0:49AAnd that motivated me to, you know, start writing the history to educate other people because I realized If I didn’t know this history and it was such an awakening to finally get a hold of this history, I’m sure other people have the same experience. So I just started to write this history to get it out there because another issue too with African history, it’s very difficult to find good sources on our history in terms of, I mean, a book. And you could, I mean, just like an experiment you could do, just walk into any bookstore, for example, like a Barnes& Noble, compare the section on European history.
1:21CYeah.
1:21Ato what they have on African history. So it’s very difficult. So my motivation was to just, you know, write those books. I’ve written 17 books in total. So yeah, I just kept researching and kept writing because I wanted to get that information out there so it’s available for people.
1:37CDo you have a website?
1:41ANot a personal website, but, um --
1:42CBecause you’re live right now, there’s a whole lot of people looking at you and they will go right to wherever you say.
1:48AI do have a Facebook page.
1:50COkay, just spell out your name and everything if you want to.
1:53AI mean, yes, so Dwayne Wong Omowale, Pan-African Writers, um, the Facebook page. So yes, all right, so, uh, Dwayne, uh, D-W -- I’ll put it up after. Okay, but I spelled it out. So it’s Dwayne, D-W-A-Y-N-E, Wong, W-O-N-G, Omowale, that’s O-M-O-W-A-L-E. And that’s what you’re talking about with African names.
2:20BRight.
2:20ABecause one of the first things I did when I started doing my research was I gave myself the name Omowale. It’s an African name that means the child returns home. Now, I haven’t actually physically gone back to Africa yet, so what that name represented to me was a psychological and a spiritual and a cultural return back to Africa. And like you were saying, it’d be great for our people to be able to actually go back to Africa, go back to roots. But even if you can’t make it back to Africa, you can still revive Africa within yourself. So that’s the process I went through.
2:49CExactly.
2:50AAnd even the culture, because a lot of us think we’ve been so many centuries removed from Africa now, we’re not Africans. And one of the things I learned from doing my research on African history and African culture, so much of that culture survived and we don’t even realize it. For example, I’m from the Caribbean. You know, we speak a Krey language.
3:10BRight.
3:11AAnd for a lot of us in the Caribbean, it’s like, you know, don’t speak that, it’s broken English, it’s not proper. And then I started doing the research and I realized the reason why we speak that way, that’s our African languages coming out. So, you know, no matter how much the slave masters whipped us and beat us and forced their language on us, they could never get us away from speaking our original African languages. So that’s why we speak those languages. We still have a lot of African foods. And I spoke here one time during Black History Month and I gave a list of even African words that we still use that we don’t realize are African words, but we use them.
3:42CGive us one or two.
3:43AWell, one of my favorite ones is kankasa, means deceit or trickery. Anansi is very popular, the Anansi stories. We still tell the Anansi stories throughout the Caribbean. Kaiso is a very popular music art form in the Caribbean and kaiso comes from an African word, Rara, that’s Haitian, that’s Haitian carnival music, that’s a Yoruba word. So as I’m saying, this is a culture, it’s there, but if you don’t make that connection to Africa and if you don’t study that culture and history, you won’t even realize how African we still are even though we’ve been removed from Africa for many centuries. We’ve undergone a process of having our history and our culture stolen from us, but we’re still an African people.
4:27AYou still see the culture there in our language, our foods. You were talking about music, you know, a lot of us here in the diaspora, we don’t really, because we’re so disconnected from Africa, that, you know, we’re not connected to what goes on there. And the thing that really caught my attention is when I started paying attention to African culture, African music. African music, that’s our music. You look at any African music video, all those dance moves that you see in African music videos, the Nigerian, the Ghanaian music videos, those are the same dance moves you’d see in like a Jamaican dancehall or Hip-hop.
4:58CZulu mbatho.
5:00AYes, so as hard as they’ve tried to, you know, take our African identity from us, it’s still there. But, um, but as I said, it’s not readily apparent to us, so you have to make that connection. You have to study the history and the culture. So that was just, you know, what motivated me to write these many books, as I had to get our people to be more aware of the history and to be more aware of the African connection. Because when you are aware of that, you become more aware of yourself and you have a better understanding Years old.
5:24BAbsolutely, my brother. Good to be here. I appreciate you.
