A Panther in Africa/Mama C Urban Warrior

A Panther in Africa

On October 30, 1969, Pete O'Neal, a young Black Panther in Kansas City,Missouri, was arrested for transporting a gun across state lines. One year later, O'Neal fled the charge, and for over 30 years, he has lived in Tanzania, one of the last American exiles from an era when activists considered themselves at war with the U.S. government. Today, this community organizer confronts very different challenges and finds himself living between two worlds - America and Africa, his radical past and his uncertain future.

Showing of Mama C: Urban Warrior
 
The film explores Mama C’s decade’s long project of coming to terms with who she is—an African American raised in Kansas City, KS, the “jazz-capital of the world,” who has lived most of her life in Africa, the place from where her ancestors were forced to make the “middle-passage.” When she first arrived in Tanzania she tried as hard as she could to “fit in,” wearing khangas, carrying my babies on my back, basket on my head, chewing sugar cane sticks.” As she writes in one of her published poems, “In my freshly-landed, just-got-off-the-boat enthusiasm of living in Africa, I tried to blend, to melt, homogenize, disappear, erase, the essence of what made me who I am, an African, who grew up in and was molded by the ‘hoods’ of America, and I almost lost myself, self.”