[Introductory Tale]

Yunhouse is to be renamed Twentieth Century House.
Here are the reasons why, writes Yunhouse Narrator

THE 20 CENTURY was drawing to a close when the press release came: “All Humans On Planet Earth Are Descended From An African Woman”

I screamed! – to the hearing of all humans present. My audience was the crowd in the London Fleet Street newsroom, where I was still swaggering in the euphoria of my very recently acquired status of first ever full-blooded African with a bona fide appellation of Fleet Street Journalist. The News Editor, who announced my appointment, said my position was an overdue 20th Century phenomenon that had been precipitated by a chance meeting at the 20th birthday party of his niece (student of Chinese language), whose current co-fornicator (an African who spoke and wrote fluent Japanese) had brought along (from Brixton) two African mates, one of whom spoke and wrote fluent Russian, and myself, an indigene of a former British Colony, where he (Fleet Street Editor) had been conceived (five decades earlier) during an imperial copulation between his father (Colonial Governor) and his mother (a blood relation of the last Emperor of Russia).

‘The globe has become one village’, the News Editor proclaimed with much excitement. He got more excited when he learnt that I was currently engaged in pamphleteering on a subject that was burning – even as we spoke – on the streets of Brixton District in South London. Our publication, The Atlantic Storm, tracked day by the day the sordid details of Black people’s experience of the historic racial implosion with which Brixton eventually got baptised as Ethnic Headquarters Of Great Britain. The Atlantic Storm was in newspaper format and appeared daily, but its African-Jamaican-British publisher, Ohimini, maintained that it was an information sheet, maybe pamphlet. But definitely not a newspaper. He said: ‘Newspapers happen in Fleet Street where White journalists disseminate to White readers stories that are crafted with White interests as leitmotif’.

At the mention of the Atlantic Storm and its publisher, the Fleet Street Editor’s excitement peaked at the maximum on the Reuter’s scale: ‘If you can get me an interview with Ohimini, I’ll make you a Fleet Street journalist’. He dragged me through the party crowd to a much more elderly Englishman in a wheelchair. So came my chance to shake the hand of the legendary Mr Africa: the man who had seen it all, heard it all, and wrote it all about Africa, whilst editing close to three thousand weekly editions of The Africa Picture, the newsmagazine – born at the beginning of th the 20 Century – internationally believed to be the oldest Pan African journal on the planet. His accolades include Mr Africa: The Man Who Has Written Africa More Times Than Any Human Alive.

The Fleet Street Editor said he owed his profound interest in Africa to Mr Africa under whom he had been a pupil journalist. It was an experience he shared with several other Fleet Street th Journalists, most of whom were present at the 80 Anniversary celebration party of The Africa Picture when Ohimini of Brixton made a bold attempt to behead the famous editor as ritual sacrifice to many angry African gods. Eyewitnesses said Ohimini refused – very loudly – to shake his host’s welcoming hand, instead he whisked out a pick axe concealed under his winter coat. Pandemonium broke out! Then the following exchange of words:

Ohimini: Show me your licence for taking Africa’s name in vain.

Mr Africa: What are you talking about?

Ohimini:Where are the Africans in The Africa Picture? Eighty years on and not one African journalist – not even a token one – has ever been aboard with you to paint the picture of the Africa peddled by your white supremacist rag.

Mr Africa:Yes, they have. You, for example. Your behaviour shows why you cannot be trusted with objectivity on the subject of Africa.

Ohimini: Do you, Mr Africa!, really know what it means to be an African?

Mr Africa:Not necessarily. I just observe you guys – professionally. If you get my meaning…
Mr Africa confidently predicted that Ohimini would not agree to be interviewed: ‘He’s too wrapped up in his Black World to talk to Whiteys in Fleet Street’. The prediction was wrong. Ohimini did agree to be interviewed. But on two conditions: one, the text would be published in question-and-answer format – with his answers unedited, two, the article appears under his choice of words for the title as well as the sub-title, thus:

To Whom It May Concern

Ohimini Of Brixton Speaks On Being A Blackman In London

Q: You chose your own title and subtitle?

A: Yes. Because I only speak on what concerns me. And I aim to communicate with those who are concerned about what I speak. There’s too much talking – and listening – at cross-purposes going on in the world today.

Q: You were born poor?

A: Yes. It was poverty far below poverty line. To measure my poverty level you’d have to dig underneath the proverbial church rat.

Q: You went to Oxford University?

A: Yes. Shortly after arriving in the UK with my carpenter father, a sensitive white teacher followed her curiosity about my unusual mental aptitude and discovered that my IQ was well above average, enough for me to be accepted as member of a high IQ society, followed by a series of scholarships that eventually led to being at Oxford.

Q: You hate White people?

A: No. Many of my friends are White. I get along with them very well. I am every inch a fine specimen of what their educational system can produce. I have insider knowledge about what makes them tick. But they don’t know what makes me tick. They don’t know because they have no idea – and therefore cannot imagine – where I am coming from, other than the colour of my skin.

Q: You hate Fleet Street?

