As part of my bid to introduce esteemed readers to prominent people across the globe, I have come across a young journalist Solyana Bekele from America.
She adores delving into black freedom fights and quests for democracy with a particular focus on the role of art in the resistant movement of black people especially in America and the Caribbean islands.
You are already familiar with the might of her pen as she demonstrated it dissecting the works of Bob Marley throwing light on his biography and subsequent articles of similar nature she contributed to The Ethiopian Herald recently.
In politics and social activism too, she has a pelted eye and a sharp mind that could influence the audience’s mindset. Her writing knack carries readers away. I hope you will like the e-mail interview. Good read. Excerpts:
Brief us about yourself your upbringing and your lineage.
I was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia until I turned nine and my parents decided it was high time we left for the perceived comforts of Western society. I was quite young when I left Ethiopia, but old enough to have an awareness and love of my Ethiopian and African identity. This was an identity that I thought would forever paint me as an outcast once I left home because I thought it meant that I would forever be untethered from the people I was familiar with. But it became something that made me connect to a people and a movement bigger than myself even though I was far from home.
Regarding your academic pursuit, what was it like? Were there ups and downs?
My long-term goal is to be a professor in Black or African studies with a focus on Black/African radical ideologies and movements. I’m currently a graduate student working on my Master’s in Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, a step toward the long journey that is the path to a professoriate.
It is still somewhat early in my academic journey but like any other student, its ups and downs are marked by late nights of reading, dealing with the ambiguousness of the early days of research, and managing all that while working as a teaching assistant. I’m currently in the early days of researching for my thesis which will be about the Ethiopian Student Movement, examined under the framework of the Black Radical Tradition.
How and when did you join The Burning Spear?
I joined The Burning Spear newspaper through a mutual friend who thought I could contribute well as a proofreader. I joined back in March 2020, and about a year or so later became its managing editor and occasional contributor.
As the proud granddaughter of Kebede Anissa, a premier journalist known for coining “Ethiopia Tikdem,” I’m excited by what seems like a continuation of his writing legacy be it in my academic or journalistic work.
Journalism and politics largely overlap. Besides, you are a social activist concerned about genuine freedom and democracy. Are these factors attributable to the facility of your pen as seen in The Burning Spear?
Journalism and politics indeed overlap. It was with that recognition I chose to do my bachelor’s in political science with a minor in journalism at Hampton University. Being part of the Burning Spear (which is the official organ of the African People’s Socialist Party) was an opportunity for me to merge these two interests of mine in a practical sense.
The Burning Spear’s journalism is explicitly written for the edification and in the interest of the African working class, wherever they may be located. It centers the African working class’s perspective and serves as its voice in an effort to build toward a genuine revolutionary freedom and democracy—much like the Black Panther Newspaper, or Marcus Garvey’s the Negro World did in their respective times.
Could you highlight the salient issues about black resistance and quests for freedom you carried across via your probing articles?
As per The Burning Spear’s credo, with my articles I talk about the various issues in politics, films, or our own economic work in the aim to center the Black/African working class perspective. For example, I recently wrote a review of the movie “They Cloned Tyrone,” to see how the various ways the film explores and comments on the quotidian Black exploitation manifest in the very food we eat, the products we put on our bodies, and the communities we live in. I also did a film review of “Oppenheimer,” raising some of the issues with the apologist or sympathizing narrative it was, unwittingly or not, peddling about the creator of the atomic bomb.
Thro
On African Studies, what are its pros and cons? Africa has not yet obtained democracy and freedom in the true sense of the word. There is even a saying white colonizers have ceded their place to black colonizers in Africa or colonialism has given way to Neocolonialism. What is your take on this observation?
I think this is a very accurate description of the current issues African people face within the continent. The very same economic and political issues that Kwame Nkrumah raised in his book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism is still very much a reality. Nkrumah says that a neo-colonial state is a state that is “in theory, independent, [with] all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,” but “in reality its economic system and thus its political policy are directed from outside.” Though Nkrumah centers his study in Africa, this is not an African problem but a situation within which any colonized country finds itself.
For some, the era of independence marks the end of colonial economic exploitation in Africa, but a serious inquiry into the economic relationship that Africa is still locked in paints a different picture. Though Africa is among the richest, if not the richest, in the amount and diversity of natural resources, African countries still have not “caught up” with the west in any sense of the word. African countries are forced to export unfinished goods and resources (at low price points), to be manufactured into finished products and sold at higher price points in the West and back to African countries, as well. A significant part of this disparity is the fact that the very land from which these invaluable resources are exhumed are not owned by African people—or if it is, it’s owned by neo-colonial compradors with no interest in using the riches of the land for collective self-determination.
For Nkrumah, a united socialist Africa was the solution to finally untethering this dependent relationship that the current economic relationship puts Africa under. To this many, including me, agree and see as the only viable option to real progressive change.
Expound on the role of art in the freedom fight.
Art and culture are important fronts in any liberation struggle. Art and culture can be used as a reflexive act of looking into oneself and one’s people, and by doing so light the spark and awaken the consciousness needed to bolster a liberation struggle. For African and colonized people, this is a paramount task because colonialism brought with it cultural imperialism—the disruption and sometimes extermination of African people’s cultures in various forms. In the wake of this devastation, a liberation struggle must necessarily incorporate a cultural component of its overall struggle because it implicates the very being and identity of any given group of people.
BY ALEM HAILU G/KRISTOS
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 17 JULY 2024
