Sons of the King [Song]

Uploaded by Blue Cinamon
SONS OF THE KING
By Lou Lyons and Muhammad Muwakil

To the rulers of our fathers,
Think you're goin' rule my life forever?

Do you know what it means to be fighting an ungodly war
And still be at peace?
Do you know how it feels to be living in the biggest cage
And still feel so free
Do you know what it means to be running for all of your life
And still be at ease?
Do you know how it feels to be sitting for all of your days
And then find your feet?

So I'm sending a message loud and clear to the village thieves [fiends?]
They've been winning way too long, killing our dreams
Who you think you fighting?
You should be afraid of these words,
They are bound to come true.

So if they won't open the door, we won't come knocking, not any more,
We're sons of the king.
They won't open the door, we won't come knocking, not any more,
We're sons of the king.
They won't open the door, we won't come knocking, not any more,
We're sons of the king.
They won't open the door, we won't come knocking, not any more,
We're sons of the king.

Source: The lyrics posted on this blog are often transcribed directly from performances. Although it is my intention to faithfully transcribe I do not get all the words and I have a knack for hearing the wrong thing. Please feel free to correct me or to fill in the words that I miss by dropping me a message via e-mail. I'd be forever grateful. Thanks in advance! ..............................................................................................................................
 

A Note From The Gull

Thank you, Lou Lyons and Muhammad Muwakil.

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Maria Roza [Song]

Uploaded by Eddy Kenzo
MARIA ROZA
By Eddy Kenzo [Uganda]

Maria, Ana Maria
Mariaroza yegwe gwe ndowooza
Maria, Mariaroza
Ayi bo, ayi bo-bo-bo nesim yeah

Maria mama roza, Maria mama we
Maria mama roza oh ma life ye.

Mariaroza [sorry] yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Mariaana [sorry] Mariaroza [I'm sorry]
Mariaroza yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Maria ah-ah eh-yah. Ehh.. ahhya.

Emikono egisudde e'buzibba, amagulu ebuvanjuba
Nenesange ebunayila, Maria nga nkunonya
Warayi ya mungu Maria wambula
Jewagenda yewa, ewatatukwa balala
Maria oliwa kubanga onfude ekyelolerwa
Nze eyali ategeela, nzena amagezi ganzigwamu
Eyali amanyi okukwaasa mama emirimu nagwa.

Mariaroza [sorry] yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Mariaana [sorry[ Mariaroza [I'm sorry]
Mariaroza yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Maria ah-ah eh-yah. Ehh.. ahhya. Uhmm yeah yeah
Ayi bo-bo-bo-bo-bo, ayi bo

Kakati nyina e sente nsasula amanyi yo
Amanyi Maria jeyagenda baaba jangu eno
Jangu onyambe baaba obulamu bugenda
Eyali omunene okukome eli kakati nakogga
Nkusaba oje Maria okomewo eweka
I'm sorry, my sweet, sweet lover mama Maria
Nayagala nkole empisa embi mama Maria zewagana
Nayagala nkole indiscipline eye kivubuka
Te amo Maria, je t'aime Mariana
Sorry, my dear, je t'aime Maria.

Mariaroza [sorry] yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Mariaana [sorry] [Mariaroza [sorry]
Mariaroza yegwe gwe ndowooza [I'm sorry]
Maria ah ah eh-yah...
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A Note From The Gull

Thank you, Eddy Kenzo!! And thanks to the comedians, Seka Manala and King Kong, who danced this song of despair into laughter. Ugandan music is sweet, sweet, sweet!

Eddy Kenzo is singing in Luganda [Oluganda is the major language of Uganda]. I don't have the English translation for the lyrics but I found a summary in one of the comments by Abraham Maru below the video.

"He crying his heart out for Mariaroza come to back to him. She is the only woman on his mind and he can not stop thinking about her. He begs for her forgiveness. He is lost without Mariaroza. He has gone, east, west, north and south in search of MariaRoza but she is no where to found. He wonders where she hiding. He has looked far and wide, she's nowhere to be found. He feels lost without MariaRoza. He is sorry that he hurt her. He used to be healthy and happy but since Mariaroza left him he his health is not good. He calls out to anybody that know where Mariaroza is to him to her. He want her to come back home. Their home. His sweet Mariaroza, the woman of his life. The only woman who completes him."

In the spirit of good-natured Trinbagonian/Ugandan humour, I dedicate this video to all people who feel that they have been wronged and are tormented because they cannot escape the fact that they need and rely upon the very persons towards whom they now feel indignation and antagonism.

