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Staying Aware

High Harmonics: Israel Vibration remembers Bob Marley on Saturday at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium

Music and words highlight the second week of African Awareness Month

By Nicky Baxter

It's black business as usual this second week of African Awareness Month, with a smorgasbord of activities around the South Bay. Significantly, most of the action is being sponsored by area colleges and universities; apparently few organizations--grass-roots or otherwise--have the time, energy or money to mount a celebratory event this year. What follows is a selective, short list of particularly noteworthy happenings.

Santa Clara University plays host to a pair of excellent lectures. On Sunday (noon, Benson Center), Stephanie D. Etukudo discusses the vital subject of black collegians with "African American Students: Issues, Methods of Coping and Resources." Etukudo is currently a psychotherapist in SCU's counseling center and an adjunct faculty member in the department of counseling psychology and education. A respected advocate of issues concerning African and female students, she specializes in, among other things, cross-cultural psychology.

On Tuesday (noon, Benson Center), noted European-Jewish scholar Herbert Aptheker will address "African Americans' Response to Slavery: The Real Truths." Over the last half-century, Aptheker has been a central figure in the nation's socialist movement, writing or editing close to 100 book-length historical treatises scrutinizing African slavery through the prism of Marxist analysis. Mentored by activist-scholar and historian W.E.B. DuBois, Aptheker is considered by some as the great Pan-Africanist's most authoritative archivist. Now in his 80s, Aptheker continues to write and speak on what DuBois often referred to as "the question of the color line." Curiously, though he has resided in the South Bay for many years, Aptheker receives scant media coverage.

On a similar tip, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills presents guest speaker Elena Featherton on Wednesday (Feb. 14) at noon in Library 25. Titled "The Cultural Legacy of Slavery: Examining, Challenging and Overturning Internalized Oppression," the lecture promises to pop plenty of science on the dilemma of the slave mentality, a still far-from-resolved (and wrongfully unacknowledged) psycho-social disease hamstringing the African Diaspora's progress.

Finally, civil rights advocate Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak at San Jose State University, Thursday (Feb. 15) at 7pm. The talk takes place at the Morris Dailey Auditorium.

On the cultural front, SJSU's African Awareness Month Committee, in conjunction with the Associated Students Program Board, hosts Black Recruitment Day (Feb. 8, 7pm, campus ballroom).

For the event, keynote performer Vernon Van will mount his One Man Malcolm X show, which is appropriate, considering that this month marks the 31st anniversary of the African revolutionary's assassination.

February is also the month of reggae ruler Bob Marley's birth. Celebrating Marley's 51st anniversary, Ola's Restaurant and Nightclub in Cupertino presents an evening rocking with reggae fever (Feb. 10, 8pm). Featured artists Boom Shaka will headline; the show also includes guest performances by local acts.

Over the hill, the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium is the site of Bob Marley Day Festival '96 (Feb. 11), featuring a raft of internationally acclaimed acts headed by Israel Vibration. Also on the bill is Shaggy, one of the new rulers of raggamuffin-style reggae. The show starts at 7 pm; advance tickets are $22.50 (BASS).

This evening, (Feb. 8, 10:25pm; repeating Feb. 16 at 10:55pm), KQED-TV (Channel 9) offers a rare interview with Curtis Mayfield, one of the first soul men to incorporate a message in his music. A quick perusal of his gift for creating profoundly moving pop gems tells the story. Songs like "People Get Ready," the gospel-charged "Amen" and "We're a Winner," arriving as they did during the flowering of the civil rights era, came to be closely associated with that movement.

Although some contend that Mayfield's musical peak occurred in the '60s, when he presided over the Impressions' rise to prominence, his solo work in the 1970s (who can forget the rousing pulse of "Move On Up" or his brilliant score for Superfly?) plainly indicated that the Chicago native's gifts were larger than any one group.

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