Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 06, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
Kwayana was born Annie Florence Elizabeth Cook in 1937. She was raised in the small town of Buena Vista, Georgia. As a year old baby in her father’s arms, she was introduced to Jim Crow white supremacy at the point of a gun and was disturbed by degrading threats, as her father wished to get her water from a local restaurant.
She grew up experiencing segregation at restaurants, movie theaters, denial of access to public swimming pools, the ever-present danger of being swindled out of one’s land. She didn’t learn to ride a bicycle or swim for fear by her parents of foul play. They protected her in a Southern culture where mutilated black bodies could be found lynched, at the bottom of wells, or in gutters. But she was also raised in an African American community that prided itself on self-reliance.
Her father, Rev. James John Cook, was a Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) minister, and her mother Mrs. Dorthula Theresa Coan Cook, cut wood in her South Carolina sharecropping home, and worked as a live-in maid in New York to send her brothers and sisters and herself to college.
Her father taught by example that the proper measure of respect with white people was not simply whether they called you by your first or last name, or treated you professionally in a customer service setting while in reality keeping you in your subordinate place. Key for Rev. Cook was whether white people respected you enough to listen to you, discuss philosophy, worldviews, and lend each other books. Those whites whom wished to keep black people in their place did not acknowledge that people of color had something to teach them about culture, or their own self-government, in an exchange of equals.
Tchaiko’s mother taught her about work ethic and believed, at first, that the children should join work gangs, most often led by white men, so they knew how to pick peaches and cotton. Her father agreed these skills should be learned and preserved in their children, but this educational experience of engaging the land should be found among black families in their own community.
Her mother’s and father’s approach to education complemented each other. Her mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse and watched over young girls, even those who became pregnant and were cast out of church communities. She made sure they got their education. She taught Tchaiko to read at four.
Tchaiko recalled that while she changed her name in search of her own identity, (“Tchaiko” in Shona means “one who seeks truth,” and “Ruramai,” her maiden name, means “take a clear path to a given goal,”) she did not anticipate how this would make her mother feel. Her mother, Dorthula, always wanted to live near a historically black college and felt “founder’s day” and graduation ceremonies, marking the overcoming of obstacles to an education, were of communal significance.
Tchaiko studied at Paine College, an HBCU in Augusta, Georgia and later at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. Around the age of 20, Tchaiko became a grade school teacher in Augusta, Georgia, having graduated high school early at the age of 16. Soon by railroad, she would migrate to teach Mexican American farm workers in Texas, work in a child care center for African American migrant farmers in Sherbourne, New York and more affluent students in an education workshop at Fresno State College. When she taught at a Boys High School in Lagos Nigeria, the only female on the staff, she beat all the students and faculty in the 100 yard dash.
From 1960 to 1968, Tchaiko helped form the Donald Warden led Afro-American Association (AAA) in the San Francisco Bay Area, which eventually gave birth in 1966, to Huey Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, Maulana Karenga’s US (“us versus them”) cultural nationalist movement known best for founding the Kwanzaa holiday, and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) that manifested aspects of class struggle and cultural nationalist ideas. As James Smethhurst, a scholar of the Black Arts Movement, has put it: at the same time as Maulana Karenga, Tchaiko pioneered the study of precolonial and ancient African civilizations and projected new philosophies of culture, but without the subordination of women.
The AAA recognized that the vote, formal education, and civil rights didn’t necessarily translate to empowerment, and it was wrong to blindly worship constitutional forms. What was needed was education rooted in African history and culture for the development of autonomous community institutions – the desire to be only Americans and not Afro-Americans made this more difficult because it papered over the history of empire and slavery that made blacks fall outside classical notions of ethnic and immigrant social mobility. Civil rights paved the way for middle and professional classes to thrive but not the marginal working class, unemployed, or street force.
Despite the BPP and US’s later deadly conflict in 1969, their basic principles were not irreconcilable. Maulana Karenga was insightful that meditations on African languages and history could produce new philosophical and epistemic breakthroughs. If Huey Newton’s initial criticism of RAM was unnecessarily harsh, Newton was also correct that the AAA had an insufficient critique of capitalism, and confrontation with police brutality was needed. But Newton was part of those who originated these radical breakthroughs after a period of intellectual development. Many were mentored toward deeper conclusions through critical dialogues as young college students by the AAA as personified by Warden, Kwayana, and others who were a few years older. This was before or concurrent with historical moments such as Malcolm X breaking with the Nation of Islam (1963-1964), Malcolm’s death in February 1965, and the Black Power and Black Studies rebellions of 1966-1971. Tchaiko was innovating and organizing before these became mass movements.
In the period Tchaiko taught in Nigeria (1962-1964), she became inspired by those who participated in Wole Soyinka’s 1960 Black Masks group. They heightened her awareness of pidgin or creole English, as a phenomenon that like Gullah/Geechee heritage in South Carolina and Georgia, contained African cultural retentions and knowledge systems, but also was a gateway to better understanding the thought of Black toilers. She spent her holidays in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana where a large African American community had settled led by Maya Angelou before Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Soon Tchaiko would develop lifelong friendships with the artists Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence, and until his death, a close friendship with Langston Hughes when she had her apartment in Harlem. Tchaiko also became close with Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka.
In 1968 Tchaiko (still as Ann Cook) published her first major article, “Black Pride: Some Contradictions?” that became serialized in the popular journals of the period through 1970 such as Hoyt Fuller’s Negro Digest (soon to be renamed Black World), and Jitu Weusi’s Black News. Her article was also in conversation with debate about the need for independent Black media and communications in Soulbook, a unique theoretical journal that brought together activists of the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Republic of New Africa but also activists of Guyana, South Africa, and Ghana to discuss the emerging conflicting tendencies in the black liberation movement.
Matthew Quest
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