A: Not really. I object to Fleet Street’s agenda on a subject of great concern to me: being a Blackman. Many Fleet Street journalists are my peers from school and Oxford. We differ on our perception of the th global racial war going on since the 15 Century and peaked with th The Trans-Atlantic Holocaust in the 19 Century. Do you know how many Africans died in this war? Current estimates put African casualties at more than the total casualties in all the rest of human conflicts, past, present and in the foreseeable future. The record is likely to be surpassed only when the world suicidally goes barking MAD – as in mutually assured destruction!…Fleet Street agenda is the victors’ agenda which assumes this war of attrition is over. As for the losers, they have no choice but to shut up and put up with Whiteman’s world order: a world pulverised by White imperialism and then blended with White supremacist recipe into a multi-racial cocktail that is promoted as elixir of harmony for the human society at large. I disagree.

Q: You founded The Atlantic Storm?

A: Yes. For my father. He made me aware that the Atlantic Road in Brixton was more than coincidence in name. He said the Brixton Riots confirmed Atlantic Road as a live battlefront of The Transatlantic Holocaust. Also, the riots manifested the communal Day Of Reckoning for the black population of Brixton. A few decades earlier, High Priest Zephaniah of the Rastafarian spiritual persuasion had foretold the Day Of Reckoning as a worldwide phenomenon for every black person on earth: “On that day, my Brethren, an incident will trigger a spiritual tsunami when all the horrors of The Transatlantic Holocaust come bearing down on your soul. You would be so crushed by the agony of being black, you would wish you had never been born”.

Q: Really?

A: Yes. My father predicted my own Day of Reckoning when I first came home with news of my admission to Oxford: ‘That place is Whiteman’s Holy of Holies. Son, may God Almighty save you on the day when you discover that there is no room for you there’.

Q: Wow?

A: Indeed! So it was that I was totally devastated by the parcel bomb left at my door with a placard addressed to: “Nigger At Oxford – Which Nigger Farm are you descended from?” …I wailed all the way from Oxford to Brixton, whilst my soul writhed and convulsed in the agony from the multiple wounds inflicted by the horrific details of a manual, How To Make A Nigger Slave, published in the middle of the th 18 Century, and written by an ancestor of a fellow English student in Oxford….My soul was blown to smithereens by the details of the animal production technique of how the Negro – and wild horses – were to be bred, broken and domesticated to become beasts of burden for driving the material prosperity of their White owners.

Q: Lord have mercy?

A: Exactly. My father’s reaction: ‘Let me tell you something else you need to know: No Africans survived!’ He explained: ‘They all went in as Africans, majority physically died, the rest were spiritually slaughtered and turned into zombies popularly known as Niggers’. He asked: ‘Have you ever wondered why no African tribal tongues survived among the Africans who outlived slave trade and slavery?’ He warned: ‘Don’t ever attempt to find out how many of my father’s generation didn’t have any fathers to identify with’. He advised: ‘High Priest Zephaniah says, “To stay alive you must stay deliberate illiterate! Don’t read what the white man has to say about you. Hear no racism, speak no racism, recognise no racism, feel no racism’.

Q: So, why The Atlantic Storm?

A: To recover the Blackman’s Storyline. At least part of it. According to High Priest Zephaniah: “Every living person has a distinct Storyline in the divine drama of Man Alive scripted by Jehovah in The Book Of Life. You are the principal character in your own Storyline. You come of age when your Storyline is revealed at some point in your life. Your Storyline is your divine identity. Life becomes full of meaning when you get to read your Storyline. Equally true, is the trauma of the Day Of Reckoning when you discover that your Storyline has been hijacked and bastardised by someone else”….Thus, High Priest Zephaniah’s doctrine of Deliberate Illiterate is actually inoculation against further assaults of the Day Of Reckoning….My father assured me that he and his peers would not play illiterate with The Atlantic Storm, if the publication gets accepted as the story of black people, written by black people, and for the enlightenment of black people. He was sure Black people who read us would be helped to understand themselves, and many would in the process discover their individual Storylines.

I PASSED THE Mother Africa press release to Ohimini. The Atlantic Storm blasted on its front page: THE HUMAN RACE IS BLACK! Ohimini and I sat to brainstorm on my plan to write feature articles on this subject for both Fleet Street and The Atlantic Storm. But Ohimini’s excitement made it impossible for me to get a word in. He went on, and on and on: how he saw the potential of the story beyond the scope of any social science… no wonder Africans insist on worshipping their ancestors – it is the only way to stay spiritually in tune with creation…how about a letter to Mother Africa?- telling her how her descendants have evolved, the hatred, the love, the variety of skin colours and other physical features, the variety of human habits as in cultures and traditions across the globe…millennia of everything human, the wars, the atrocities, man’s inhumanity to man…can you imagine Fleet Street’s reaction if the story had been that the first human was European?…

Finally, Ohimini recommended a visit to Yunhouse in the north bank of River Thames, a really posh district called Hampstead. He was an active member of Yunhouse. His African baptismal name, Ohimini, (which replaced Joseph Anderson) came from a Yunhouse Chief who said it was an African tribal tongue for the Atlantic Ocean. Yunhouse is the one and only African colony in the whole wide world, he said. At least that’s what the African residents believed. Ancestor worship was alive in Yunhouse. News about Mother Africa was bound to provoke a major event in the Palaver Hall of Yunhouse, an arena where Africa is discussed 24/7 – literally!…