Educator, artist, performer Mwatabu Okantah

As assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University, he has served as the Department’s Poet in Residence, and as Director of the Center of Pan-African Culture. During his involvement with Cleveland State University's Cultural Center, he bought to Cleveland some of the best African-American speakers and artists: Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, and Louis Farrakhan. Cool Cleveland spoke with Mwatabu about his activism in custom-creating educational programs and his performance group The Muntu Kuntu Energy Ensemble.

Cool Cleveland: When you boast to people outside Cleveland about our city, what’s on your list?

Mwatabu Okantah: To be honest, I do not “boast to people about Cleveland.” However, I do tell people that I have lived in the Cleveland area long enough to claim it. I am not originally from this area, but I have lived here for more than twenty years now.

What’s your vision of how Cleveland should look and feel?

Interesting question. Because I am not a native Clevelander, I have never thought of the area in those terms. Rather, my destiny brought me to this area. First, as a college student at Kent State University in the early 1970s— I was a freshman in September, 1970 when the campus reopened for the first time after student were shot earlier that May. I returned to the area in 1981 to coordinate the African-American Cultural Center and teach in the Black Studies Program at Cleveland State University. I returned to KSU in 1991 to teach in the same program I was a student in during the heyday of the Black Studies movement. I am now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan-African Studies. I serve as the Department’s Poet in Residence, and as Director of the Center of Pan-African Culture. I have been blessed to be able to say to my students that I was a student in the program when we dreamed of their presence and the program’s very existence before they were born.

What are your passions and how does it manifest itself in your life?
I would say one of the passions in my life is now manifest in the work I have been able to accomplish in this area. I have also been a working creative artist in the area since the late 1970s. My first passion is my poetry, followed closely or seamlessly by my music. I have been blessed to work with some of the area’s finest musicians, including Ras Kwame Nyamekye, Ras Matunji, Eric Gould, Bill Ransom, Glenn Holmes and the Cavani String Quartet.

What has your best contribution to Cleveland been?
My most lasting contribution came while I was working at CSU. For nine years [1982-1991], I produced and hosted two radio programs [Wind Words (talk)/In the Tradition (music)] on WCSB 89.3FM. I still run into people who tell me they have a tape library of my shows. As coordinator of the Cultural Center, I was also able to bring in some of the best speakers, artists, etc. from the Black world—Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Louis Farrakhan, Maya Angelou and Leon Thomas just to name a few. My work here at KSU has been equally rewarding. It is a unique experience to be able to say that I now teach in a program I literally helped to create [as a foot soldier in the movement] as a student activist.

Do you have favorite quotes or sayings you live by?
“The Negro in America must choose between recovering and becoming fully conscious of his own identity or being washed down the plumbless drains of history as a mindless freak of nature.” [Chief Fela Sowande]

“Power without wisdom is but another name for death.” [Sowande]

“Seek TRUTH and pursue it to the extent of remaking your own mind...should it become necessary.” [Sowande]

What’s the best learning/experimenting you’ve done in the last 5 years?
The best learning I have done in the last five years has been as a husband and and father. The best experimenting has been in finishing my most recent book, Reconnecting Memories: Dreams No Longer Deferred, working with the Cavani String Quartet and leading my performance group—The Muntu Kuntu Energy Ensemble.

Who’s on your list of most-admired & why?
Chief Fela Sowande because he helped me to become spiritually centered as a “born again African.” He helped me to find my path. Hulda Smith-Graham because she helped me accept my path once I found it. James Kilgore and Gwendolyn Brooks because they believed in my poetry before I learned how to believe in it myself. And, Ophelia Settle Egypt because she taught me to “keep our story alive.”

What was a significant failure in your life and what did you learn from it?
I have failed once at marriage, and I have fathered a child out-of-wedlock. I am estranged from my two eldest daughters because of my inability to make peace with their mothers. Now remarried with five children, I have learned how to put my life back together and to not make the same mistakes.

Where are you most likely to hang out in Cleveland?
Whereever the singers & poets & players of instruments are makin’ it happen. Live!

How do you think Cool Cleveland can continue being successful?
By continuing to search and expose a wide variety of diverse Cleveland voices.

Interview by Tisha Nemeth

Image by Mwatabu Okantah

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