COOLER THAN THE FIST ON AN AFRO PICK

Happily Natural Day is a powerful summer festival dedicated to holistic health, cultural awareness and social change. In effect for the last 6 years, The Happily Natural Festival has featured noted Artist and Activists such as; dead prez, The FTP Movement, Queen Afua, Ashra Kwesi, Iyapiphany, and Professor Griff (Public Enemy). We wanted to go to the mind behind the gun, Duron Chavis aka Brother Manifest, to find out what’s really good with Happily Natural.

TheSoulPlanet.com: You are the Founder of the Happily Natural Festival. Can you explain to us what is Happily Natural and what is the purpose of it?

Brother Manifest: Happily Natural Day is a community event that promotes holistic health, cultural awareness and social change. We advocate for African people loving who they are naturally because colonization and slavery instilled an inferiority complex in our people that can be most apparently seen in how we relate to our external i.e. skin & hair; nappy vs. straight; dark skinned vs. light skinned. We take a specific stance on redefining our aesthetic. We promote being proud of being black. We promote loving yourself. Loving yourself means taking care of your body, your spirit, your mind. in a world that seeks to white you out.

Happily Natural Day is a liberation zone we create every summer, to bring together African people for the purpose of loving themselves. We create economic empowerment opportunities for black businesses and learning opportunities for people of all levels of consciousness. We combine music and educational workshops to filter information through to those in attendance. Another reason we do Happily Natural Day is because the consciousness is at an all time low in the black community. We seek to raise that consciousness up out of the present apathy and ignorance to a level wherein the present state of our community becomes intolerable. That’s where the social change aspect comes in. Once people have been educated out of ignorance, it is still easy to become trapped in apathy, by incorporating organizations dedicated specifically to making a difference in the African community. The festival gives people in attendance a channel through which to filter that energy.

The purpose of Happily Natural is to inspire you to incorporate African culture into your life, cultivate optimum wellness, and make a difference in your community. Loving blackness is revolutionary. Once you get centered in your culture; balance your health and then you can makes steps to improve your community.

TheSoulPlanet.com: What do you feel the role of the Cultural Worker is in the Liberation Struggle?

Brother Manifest: Culture is your way of life, and African people have been divorced from their culture due to white supremacy i.e. slavery & colonization. The role of the cultural worker is to re-instill those elements that will push our people forward. Culture centers you. Your culture explains who you are in relation to your ancestry, where you came from. The cultural worker is a preservationist, a beacon because it guides us as to what we have lost, and where we have to go to get ourselves together. Beyond that the cultural worker is the artist, the musician, the writer, the poet, the dancer. The cultural worker popularizes liberation by bringing freedom into the everyday thought and psyche of the people. The cultural worker is a propagandist, through the cultivation of art, inspired by the traditions and heritage of our people; catapulting our past glory; revolutionary ideals; disdain with oppression, into our present frame of reference to inspire a brighter future. Think about it. When you see a picture of a sister with an afro with her fist up. No words on the picture. Just a sister with an afro and her fist up in black in white. That idea that your mind conceives through that image is a by-product of your culture. So the cultural worker has an integral role in the liberation struggle. Emory Douglas was a cultural worker, I feel like he left us with a good example of what the role of the cultural worker is.

TheSoulPlanet.com: What role does the student play in the Movement for Self Determination?

Brother Manifest: The student is very important. We are all students, but college students are critical to the movement for self-determination because at this time, the students are our next teachers, educators, professors and they are the extension to the generation that post dates them.

Students also have the keys to a great number of resources that they often take for granted. Students can organize events funded solely by their offices of multi-cultural affairs, organizations and student unions with funds that the community simply does not have immediate access to. Students with a revolutionary consciousness can start organizations and bring speakers and activists to their schools and raise the consciousness of others in their student body. More importantly students with a revolutionary consciousness can form relationships with the communities they live in and build the community their school resides in, using the resources that the colleges have.

The only caveat to the student’s role in the movement for self-determination is that being a college student is a transient position. You are a student for at best 4 to 6 years, after that there is void in student leadership unless significant efforts are made to lateral the keys to success to students coming after you.

We have to always reference history and look at organizations like SNCC, the Black Panther Party and the uprisings on college campuses during the 60's & 70's that created the African Studies programs that we see today.

