Sudan Needs Black Celebrities

Angelina Jolie says "I'll do all that I can."  Mia Farrow, another white female celebrity, is quite literally on the front lines of the genocide in Darfur. New York super publicist Meryl Zegarek saves lives in South Sudan as a part-time activist.

And to be sure that you know which famous blacks the media won't tell you are helping out, I myself was there the day that actor Danny Glover got frisked, handcuffed and jailed by police for standing in the doorway at the Sudanese Embassy in protest against the atrocities committed by my homeland's Black Arab Muslim government in North Sudan.  

I can also attest to the sacrifices of heroic Black American journalist, Joe Madison, the very first American celebrity to risk slanderous attacks from oil companies and Arab-owned U.S. corporations in his commandeering an international campaign against the much denied North African slave trade.

This article isn't directed at that small band, though. It's more about people who are not doing anything to help, like one of the great heroines of my life--Winnie Mandela--someone I deeply love and was given only a five minute telephone appointment with, despite the lavishness of the evils being committed "on our watch" as a human race, and it's also about saying to the American media that it's wrong to allow those of us who do stand up to be so completely slandered, silenced or threatened by those who defend the Arab regime in North Sudan, regardless of how traumatized and eccentric we Pro-Southerners may be. 

It is now less than a month since I was appointed National Chairwoman of the United States branch of South Sudan's Sudanese Sensitization Peace Project (the SSPP).  This was a most ironic appointment considering the fact that I am a half-Arab Northerner, originally born Muslim, a "traitor" to the North.  I did spy work for the SPLA (South), and now, in my job rounding up celebrities and politicians to take a stance on behalf of Darfur and the 2011 secession of South Sudan, I find myself greatly pained that absolutely none of the African Presidents of the African Union are doing what they should to challenge and confront President Bashir's regime in Khartoum, even as they acknowledge that he, and in full disclosure, my former boyfriend, Hasan al Turabi, are responsible for carrying out genocide.

Millions of blacks around the world--whether their worlds be Johannesburg, Harlem, Dakar, London or Los Angeles--love to evoke the names "Nubia" and "Cush" to the point of overkill, yet as we get high linking ourselves to some glorious ancient past, we place little stock in fixing our present or constructing our future.  Indeed few of us in the west seem to remember that both Nubia and Cush are located in the country that the Black Egyptians of Kom Ombo refer to as--"Our Mother, the Goddess Sudan."

When my idol, Alice Walker, speaks of the little "brown children" whose heads are being bombed in Arab countries--I think of the babies in Sudan who look more like Alice and are also being bombed and filleted, but on a much grander scale than the children of Iraq--and I think of those Arab children, and how I, Kola Boof, have donated book royalties as charity for those Arab children, but how no American organizations or celebrities, black or Arab, seem to care about the charcoal babies in Sudan.  

When Elaine Brown and bell hooks speak of their "Poor oppressed Palestinian brothers and sisters"--I, like most cocoa skinned North African women, think of the Palestinians in Port Sudan who murdered my uncle by kicking holes in his stomach for being "black" and getting promoted over them, and I think of the Palestinians who, in the course of their daily routines, casually refer to black skinned people as "abeed."

In hearing so many Black American celebrities refer to Latinos and Arabs as "brown brothers and sisters" and refer to African people as mere "cousins," I feel compelled to remind them that people of Sudan, your "real brothers and sisters," the ones who are the living replicas of your dead ancestors, desperately need your help.  I ask of Africans worldwide--whatever happened to black people's love for other black people, or did we ever have it in the first place?  And if we as blacks were never able to admire our own reflection as other people do theirs, but would rather dream idealistic fairytales about solidarity with people who, at best, have a "tan," then just how human are we in the first place, and just what right do we have to speak against the various invasions that have destroyed our ancestor's continent?

This is why I, and the SSPP, South Sudan and our ally Israel, thank God for the emergence of future President Barack Obama, a man who expresses an unwavering desire to see love, compassion and justice extended to all human beings, but who also understands the African view, that if our Arab brothers were to lay down their weapons today, there would be no more violence, yet if we of South Sudan and Israel were to lay down our weapons today, we would all be massacred, and the whole world would be claiming they never saw it coming.

Genocide, slavery, rape and colorism are wrong.

(To support South Sudan in becoming an independent nation in the year 2011, contact the SSPP Headquarters hotline in the Foreign Ministry Triangle at the capital of South Sudan in Juba.  Or you can email the American branch President in New York City at info@thesspp.org.)