beyond our control. Schools have nothing to engage our students in African Cultural Traditions or in support of African Communities. Our Communities rarely acknowledges our Traditions and they fail to create adequate structures to guarantee “Intergenerational Cultural Transmission”. We are culturally lazy and our ancestors are not pleased. History will not be kind to this of us who forget. Shame, disintegration and dependency on others, or worse, will be the outcome.
The socio-historical significance of the game in South Africa is not a recent phenomenon, as the impressive growth of football over time clearly demonstrates. The first documented matches took place in 1862 between White civil servants and soldiers in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Organised football among Whites originated in Natal, but eventually British ideas about race, class, gender, and empire led to the appropriation of rugby and cricket by Whites, and football and boxing by Blacks. Between the 1880s and 1910s, African, Indian, and Coloured football associations and leagues developed in Kimberley, Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, as well as in the elite mission schools. The game was fun, cheap, and relatively simple. It offered excitement, unpredictability, and new adventures; sport created popular discourse and generated emotional attachment. The ‘intrinsic value’ of football provided valuable entertainment and granted temporary relief from police harassment and grinding poverty. The inter-war years signaled the dawn of a new era in South African football. When slavery and later colonization took place the vision that our ancestors had of educating and raising African children(The African-centered way) was taken out of their control and a new way was imposed on African people-This destroyed our culture in deep and disastrous ways. Worse, this new system of education ran counter to the interests and needs of Africans. As a result, today, African people have never had so many talented and educated economists, educators, sociologists, doctors, lawyers, artists, etc, yet we suffer the worst health, housing, and education on the planet because our education was never designed to promote our interests but rather the goals and the interests of our oppressors. This 700-page masterpiece ends with an examination of the politics of the Civil War and of the Reconstruction as they affected the fate and fortunes of the African peoples in America. What is even more remarkable, is that DuBois connects this complex American historical tableaux to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the formation of Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. The counter-revolution that followed Reconstruction is interwoven into the nature of American property system. Black Reconstruction in America was truly innovative within American historiography in its wedding together of a brilliant theoretical structure, intuitive realism, empirical evidence and statistical data. Cultural Politics was not the only reason why urban Africans performed American music and dance. Jazz had become part of their musical diet of Africans in south Africa because it reproduces many performance principles of African Traditional Music.
