Onwubiko Agozino
Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors and must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share it in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture among the Igbo (who ritually select representatives to go into the forest and commune with the ancestors for days before they return to restructure and rebuild it every now and then when the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled and they repopulate it as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community since they coexist, as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the cultural politics of African Fractals and Modern Computer Engineering). Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino
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