adminLupe Fiasco.
You can be forgiven for not knowing him: I have not met people who say they are his fans and I cannot say I like his type of music, either.
Thirty-one-year-old Lupe Fiasco, whose real name is Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, is also a record producer, and entrepreneur.
He debuted in 2006 with an album called, “Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor.”
Perhaps his greatest claim to fame, or notoriety, depending on whose side the ox is gored, are his controversial and iconoclastic lyrics and views, especially in light of his country’s so-called war on terror.
The song with the above lines, entitled “Words I never said”, is especially poignant.
He says, in part, “I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bulls**t/Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets/How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it . . .”
Apart from these “conspiracy theories” he also protests social spending cuts which affect education, and that “(when) Gaza strip was getting bombed, (President) Obama didn’t say sh*t/That’s why I ain’t vote for him . . . ”
That is not all.
In 2011, in an interview with a TV station, he called President Obama a terrorist.
“To me,” he said, “the biggest terrorist is Obama in the United States of America. I’m trying to fight the terrorism that’s causing the other forms of terrorism. You know the root cause of terrorists is the stuff the US government allows to happen. The foreign policies that we have in place in different countries that inspire people to become terrorists.”
And a couple of weeks ago when Obama was inaugurated for the second time, Lupe was at it again, as he sang “Words I never said” at the inauguration gig, which reportedly earned him a boot from the stage.
(Organisers, of course, deny this claiming he had become monotonous, etc)
Lupe must be a very brave and audacious young man, who knows how to use his rights and certainly he is not foolish.
He has decided to fearlessly tackle what he perceives are the big lies of his time — at a time when the big weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass deception are trained at the world.
He risks ostracisation.
People may think he is mad.
When this week I mentioned him to a couple of guys here, so many thousand miles away, they thought as much of him.
Yet there is something special in standing up for your views and especially so for the oppressed people, like the nameless ones in Gaza, who do not have any powerful voice to speak for them.
Lupe says he doesn’t vote — won’t vote — for US presidents because “I don’t want you to bomb some village in the middle of nowhere.”
I have lately been thinking of Lupe, who is climes away in Chicago, because of something that happened in Zimbabwe’s fourth city of Mutare recently.
A couple weeks ago a woman, Sheila Mutsenhu, stripped to her barest minimum when the US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Bruce Wharton, visited the border city. Sheila, who says she is a teacher by profession and a mother of two, stripped in protest over the US’ maintenance of sanctions against Zimbabwe.
One President George W. Bush, a bomber of villages in Iraq and Afghanistan, imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2001, for Zimbabwe’s crime of redistributing land from a rich landed tiny minority white population to the vast majority of blacks who had been condemned to arid land for 110 years.
The sanctions have been renewed and maintained by Lupe’s Obama, who in his own right, is a bomber of villages in pursuance of the war on terror.
Sheila is such a brave woman and accusations and flak, morally and politically, have come her way in some deluge.
People who take a stand, writers and thinkers included, are bound to.
They will be labelled and they may be punished.
But Sheila made her point.
She told this paper in an interview last week that: “When a woman strips, it is the highest level of protest. It is a sign of utter disgust. I thought it was the language he understands the most because every other channel has failed. Negotiations for the removal of the illegal sanctions have failed; the two million signatures have not worked; trips to the US and Europe have not worked. Maybe this one will work.”
In a brief talk with Sheila, she told me she had nothing to lose — or fear — when the leadership of this country has been subjected to sanctions and restrictions.
And she cared less for being barred from travelling to the US, as such an action might earn her, because she does not need to travel there in the first place.
Perhaps she is naive to think she does not want to go to the land of opportunity!
Or maybe not.
Yet she has a conviction that the US and its allies have no right to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Which makes her something special — especially at a time when some people, including her “homies” like Farai Maguwu that dubious “diamond activist”, make a lot of money by encouraging sanctions that hurt the ordinary people. Sheila won’’t receive “international” awards or suchlike trinkets.
Sheila may not even get any recognition at home.
Her small-time business as a restaurateur may suffer.
However, she stands atop the pile of many protesters because she has dared stand up against a monster and a bully called the West when others are cowed or kowtow or see opportunities to make filthy lucre in identifying with the bully.
Many people who have spoken against sanctions – this writer included: and I was part of the thousands that attended the launch of the Anti-Sanctions Campaign, whatever happened to it — know exactly the consequences.
But it cannot take the legitimacy in opposing the unholy, dastardly and cynical situation in which one country or a group of countries uses their unduly big muscles to coerce smaller nations into behaving despite themselves.
It is simply wrong. Sheila was right.
And was it not a US woman, Cynthia Mckinney, a lawmaker, who strongly opposed sanctions against Zimbabwe as she described the measures as racist and bent on formenting regime change in Zimbabwe?
She said then: “When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a programme to maintain white-skin privilege.
“We can call it an ‘incentives’ bill, but that does not change its essential ‘sanctions’ nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans.”
In Lupe’s book, these are words that were so loud inside Sheila’s head — and they are words that she said!
Online Reporter