TheSoulPlanet.com: You are based out of Richmond; V.A. What historical role has Afrikans in your area played in the Struggle?

Brother Manifest: Virginia is and has been home to a great many ancestors, including Maggie Walker who formed one of the first black owned banks in the early 1900's. Black people during the segregated south in Virginia had ownership of their communities by owning our own insurance companies and trade schools. That doesn't exist today to any significant degree when you contrast it to the segregated south. You also have people such as Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner who both were freedom fighters during slavery, who gave their lives to set our people free. You have the maroon communities that existed right here during slavery where our ancestors escaped and connected with the indigenous people, right here in Virginia. During the Civil Rights era you had people like Oliver Hill, whose efforts in the legal system broke down barriers in the Brown Vs. Board Of Education case that desegregated public schools. Danville VA was the birthplace of Clarence 13x, who is the founder of the Nation of Gods and Earths. Virginia was the first place that this imperialist empire brought us i.e. Jamestown. So Virginia is the starting point of this disease we call white supremacy.

TheSoulPlanet.com: As an organizer what is your main focus? What would you like to see accomplished?

Brother Manifest: My main focus is raising consciousness. I want to see African people with a higher consciousness and understanding of who they are, who they were and what they can be. To accomplish that I create programs and events to educate and inspire black people young and old. I would like for our people to get conscious and think collective. Collective means all of us, not just my organization, or my family, or my coalition, but all of us. To get conscious means to educate one-self, to raise your self-awareness. We are black people, what does that mean? Who were we before slavery and colonization? Was our health better? Was our social system better? Was our family structure better? What are those things like now? What is the reason for our current condition? Answering these questions honestly allows us to have a consciousness that understands what we need to be doing to prevent our continued exploitation oppression and genocide.

TheSoulPlanet.com: Hip Hop Artist Nas said, “Hip Hop is dead”. Do you feel the Movement is dead?

Brother Manifest: Not at all. I feel the movement is alive, it is just evolving, taking on a different shape to cope with the changes in our society. I feel that the movement is global; we can understand that now that white supremacy in America is white supremacy in Venezuela. There is no difference only the complexion of the oppressor and the type of tools they use to exploit the masses, but it all flows back into the pockets of the same Western invader from 5,000 years ago.

I think Hip-hop and the movement are parallels, in that if we look at what is happening to hip hop and think about what is happening to the movement we can get some very enlightening insights. For instance, in Hip Hop you have a concept called payola, where the record labels pay the radio station for a certain type of b.s song to get played everyday. This is a fact, and it is the reason you only get to hear laffy taffy and not dead prez on the 5'o'clock rush hour drive. Apply that to the movement. You have certain black people you get to hear from on the news or in the public discourse. The revolutionaries are marginalized and pushed to the side. In this context you would hear from a Henry Louis Gates but you wouldn’t hear from Rev. Phil Valentine. The people hear from the paid for music/paid for intellectuals and they adhere to the worldview and behavior that these conduits promote. So the consciousness gets stuck at that level because the people are programmed by the continuous promotion of the ideas they are introduced to via radio, TV, newspapers etc.

The movement is resurging though, I feel like it is more prevalent every year, because I see so many people attending events like Happily Natural Day from further and further away. I went to London had a red, black and green flag and met comrades that were able to help me get to and fro simply on the strength of our understanding of what is going on in the world; our commonality was Garveyism. I had broken conversations with people from other countries who could all identify with the icons and ideas that we promote through Happily Natural Day so I feel like the movement is alive, but we are in need of a tool for mass mobilization that is completely different from the mass march and protest idea. I think that shit is dead. We are not gonna protest white supremacy away. We are not gonna march it away. SO if that is somebody's idea of the movement that shit is dead. We are on a new page today. Not that the marches and protests don't have a place, they are tactics but are not the movement in and of themselves.

TheSoulPlanet.com: Some Elders say the youth have dropped the ball when it comes to Activism. Do you agree with this or are there still youth actively engaged?

Brother Manifest: I am 28. I started working in the community when I was 20, 21 years old. I got blessed by older brothers and sisters but not the civil rights vanguard. I was influenced by the Nuwabian Nation and the Nation of Gods and Earths; people who were in the community who talked about black consciousness. The academia that many from the civil rights vanguard moved into after the 70's didn't come to the projects and ghettos where people were getting high, getting shot, selling dope. But the NGE was there; the Nuwabians were there, because they lived there, they sold incense, jewelry, books and oils on the corner there.

