Letters

Philanthropy

Dear Editor:
After reading the article “A Lesson in Giving” (Africa Focus, July/August 2008), I was appalled and overwhelmed by sadness. I am not a stranger to the horrific conditions that my people are facing in Africa. What appalls me is that they [the Acholi women of Kireka] would haul buckets of rocks, at six cents for every five-gallon bucket they filled, and raise $1,000 to send to America, when they could have used that money to help African people in the wretched slums of Kampala. What increased my melancholia is that they were sending the money to white people who they thought were the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  As an African from the continent, this article has not only proven to me that the African elites are worthless, but that the African people both in the diaspora and the continent are still imbued with and suffering from the colonial mentality (slave mentality). The bodies of Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and Amilcar Cabral must have rolled over in their graves.

Bai Paasewe
Malone, N.Y.

Black Nonprofits

Dear Editor:
I was a fundraiser for the Philadelphia chapter of the MSU Alumni Association. I had no degree, but, like the inventor of the trolley6 car, I had skills. Your article “Crisis in Black Nonprofits” (July/August 2008) calls for leaders with degrees. I think that is a big mistake on the part of African-Americans. If we are going to help our nonprofits survive, education alone won’t get it. The ingenuity of African-Americans will. Combine education and natural ingenuity and you have a winner. African-American groups need desperately to study Wall Street, the Standard & Poor’s and Dow Jones Industrial Average indices and stock exchanges in major global cities. Therein lie the names of companies African-American nonprofits should solicit as donors.

Doris Scott
scottdoris1@yahoo.com