We have to find a way to come to terms with these virulent emotions which tend to drag us down if we don't find positive ways in which to express them, to expiate them, to let go of them. If you know in your heart that you are blowing things out of proportion, please find a way to get it out of your system. After you dispense the calpets and karate chops like Maria Roza, verbal or otherwise, for your own good and the good of those around you, take a breath, accept the hand extended in peace, smell the sea breeze, and with grace, wheel and come again. None of us have long on this earth but our legacy, as codified in the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, should be viewed as having the power to influence the future for seven generations.

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Dignity

...Sometimes Unapologetically Indignant.

I am pleased to announce that Maximilian Forte on his blog "Zero Anthropology" has been producing a series of blog posts on the topic of Dignity . They include:

1. Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity.

With a conclusion featuring Singing Sandra's "Die With My Dignity" this post begins the exploration of the concept of dignity. It notes the absence of the idea as a concept in the works of most anthropologists, which is unfortunate because the writer believes that "the absence or the silencing of the idea has serious import for how we think others think about the world, and for how we ought to think about the world, while using the idea/concept as a way of questioning the preferred constructs of the institutionalized, liberal elite..." The writer goes on to explore two problems encountered when trying to explore the concept of dignity - the problem of Eurocentrism and his view that there is "no sharp dividing line between “Europe” or the “West” and the nations that either will merely be mentioned in the series, or from which examples and insights are drawn: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Libya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe."

2. A Tear for Africa: Humanitarian Abduction and Reduction.

"Helpless, pleading, wanting, needing, small, weak, staring at you, black–this is the anti-bogeyman invented by Western humanitarianism, what passes as morality in the ideology of empire (yet again). Past the time of a London Missionary Society, we now have the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the moral dogma of a white, western elite that projects its abusive notion of “protection” everywhere it is not wanted." In this post the writer examines this imperialist impulse to bring dignity to the undignified by his exploration of issues like international adoption [with the focus on black children] as abduction, African poverty pornography, anthropology's continuing fixation with those who need fixing and foreign aid as local degradation.

3. Zimbabwe: “Keep your money, keep your power, and keep away from us.”

Here the writer uses the example of Zimbabwe's defiance to illustrate the exercise of dignity - national dignity. A strong leader with a clear vision for his country and one that does not necessarily involve following a script handed to him by outside forces, is determined to see his country attain de facto independence with dignity. It is no surprise that he must continue to run the gauntlet of neocolonialism's grim claw, economic sanctions, negative press - especially by US mainstream media, and internal treason.

The writer concludes, "One expects one’s Prime Minister to fight for one’s country, in other words, one expects dignity." In President Mugabe's own words, “...the legacy I want to leave behind is Zimbabwe without outside interference.”

4. Still Standing: Zimbabwe.

The focus on Zimbabwe continues and in this post we are taken beyond the hypocritical and often self-serving international outcry most often associated with this country's efforts to pull itself up and offered insights into a few issues including Zimbabwe’s successful agrarian reform program which was launched to ensure that the dignity of black Zimbabweans was asserted. In a country where agriculture employed 70% of the population. the 2007 Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act supports the logic of the conviction that "democracy and political stability can therefore not be sustained in a situation where resources remain concentrated in the hands of a few non-indigenous people”. Nor can dignity be sustained where foreign settlers are presumed to be inherently or legally entitled to more than their fair share."

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A Note From The Gull

Thank you, Maximilian Forte, for these informative and thought provoking posts. I am thinking that these should be essential reading for my fellow Trinbagonians as we approach the date of our 50th Anniversary of Independence. National dignity is not something that we talk a lot about in Trinidad and Tobago. We tend to limit our appreciation of dignity to the individual human being but I think that patriots are the ones who see it most clearly at the level of the nation, not only in how we present ourselves or are perceived on the international stage but more importantly in my estimation, in how our country stands up for us locally. Some time ago, activist Ishmael Samad made a very interesting statement in the court where he was eventually to be found guilty and punished for unlawfully and maliciously damaging the gate to John Calder Hart’s home on April 14, 2010.

By way of explanation for his actions on that day, Ishmael Samad said that, “He [John Calder Hart] committed the most heinous, brazen and disgraceful crime of the century..." And while he said he [Ishmael Samad] would never perpetrate such a crime again, Samad said the act would leave a reminder of one man who stood for a cause. “At least the last thing Calder Hart would remember is someone breaking down his gate to arrest him before he fled the country,” Samad said. “I broke the law, but all I was trying to do was save the dignity and respect of the country.”

