I have told this story before. It is one that Tsitsi Dangarembga bravely revealed through the voice of a young girl in a village in Zimbabwe (Nervous Conditions). Ever since she could remember, Tambu has listened to the wisdom of her grandmother. Along with other children in the village, she absorbed the history �that could not be found in the textbooks� about the conquest and the warrior�s resistance to that conquest from a woman �who had been an inexorable cultivator of land, sower of seeds and reaper of rich harvests until...her very last moment.�

Before the grandmother dies, the �wizards� arrive in the village. The wizards, the grandmother learns, have no �use for women and children.� People were removed from their lands and even the grandmother�s third son, �enticed� by the �wizard�s whispers of riches and luxury,� was, with his family, lured into slavery. In time, the grandmother heard stories of how the men were being killed or maimed from work in the mines. Her own husband was killed and she was left with six children to support. Other wizards arrived and establishing missions near the homestead, announced themselves as �holy,� similar �but not of them,� the first wizards - so she believed. She begged the holy wizards to take her nine year old son, Babamukuru, and �prepare him for the life in their world.� Accepted at the missionary school, the wizards, the holy wizards, put the young boy to work on a farm by day and educated him �in their wizardry� by night.

Tambu�s grandmother continued to tell the village children stories, only now the �fairy-tale� of the very grown Babamukuru�s �success,� from nothing to manager of the missionary school, aspired the young children to look up towards the heavens where the wizards reigned.

Work hard and obey the rules! Receive enough of a salary to �reduce the meagerness� of family life! �For there is no other way,� the grandmother insists!

Tambu agrees, for a while, until she has the opportunity to attend school and comes to live with her uncle�s family just returned from England. There she meets her cousin�s mother, educated yet restrained from escaping her cell bars by the dictates of the wizard�s religious and therefore patriarchal bent. The cousin, Tambu discovers, is in worse shape; she is virtually in a state of physical as well as mental deterioration. Having consumed so much of the wizard�s understanding of the world, Nyasha recognizes her inability to function within her community, and worse, confined to her father�s home and his authority, must accept this passive existence as the only way in which she can contribute to the community. After all, Babamukuru�s first duty to the holy wizards is to wrestle from the devil the minds, bodies, and souls of the women (still in possession of strange desires to fly) while preparing the boys and young men to follow his example. Nyasha has decided that if she cannot live as a human being then she will not live.

From her grandmother, Tambu, unlike Nyasha, inherits the history of conquest and resistance - before the corruption and capitulation of her elders. As a result, she is able to witness what that corruption and capitulation yields, that is, a tragedy worse than anything Shakespeare could imagine.

Nothing ever happens once, Faulkner tells us.

Our problem is that unlike Tambu, we cannot see how our narratives of the conquest and our resistance have been corrupted and made to encourage the interests of current-day corporate wizards. Four hundred years of freedom activism is outdated in the age of post racism. Wizardry obscures Dr. King�s charge that America has handed Black Americans a bounced check, and even a notorious wizard like Glenn Beck hijacks the rebel�s narrative to galvanize pre-dominantly white workers to �take back America� from infidel and indolent. Unlike Tambu, too, so many Black Americans aspire to be Babamukuru, with the power to further repress his own in exchange for a little reduction of the meagerness in their lives. For many of them believe there is no other way.

You can go far when you become the favorite boy of the gods - as we in the U.S. have come to know. The lines of the holy and secular are blurred in Chicago. Watch how the Babamukurus, standing before a ruckus choir predominantly consisting of women, create their own fairy tales in which they star as dedicated servants for the public good. Melancholic violins would be more appropriate for those Babamukurus soon to fly about the wizard, Daley the Younger, praising his reign, with thoughts of a Babamukuru in Chicago and one in Washington D.C. �Yuwi!�

In the meantime, the heads of the masses for some time have been barely visible above water.

Here is the reality - an excerpt from Steven Greenhouse�s book, The Big Squeeze reprinted in the New York Times, May 25, 2010: workers in the U.S. have been screwed by the wizards! All workers! Greenhouse spells it out:

Get that! Income inequality in the U.S. resembles the inequality of a �third world� country! Now somewhere in the above quote are those who have never known anything else but a �third world� experience in the U.S. Somewhere in this reality check are those the U.S. never wanted as slaves not workers. Somewhere in this reality faced by newcomers, poverty has always been the norm.

Poison in the well is ultimately contaminated water in the well for everyone.

�For millions of low-income workers,� Greenhouse points out, �the promise of America has been broken: the promise that if you work hard, you will be rewarded with a decent living, the promise that if you do an honest day's work, you will earn enough to feed, clothe, and shelter your family.� How many of these �low-income workers� heard the �work hard and obey the rules� long before the fall of 2008? How many watched the Babamukurus help facilitate the breaking of that promise by supporting the family values narrative, featuring corporate family values?

The Babamukurus have been and still are enablers of fascism. For them, a revolution has occurred but not one of and for the people they claim to lead. When the government gives the green light to corporations to remove jobs, education, health care, and Blacks themselves from desolate urban areas that become upscale neighborhoods for others while confining the removed to the concentration camps called hoods, the Babamukurus have been there accepting IOUs for a job well done but urging the masses of Blacks to be responsible for their behavior. The role of the grandmother, usurped by the Babamukurus, Grand Patriarchs of the Promised Land Narrative, offer praise to the New World Order with anniversary celebrations of the dead and bygone resistance movements. Yes, a revolution that would have sickened Douglass and King! Glenn Beck�s charade of alarm is nothing more than an effort to assure America and the world that all is well: Reverend this and Reverend that has everything under control - for us.

The Tambus, here, did not rise to the challenge when confronted with the suffering of Nyashas and Nhamos (brother of Tambu). To return home to sulk in the garden or to become self-absorbed in fashion is to prostrate in praise of the tried and tested method for controlling the Black masses. It is to decide to accept passivity and call it �living.� There is nothing out of the norm worth writing about! To be sure, the Babamukurus shouted, Yuwi!

Did anyone really believe that the oppression of Black workers through cleverly crafted-post civil rights clauses, the campaign to end Affirmative Action, the drug disparity sentencing, the government infiltration of workers unions, and the school-to-prison educational programs would halt with just the death of Black Americans? Nothing ever happens once and once in the world happens to just one people.

It is no wonder our young, with no Tambus in sight to rescue them from the now multi-racial wizards, are suffering from disillusion and nervous conditions. [1]

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.