ASCAC PAYS HOMAGE TO NANA MOSES

ASCAC PAYS HOMAGE TO NANA MOSES

QUEEN MOTHER HARRIET TUBMAN

By Bro. Zayid Muhammad

“National liberation is necessarily an act of culture...”

-Amilcar Cabral

“Rituals carry the culture…”

-Joy Hardiman

The annual pilgrimage to the gravesite of Malcolm X appears to have spawned other pilgrimages to those of other great race ancestors.

One such expression that been going on for the last several years has the annual retreat of the Association for the Study of Classical Afrikan Civilization (ASCAC) to the home and gravesite of the incredible guerilla commander of our underground, Harriet Tubman in Auburn, New York.

For some years now, ASCAC has emerged as one of the key organizations to play a critical role in the development and spread of Africentric thought.

The Eastern Region of ASCAC, currently under the leadership of LaTrella Thornton, has hosted this one day retreat for several years now, which includes a moving pilgrimage to Tubman’s gravesite, a tour of her home and her memorial library and a lecture by a leading scholar in their ranks.

July 21^st saw this retreat come in in a splendid way, against the backdrop of breezy, cloudless and peaceful day, with proud bearers of the culture coming from as far south as Atlantic City, New Jersey to as far north as Toronto, Canada, caravanning up to the Tubman Estate.

Although many people from all walks of life have flocked to the Tubman Estate since it was declared a historic landmark back in 1953, nearly 50 years ago, few actually visit the gravesite. Recognizing the enormous cultural significance of this, before anything else happens at the ASCAC retreat, everybody gets back on their bus and rolls together to the nearby Fort Hills Cemetery to commune with one of our ancestors in a way that is particular to Afrikan people.

Sis. LaTrella led the gravesite ritual with a moving participatory ceremony.

“I had no fear; You have no fear. I did what I had to do; You do what you have to do,” she had all the participants chant, as if she was allowing herself to be used as a message vehicle for the ancestor to address the people.

With a trio of Harlem drummers in tow, the ceremony included a moving libation, a candle lighting ceremony which focused on the seven shakras and a large circle of umoja and imani, which began with a powerful moment of united silence and ended with each participant individually making their own personal offerings to their powerful warrior woman ancestor. A uniformed official of the New Black Panther Party ended the circle of participation by coming to a full military salute, proudly recognizing the military significance of the Tubman legacy.

“Nana Harriet Tubman is one of the great mothers, guerrillas and generals of our grand tradition of resistance. This is the only way our late national chairman Khallid Abdul Muhammad, who was a proud ASCAC member, by the way, would have us partake in such a ceremony,” he said.

Dr. Joy Hardiman, ASCAC’s national secretary, then did a highly charged lecture on the Tubman legacy using, of course, a classical Afrikan framework.

Using a faith language common to the vernacular of Black folk, Dr. Hardiman said that this great woman was a “modern day reincarnation of Auset (Isis),” the divine female archetype of our ancient ancestors.

Making “a way out of no way,” Harriet Tubman was an “ordinary woman who did extraordinary things” because she believed in and embodied the concept of “the divine in the human being,” she continued. “She took a people who were considered the ‘wretched of the earth,’ and told them to stand up.”

Like Auset, Hardiman went on, Harriet Tubman had to “pick up the pieces” of what had been done to our people and attempt to put them back together. Like Auset, who had to have an enormous faith in order to trust her guide in the underworld, Harriet Tubman also had to have enormous faith to personally “go down into the belly of the beast and know that she would come back, and do that at least 19 times that we know of.”

Extending the framework to analyze and appreciate Tubman’s work on her own land after her military career was over, her creating institutional support for children and for the elderly, and of course, her leaving her newly liberated charges in places where they could receive an education over the course of her military career, Hardiman went further and said that this great ancestor “reinstituted the principle of the ankh,” by using her land, which had the trappings of a plantation and using it to restore dignity to her people.

In 1906, Harriet Tubman turned over her land, some 32 acres with eight buildings on it, to the AME Zion Church. The Harriet Tubman Home is currently maintained under the direction of its curator Rev. Paul Carter and his wife and tour coordinator, Christine Carter. In keeping with this great ancestor’s vision, there are plans to continue to transform the home into the Harriet Tubman Research And Cultural Center, which would include housing accommodations so that it can host conferences, concerts and symposia on a larger scale.

The address of The Harriet Tubman Home is 180 South Street, Auburn, New York 13021. Their telephone number is 315-252-2081. Their website is www.harriettubmanhome.org.

Last year, Harriet Tubman was posthumously enstoolled as a Queen Mother in Ghana.

’Bro. Zayid’ Kazi Angaza Kikongo Muhammad

7/26/01