21/07/2023
It is our pleasure to present to you:
🥁 🥁 🥁🥁 🥁 🥁🥁 🥁 🥁🥁 🥁 🥁
The African Renaissance Community!
1. The Logo:
First designed & tattooed on the Founder's forearm, the logo predates the European Civilisation that whitewashed African heritage.
The ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tale, represents a truth about our journey from ancestor, to human, to ancestor again. It means we consume ourselves in one form to give life to the next. , , , , .
The sacred geometric pattern that populates the ouroboros is the flower of life. It represents the interconnectedness of all life. Animate and inanimate beings. Past to present to future. Ancestor to Human to Ancestor. Time and space and eternity.
2. The context of the images that follow, and indeed the creation of the ARC, can be summed up in the following exert from the speech by President Thabo Mbeki at the inauguration of the African Renaissance Institute in Pretoria, 1999:
"...I am convinced that all of us present here share a common vision in favour of African unity and solidarity, African development and renewal and an end to the marginalisation of our Continent in world affairs and development processes.
*It would seem to us vitally necessary that whereas, for some time, the achievement of these objectives has been left to our governments, it is necessary that we return this vision to the people.
We are therefore of the firm view that there is a critically important and urgent need to develop a Popular Movement for the African Renaissance.*
Accordingly, we believe that political organisations and governments in all African countries should be mobilised to act in furtherance of the objectives of the African Renaissance.
Equally, the masses and their organisations in all African countries should similarly be mobilised and drawn into action.
We must also pay attention to the intelligentsia, the professionals, the trade unions, business people, women and the youth, the traditional leaders, cultural workers, the media and so on, to bring them into the popular struggle for Africa's rebirth..."
Karibu sana ✊🏾
