So it's February and its that time again for da da da daaaaaa AFRICAN HISTORY Month, the time of the year when we all take that ONE month to recognize people of African Descent and their accomplishments..do I sound a bit jaded, well I think its great that African peoples have time dedicated to their history and continued accomplishments, but the jaded part comes from African History and Canadian African History that has contributed to the greatness of Canada not being part of the Ministry of Educations mandate to teach throughout the year, especially when our African boys are dropping out at the rate of 58%, the last time I checked. That being said and all politics aside I was truly inspired and humbled to be part of Ursula Franklin Academy Black History Event, on Thursday Feb 9th 2012. I was there representing the Ontario Black History Society who I worked with many summer's ago.(.see never burn any bridges as my mama would say) and I was pleased to see that the event was organized by the youth of the school for ALL students. The youth decided to organize this event because every year they have a speaker in the morning but information goes in one ear and out the other and is generally not engaging to the youth, so they decided to have workshops with different themes that students would attend for the first part of the day. There were a variety of topics and I saw some old friends..yes yes. My workshop was centered around African Principals and pre-slavery ancestors entitled  "Every Lion has a Story" based on the Akan quote;

                                 " Until lions have their historians tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters"

It was a short 45 minutes so it was hard to really get into any in-depth discussions but we what we were able to do was share stories of African Ancestors, play a drama game based on African Principals and connect about youth manifesting their divine purpose as a legacy to ALL our African Ancestors who made self- discovery a way of life not a weekend retreat. I want to document this in print how INSPIRED, MOTIVATED, IMPRESSED and RE-ENERGIZED I was by these youth from our city.The event was very well organized, (I could tell as I have been organizing events since ..well a long time) the youth organizers were helpful, respectful and on-point. I was taken care of, water was even  delivered to my room before each of my three sessions, that's a first for me and I have been doing workshops for almost ten years now, darn I'm getting old.  If you are one of those youth and you are reading this now, thanks for checking out the site (and they say teenagers don't listen) but most important, thank you for taking leadership, thank you for filling a need in the community, thank you for defying stereotypes about our youth, thanks for allowing the lions to have their historians and medasi pa for being a shining light for the future of our city and really the world......
Tanika 
POR AMOR