I don't agree that the youth have dropped the ball. I feel as though we all young and old underestimated the amount of resources that white supremacy would use to keep us confused. I think that because of Cointelpro and the FBI's war on Black America it was hard to pass the torch. Nobody really talks about our story in the school system, families who were in the movement, their children are active and are extensions of their parents work but on a wide basis, many of the children of Black America rely on the schools to educate their offspring.

I was always soaking up knowledge when I was younger, I read a lot. So I think the elders did a good job documenting what was going on considering that the 60's and 70's was a traumatic experience for a lot of them. Seeing your friends locked up, assassinated, harassed and then to see the drugs pumped into the communities to quelch the revolution was a hard thing I would imagine. But the fact is that the youth needs to know what happened and understand that the future depends on them. Without knowledge from the elders, the youth will simply reinvent the wheel; we will keep going around in circles. The Soulplanet is an example of the generation post civil rights coming of age and moving the movement to a new place given the technology available.

Without a doubt, activism as it existed in the 60's and 70's is not alive in 2008, however we must understand that we didn’t know what the enemy was going to throw at us 40 years ago. Now we know. What I do find is that the elders who were serious about activism maintained a connection to the youth, while others sought other things. Look at Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Ashanti Alston as examples. They work with the youth today based on their experiences as Panthers and BLA. They kept the connection alive. We have to seek them out, there are a great many of our elders who are locked up as political prisoners for crimes they didn’t commit, which tells you that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for us, the generation after them and for our babies, babies.

Yet the fact that there are youth engaging the system today at all is a plus. We have to understand that this system does not want you or I to organize, to be active in the cause of African liberation. That is why the school system still teaches lies, Columbus discovered America, the Indians were savages, and African people had no culture before slavery. All these ideas reinforce the power-relationship between Western Civilization and everybody else.

TheSoulPlanet.com: What is your take on the upcoming presidential election?

Brother Manifest: I am really, really concerned. My theory is this. We have experienced 8 years of dictatorship under George Bush. We watched him get selected, not elected in 2000 and 2004. Nobody speaks of the Florida and Ohio voter fraud anymore. It is as if it didn’t happen. For that reason amongst many others, I know that whomever the system wants in office they will put in office. We know George Bush is a puppet. The figurehead to a much more diabolical system. My theory is that the system gave you a wolf overtly in the form of George Bush. Why would the system allow Barack Obama in to make a difference for the poor and oppressed masses? Cointelpro had a goal, to prevent the rise of a black messiah. While Sundiata Acoli is still locked up, while Mumia is still locked up, the system gives you Obama as the messiah that will solve all the problems. And everybody gobbles it up because the people are so tired of being oppressed they need something to hope for, they need somebody that will make it all better. That is the messiah complex in full effect. The system put so much pressure on the people that anything looks better than bush.

I may lose a lot of friends because of this, but I feel like Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His voting for the FISA bill that allowed wire tapping on our phones, which is in violation of privacy. He promised the Jewish community billions of dollars, but said that he cannot support reparations for black people. Obama is pro-Israel. How can he be so given the historical analysis of Israel/Palestine? His advisor was Zibrig Brisenski, the author of the Grand Chessboard, who basically indicated that the US should lock down the Middle East because the energy resources that it holds are the last piece to the Western Empire. He indicated that after the Sean Bell incident and the police were acquitted of the charges that we should respect the judges ruling. What? Respect what? These are all questions that need answers, and those answers are not pretty.

The system has virtually blacked out the Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente ticket. Which is interesting because with Palin running as vice president, here you have an all female all black ticket - which basically trumps both Obama and McCain. But they get no coverage. I wonder why? Well let’s start with because they aren't in the pocket of any corporations and that the McKinney/Clemente ticket are really connected to the grassroots people who work beyond the election cycle. So this is another case of the system given you a choice and you choosing who they want you to choose. They want you to choose Obama. But I study history. A black face in leadership is no better and in fact worse than a white face in leadership; when that black face espouses the worldview of the white supremacy and Western Hegemony. Obama is the rise of neo-colonialism in America.

For more info on Happily Natural Day go to www.Happilynaturalday.com and for Booking Brother Manifest go to www.TheSoulplanet.com