Ishmael Samad: "I broke the law,
but all I was trying to do was
save the dignity and respect of the country."

Is Ishmael's anger the sort to which Maximilian refers when he says, "...anger is also indignation, and it is an expression rooted in dignity." ?

"Dignity has become complex now for having crossed the lines between the personal, the national, and the geopolitical, where we begin to mix individuals with collectivities, and where one speaks for the other. Dignity also crosses the lines of exchange value and emotional self-affirmation. U.S. national security strategy documents seem to essentially equate dignity with having modern conveniences and cash–in other words, an instumentalist or transactionalist view of dignity that sits well with capitalist values, and makes for easy policy options. In addition to instrumentalizing dignity, U.S. policy documents Westernize it, by reducing dignity to the property of the individual. However, ideas such as national dignity, and black dignity, speak of dignity as the possession of large collectivities–nor are they reducible to pragmatic calculations and seeking monetary gain. “Keep your money”–the lead idea in two of the previous essays, expressly rebels against pragmatism, cash reductions of dignity, and counters dignity as manipulated by men exploiting women, adults shopping for children, or superpowers trying to intimidate barely post-colonial nations. If U.S. policy documents speak of dignity, it is out of recognition that this concept matters to many, hence best for the U.S. to try to produce the representations that it hopes will stick and to define the field for everyone else. One reason why dignity matters so much, as a concept, is that it goes beyond freedom and rights and thus there is a risk for the West that some of the cherished concepts in its intellectual armory, used to wage international propaganda, could evaporate back into the thin air from which they came.

Rights–or more accurately, human rights–tend to privilege the individual, which is one of the reasons for long-standing and widespread criticisms of the idea as a Eurocentric and capitalist one. Freedom, especially in the pronouncements of U.S. political leaders, clearly means free markets, free trade, free flows of capital, and it implies an equivalent system of government where influence, access, and votes are bought and sold, and marshaled by competing groups of entrepreneurs organized in self-serving entities we know as political parties.

Dignity, however, does not imply that any one system of political organization is better or more needed than another. Dignity can exist and thrive in a multi-party state, in a one-party state, in a no-party state, and in a non-state society. No ruler, or form of rule, can take away someone’s dignity–dignity can be denied, suppressed, or ignored, but not taken away, and that makes it quite distinct from either rights or freedom. Moreover, the roots of dignity are fundamentally local, and given the very diverse ways in which it can be perceived and valued, it cannot easily be codified in legal instruments at the international level. In other words, don’t expect a United Nations Charter on the Dignity of Peoples anytime soon. Dignity has no universally agreed upon list of traits–so the concept defies measurement, and it escapes positivism, capitalism, and Western humanitarianism.

Imperialist logics are also defied by dignity, a term that often comes out in the open as a rallying cry in resistance and rebellion. When dignity means a man defending his land, with a pistol in his hand, then dignity can pose an obstacle to imperialist denials of self-determination (another concept which has been very problematic for the United Nations which has tried to co-opt it on the one hand, while denying it on the other).

Finally here, it is also interesting to note that dignity is often symbolized in English with a certain body language: getting up, standing up, staying up, keeping one’s head high, standing straight, lifting up, being uplifted, arising, etc. Certain mental states are also associated in some cases with dignity: consciousness, realization, recognition, and awakening." SOURCE: Still standing: Zimbabwe - By Maximilian Forte

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Where Is Our Calypso Going? [Song]

Uploaded by kaiso22WHERE IS OUR CALYPSO GOING?
By Lord Shorty

I would really like to know what is our musical culture?
Is it calypso or is it soul music from America?
I ask this because I know foreign music has take over my country,
And my calypso is being suppressed and not used to uplift my dignity.
Some say our music is calypso but we ent sure
Because if this was really so,
Of our calypsonians and calypso we should know more
How terrible, of one's culture to know so little.

Chorus:
So I'm asking, Where is our dignity? Oh lord, where is our pride?
Perhaps it leave the country and gone for a ride
Who was Lord Executor? No one know the answer.
Yet everyone of us here know the life story of Louis Armstrong Satchmo.

