Lalibela is the 3rd Single released off Ugandan HipHop Artist Ajo’s African Reality Album that was released earlier this year on the 29th of June. Lalibela is produced by Uganda renowned producers Koz N Effekt and Nase Avatar.
Lalibela follows the Album theme of pan-africanism and embracing our African Heritage.
This is a song about strength, triumph and celebration of African Liberation. it emphasizes the distinction that Africans can manage their own destinies and advance to greater heights.
This song exudes Africa’s greatness and achievements with reference to some events that shaped African History and individuals in African History that exhibited strength and will to liberate their people and give power back to the blackman.
- Lalibela
Gebre Mesqel Lalibela was a great king of the Zagwe dynasty in Ethiopia whose reign lasted forty years, spanning the end of the 12th century and the opening decades of the 13th.
He is credited with the building of the rock-hewn churches in Roha, later renamed in his honor. Emperor and Saint – Lalibela is celebrated by the Ethiopian Tewadeho Orthodox Church on the 12th of Sene or June 19th.
According to a well-known fable, a swarm of bees surrounded the infant Lalibela at his birth, a sign which his mother took to be portent of his long and prosperous reign as king.
It is said that King Lalibela built ten of the churches, and his wife built the eleventh one in his honor.
- John Chilembwe
Reverend John Chilembwe, of Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), is a person of mythic proportions in his homeland because he stood for Malawian nationalism against British colonialism.
Around 1890, Chilembwe became a student at the Church of Scotland mission in Blantyre. He was later converted by Joseph Booth, a British Baptist missionary, and became his assistant from 1892 until 1895. Booth worked for a number of churches and had no denominational loyalty; he taught a radical equality that resonated with Chilembwe’s own sense of black pride. In 1897, Booth took Chilembwe to the United States, where a Baptist church sponsored him through Virginia Theological College. Here he seems to have come into contact with contemporary African-American thinking, especially that of Booker T. Washington. He returned to Nyasaland in 1900 as an ordained Baptist and founded the Providence Industrial Mission, which developed into seven schools.
In 1915 John Chilembwe organized and led a revolt against British rule. This revolt came during World War I, in protest of Malawians being conscripted in the British Army and the treatment of workers on plantations. In this same year the British had already been fighting the Germans in northern Nyasaland. The revolt began on Jan. 23, 1915 and ended with the death of Chilembwe on Feb. 4, 1915.
Today Malawians celebrate Chilembwe as a martyr who knew he would not survive the revolt, but who led it anyway. It would be over 50 years before Malawi achieved independence in 1964. In 1965 President Kamuzu Banda, put Chilembwe’s face on a set of four commemorative stamps issued to mark the 50th anniversary of the Uprising. Later His image was put on several of the Kwatcha notes and January 15th declared a national holiday- “John Chilembwe Day”
“It is too late now to talk of what might or might not have been. Whatsoever be the reasons we are invited to join in the war, the fact remains, we are invited to die for Nyasaland. We leave all for the consideration of the Government, we hope in the Mercy of Almighty God, that some day things will turn out well and that Government will recognise our indispensability, and that justice will prevail.”
JOHN CHILEMBWE
On behalf of his countrymen
Nyasaland Times No.48, 26 November, 1914
- Nama and Herero
Present day Namibia was once a part of the imperial German empire. As was common during the scramble for Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the territory was claimed and occupied by an expansionist European power, in this case Germany. Their rule was oppressive and the indigenous cultures were gradually being destroyed.
In January 1904, the Herero people, led by Samuel Maharero, and the Nama people, led by Hendrik Witbooi, rebelled against the German colonial occupation. Their rebellion stood no chance of success against the oppressive German occupation of the region. In response, German General Lothar von Trotha ordered that ‘within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.’ Many were killed in combat, including during the Battle of Waterberg. Others died of dehydration in the desert. Those imprisoned in concentration camps died of disease and exhaustion. These various methods were used to respond to the failed Herero and Nama rebellion. They resulted in the annihilation of approximately 80% of the Herero people and 50% of the Nama.
- Sharpeville Massacre
The Sharpeville massacre was a turning point in South African history. On March 21, 1960, without warning, South African police at Sharpeville, an African township of Vereeninging, south of Johannesburg, shot into a crowd of about 5,000 unarmed anti-pass protesters, killing at least 69 people – many of them shot in the back – and wounding more than 200.
This massacre created a crisis for the apartheid government, both inside the country and internationally. The government immediately declared a State of Emergency and banned political meetings. Within less than a month, it banned both the Pan Africanist Congress, which had organized the action in Sharpeville, and the African National Congress. After lengthy internal discussions, the ANC and PAC turned to armed struggle and went underground. News of the massacre drew immediate international condemnation. The South African stock exchange sank, saved only by loans from a consortium of U.S. banks.
- Volta – Bani War
Rebellion which took place in what is now Burkina Faso and Mali (then parts of French West Africa) between 1915 and 1917. It was a war between an indigenous African army resulting from a heterogeneous coalition including people of different ethnicities who fought the French Army. At its height in 1916 the indigenous forces mustered from 15,000–20,000 men and fought on multiple fronts. After about a year and several setbacks, the French army defeated the insurgents and jailed or executed their leaders but resistance continued until 1917.
- Malagasy Uprising
In 1946, the island of Madagascar became a French overseas territory, prompting the establishment of its first formal political party, called the Mouvement Democratique de la Renovation Malagache (MDRM), whose objective was independence for Madagascar. In less than a year, Malagasy nationalist tribesmen rose in revolt in the island’s eastern part; after receiving reinforcements, resident French soldiers were able to quell it, but not before much bloodshed had occurred (more than 11,000 persons were killed in the fighting). The MDRM was outlawed, and the revolt continued as a guerrilla war through 1948.
- Kongo Wara Rebellion
The Kongo-Wara rebellion, also known as the War of the Hoe Handle and the Baya War, was a rural, anticolonial rebellion in the former colonies of French Equatorial Africa and French Cameroon which began as a result of recruitment of the native population in railway construction and rubber tapping. It was the smallest and least well-known of the French colonial uprisings during the interwar period. Much of the conflict took place in what is now part of the Central African Republic.