A radio announcer say, "Calypso is loved only by the old.
The youths of today appreciate no other music but soul."
But I know that this could not be so, how can his conception be the truth,
When our calypso is being played few and far between like Grandma tooth?
Even our Prime Minister quoting foreign songs
He said, "I want to retire. Like a bridge over troubled water,
I am going to lay me down."
Man that ent fair, he should say, "Let me get to hell outta here!"

Chorus:
It makes me wonder, Where is our dignity? Oh lord, where is our pride?
Why must we appreciate more the things from outside?
Foreign music is being entertained, my calypso is going down the drain
We speak of cultural consciousness and they themself who preach, doing stupidness.

Calypso music is sweet and lyrically soul expression
This rhythmic beat is undoubtedly truly Trinidadian
But we allow other countries to claim our calypso as theirs
The authorities have simply neglected our art down through the years
Go to Jamaica, you would hear reggae from dawn til dawn
I don't blame them in any way, I only hope that some good day
We too will catch on
And leave foreign things alone and appreciate what's our own.

Chorus:
Please tell me, Where is our dignity? Oh lord, where is our pride?
Why must we appreciate more the things from outside?
It is time that we should learn, what belongs to us, we should show concern
Every country thinks of their own, so to Trinidadians this I will condone.

Source: The lyrics posted on this blog are often transcribed directly from performances. Although it is my intention to faithfully transcribe I do not get all the words and I have a knack for hearing the wrong thing. Please feel free to correct me or to fill in the words that I miss by dropping me a message via e-mail. I'd be forever grateful. Thanks in advance!
..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Die With My Dignity [Song]

Uploaded by marledebakkerunicorn
DIE WITH MY DIGNITY
By Singing Sandra

You want to help to mind your family,
You want to help your man financially
But nowadays it really very hard
To get a job as a girl in Trinidad
You looking now to find something to do,
You meet a boss man who promise to help you
But when the man lay down the condition,
Nothing else but humiliation.
They want to see your whole anatomy
They want to see wey your doctor never see
They want to do wey your husband never do
Still you ent know if the scamps will hire you
Well, if is all this humiliation
To get a job these days as a woman
Brother, they go keep dey money, I go keep my honey
And die with my dignity!

Some of them done park up already
Yet they sit down waiting like mapepire
Using the power of their cash and position
Waiting to abuse and exploit any woman
To get the work you have to go to bed with he
Become he slave, second wife and deputy
And as a next woman come on the line
He start to tell you, "You ent good, you can't wine."
They want to see you with some fancy, fancy pose
They want to see how you look without your clothes
They want you cock up like a bloody acrobat
Their wife at home, they can't ask she to do that
So before I have to lick down somebody
Or cuss and let the police come for me
Tell them they could keep dey money, I go keep my honey
And die with my dignity!

Looking for work, you might bounce up a fellow
Who might be looking quite handsome and macho
You tell yourself you want to work with he
So you decide to try a ratchifee
But when you done is then you get to know
He wife leave he and gone long time ago
With all the cash he have, he is a failure
The man is nothing but a blinking soucouyant
They want to feel up your navel and your breast
They want to see if you have lota on your chest
The things they want to do you with dey hand
Like if they searching to find the promised land
I am a woman who don't make any skylark
Before I slap them and they die of heart attack
Tell them they could keep dey money, I go keep my honey
And die with my dignity!

It have a lot of women just like me
Who might be not too well off financially
You need a job and you really need it bad
A man decide to help, you must be glad
But if you value yourself as a woman
You will demand respect from the vagabonds
Stand up to them and let them know the truth
Is work you want, you ent no blinking prostitute
You have a mole on your back, they want to see
They want to see if you have marks on your belly
They want to know how much man you had before
And if you strong enough to take any more
I have my pride and I have my ambition
I want to hold my head up high as a woman
So brother, they go keep dey money, I go keep my honey
And die with my dignity!

Source: The lyrics posted on this blog are often transcribed directly from performances. Although it is my intention to faithfully transcribe I do not get all the words and I have a knack for hearing the wrong thing. Please feel free to correct me or to fill in the words that I miss by dropping me a message via e-mail. I'd be forever grateful. Thanks in advance!
..............................................................................................................................




A Note From The Gull

For some reason, the site is being queried for this song so I am happy to present it and the transcribed lyrics. Powerful, powerful stuff!

Thank you, Singing Sandra. This, together with Singing Francine's "Run Away" were among my mother's favourite calypsos. Her dignity was a major, major part of who she was in her life as a woman and she always warned her sons about taking advantage of women, even when the women appear to be willing.

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare