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The Sofa. 100% Unfiltered Discussions. Real Talk by Real People. Topic: Do all men cheat, what are your definitions of cheating?
Discussion by @marygodwin @tia_amarie Eavie Filmed by @thinkweike @mrghostrain6 | Produced / Edited by @thinkweike for @africax5

Kamiyah Mobley, a 19-year-old who was kidnapped at birth and raised by her kidnapper, Alexis. She was taken from her biological parents 8 hours after birth. It is so sad that a woman Kamiyah saw as a hero was the villain who destroyed Kamiyah's biological parents' lives. Kamiyah is very protective of Alexis, despite finding out the truth. The biggest pain that no one is really talking about is that Kamaya has to bury Alexis to exist. Today, with her abductor in jail, Kamiyah is left without a true identity or a mother to call her own. What do you think of Kamiyah's situation?

Martina Big has had injections to turn her into a black woman. Martina Big explains that she admires women of color, their skin, and their curves. She has had three melatonin injects costing 170 pounds each. Her skin color, hair color, and eye color have all changed to match those of a person of color. Her husband, Michael, is also taking the necessary steps to change his skin color. Martina has spent time in Africa to learn more about black culture and their way of living. She now identifies as 100% black. What do you think about Martina's choice?

Nicole had been in prison for four years, where she has been in a relationship with Daonte. Despite warnings from his family, 33-year-old Daonte spent more than $30,000 on Nicole while incarcerated. He was ready to take their relationship to the next level. However, when Nicole is released, she claims not to be ready to have an intimate relationship with Deonte; she is interested in someone else. Doente, who is not aware of this, is willing to give Nicole some space The dynamics of their relationship represent most that develop with inmates. What do you think?

At California's Institution for Men in Chino, 78 female transgender prisoners live among more than 3,500 men. The prisoners live in shared spaces and bunk beds. Many live in fear of sexual assault and would prefer to be transferred to female prisons per their rights. According to the justice department, 35% of transgender people individuals report cases of sexual assault by other prisoners or prison staff. LGBTQ advocates note these numbers could be higher. At Chino, most trans women have requested transfers but have been denied or asked about their security concerns. What do you think about the safety of transgender persons and the changes that need to be made?

Even though slavery was abolished more than a century ago, it has evolved to take up a more modern form; human trafficking. Those most affected are from poor communities promised better opportunities abroad only to be sold as sex slaves. In Nigeria, girls as young as fifteen are tricked into thinking they are traveling to Italy for better opportunities, only to be burdened with massive debts amounting to up to 25,000 euros. They perform sexual favors to try and pay this debt and are sold to other traffickers like goods. This is not any different from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the only difference is this is happening in a modern world where everyone has rights. What are your thoughts?

Yolanda Guzmán was a young Afro Latina activist in the Dominican Republic who was killed in 1965 at the time of an uprising by supporters of the country’s democratically-installed president Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by military-backed forces. Guzmán, who had worked for the Bosch administration, disappeared along with five companions within days of the United States’ invasion of the island republic in support of the anti-democratic forces. Most Dominicans believe that Guzmán was assassinated on May 2, 1965, by the Centro de Ensenanza de las Fuerzas Armadas (the federal branch of military education under the dictatorship). The Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States eventually gained access and identified her body.

Guzmán’s death at age 21 came to symbolize the ways in which women and young people fought against one of the longest-running and vicious dictatorships in 20th century Latin America, that of Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo had dominated the Dominican Republic for over thirty years, with the support of the U.S. government, before he was assassinated in 1961. Bosch was elected president in 1962 but the Dominican military did not like his reformist policies, and he was overthrown in 1963. In April 1965, after pro-Bosch forces attacked the military-controlled government to reinstate Bosch, President Lyndon Johnson sent in U.S. troops, who, supported by forces provided by some of the members of the OAS, helped install a conservative, non-military government.

Guzmán was born on July 8, 1943, in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. She was the daughter of Beatriz Guzmán, a domestic worker, and Carlos Maria Paulino Fernandez, who served in the brief Bosch administration. Both of her parents were fierce anti-Trujillistas. Because of the repressive environment for those who dared to criticize the Trujillo dictatorship, and the possibility of torture, imprisonment, and death of activists, Guzmán ran in clandestine circles and the specifics of her activities are not well documented. It is known that she worked in some capacity for the women’s division in the Bosch administration and that her passion for women’s rights fueled her work. Some authors have pointed to the deaths of the well-known anti-Trujillo activist Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa, known as las mariposas (the butterflies), as a crucial moment in Guzmán’s commitment to opposing anti-democratic forces in her homeland. After the sisters’ deaths, Guzmán began to engage in more public protests. Most likely she, like other female activists during this period, helped with weapons training, instructed other combatants, managed funds and food between the capital and the interior, organized secret communications and care for the wounded, procured food, and buried the dead.

Much of the writing on civil rights history in the transportation setting has been about the arrest of Rosa Parks, a woman who defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger on a bus. Her move, on December 1, 1955, started the boycott that would help galvanize the civil rights movement. But her stance did not just come out of nowhere.

In fact, half a century before the civil rights movement, Barbara Pope boarded a train and in the process challenged Virginia’s Jim Crow law requiring segregation on trains and streetcars. The D.C. native, whose story is virtually unknown today, started off as a published writer, whose works focused on social change. Her stories were well received, especially by Black greats like WEB DuBois, however, her stance against racism in transportation almost 50 years before Parks’ bus ride became her greatest feat.

She would grab headlines in the U.S. as the primary player in the DuBois-led Niagara Movement’s first challenge to interstate segregation laws, according to one account. Pope’s case further paved the way for the NAACP’s landmark 1954 Supreme Court victory in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. But many soon forgot about her until her shocking death in 1908. To some historians, her contributions to civil rights were deliberately erased, and this is largely why.

Born in 1854, Pope grew up in Georgetown’s Black community. She started a teaching career at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and championed reforms in the District’s Colored School System, according to an article in The Washington Post Magazine. By 1890, she had begun publishing fiction. In 1906, she joined the Niagara Movement, the organization of Black intellectuals that was led by Du Bois. Pope became one of the movement’s first female members at a time it was gaining ground in the Black Community of D.C. In that same year she joined the movement, she made history.

In August 1906, Pope boarded a train at Union Station to travel to Virginia. Before the ride, history notes that she “had been annoyed before” by Virginia’s Jim Crow rule and “didn’t want to be annoyed that way” again. Thus, when she bought her ticket she wanted nothing but a peaceful and comfortable ride. She however received the opposite. Boarding at Union Station, she saw the colored compartment was uncomfortably small and restricted, with seats faced backward. Pope, therefore, took a seat in the main compartment.

After the train had crossed the Potomac into Virginia, her troubles began. A White conductor asked her to move but she refused. The conductor followed it up with a threat of arrest but she still refused. Pope was later detained at the mayor’s office after the train stopped at Falls Church. A kangaroo court was set up by the mayor in the train station, where Pope was tried for “violating the separate car law of the State of Virginia” and fined $10 plus court costs, per the report in The Washington Post Magazine.

Some weeks later, members of the Niagara Movement voted to fund an appeal to overturn her conviction in the Virginia circuit court, hoping that would be a test case. They argued that as an interstate traveler, Pope was not subject to Virginia’s Jim Crow statutes. But that October, Pope lost her appeal at an Alexandria circuit court. She, along with the movement, did not give up. They headed to Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals, where victory became theirs in 1907. “This means that the NIAGARA MOVEMENT has established that under the present statute Virginia cannot fine an interstate passenger who refuses to be Jim-Crowed,” Du Bois later explained.

The Niagara movement subsequently filed a civil case demanding $50,000 in damages. When the trial opened in June 1907 in D.C., the jury voted in Pope’s favor but awarded her just one cent.

Some months after the civil trial, Pope went through “personal troubles”. She did not only lose her job but suffered from insomnia for months. One evening in September 1908, the 54-year-old decided to end it all. “She walked out onto Lovers’ Lane, beside Montrose Park in Georgetown, pinned a note addressed to the coroner to her dress, and hanged herself,” the article in The Washington Post Magazine said, adding that the note said she felt her brain was “on fire”.

Soon, her story would be absent from African-American history, and historians blame this on the stigma associated with suicide. One could only find Pope’s work in the Library of Congress on microfilm until 2015 when historian Jennifer Harris wrote a profile of Pope for Legacy, a journal of American women writers, highlighting the story of the little-known but impactful woman.

Queen Amina is often mentioned among norm-busting African women of old whose accomplishments and deeds surpass what we modern society has come to expect of women. Even though her historicity has been questioned multiple times, the former queen of Zazzau continues to be regarded as the archetypal empowered woman.

She was born circa 1533 in Zazzau, a Hausa people whose ancient kingdom is now known as Zaria (curiously named after Amina’s sister) in the northern region of ancient Nigeria. Her family was a wealthy and noble family. Amina’s family made their fortunes from the sale of leather goods, kola, salt, horses and imported metals, Amina acquired battle skills while understudying with the soldiers of the Zazzau military.

Upon the death of her mother the queen in 1566, the rule of Zazzau fell on Amina’s younger brother Karama as customary in those days. After ten years or so on the throne, Karama died and the leadership baton fell on Queen Amina who had gathered much popularity among Zazzau’s people and military owing to her exemplary leadership skills and for the fact that she was unbeatable even as a female warrior. Thus, in 1576, she became the Queen of Zazzau.

Among the things credited to Amina is her securing her kingdom’s direct access to the Atlantic Coast for trade-related reasons and expanding Zazzau’s territory up to Nupe and Kwarafa in the north. To ensure this, she is thought to have personally led military expeditions of over 20,000 infantrymen to innumerable battles. And this is where it gets intriguing for a woman.

Amina never married but according to Emirates of Northern Nigeria written Sidney Hogben, rather took lovers from these towns that she overcame in battle. As she did not make them her husband, it is safe to assume Amina was not looking to forge bonds in the protection of her kingdom. The most reasonable conclusion one may draw was that she was a woman in the position to have a lover of her choice and did not turn down the opportunity.

But Hogben’s book also claimed that Amina’s “brief bridegroom was beheaded so that none should live to tell the tale”. This may speak to the idea that although she was an independent woman capable of having her way, she may have still been under pressure of gendered expectations of womanhood. Male rulers would not ordinarily kill their female lovers just so they do not live to tell the tale.

The term “power couple” is a modern invention to describe couples either married or romantically linked where each is accomplished in their own right. It has been applied to Barack and Michelle Obama and retroactively to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt among others. But no one is more deserving of the title than Manet Harrison and Stephen Fowler, arguably the 20th century’s first Black power couple.

Both Harrison and Fowler were born and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, a town not known for its Black population or its racial tolerance. She was born Minnia Helen Harrison on August 30, 1895, changing her given name to “Manette” (or “Manet”) while still a young woman. He was born on May 6, 1881. Both were products of the segregated Fort Worth school system which before 1910 ended for Black students with primary education. Yet both attended college, she to Tuskegee Agricultural and Normal School (Alabama) where she knew George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and he to Prairie View Normal and Industrial College (Texas) Although their specific graduation dates are unknown, after graduation both returned to Fort Worth and Fowler joined the faculty of the Colored high school.

Manet Harrison was drawn to teaching. She was a child prodigy who gave piano recitals at the age of six. She graduated from Tuskegee with a degree in “domestic science” then joined the faculty at Prairie View where she put her true talents to work teaching music. However, Fort Worth drew her back to teach in the public schools.

It was a love of music and church that brought them together. Both were members of Mount Gilead Baptist Church, Fort Worth’s oldest Black church. He was on staff teaching Bible classes, and she was the director of the choir and the organist. In 1915 they married in a church wedding that was one of the biggest social events of the year in Fort Worth’s Black community which numbered approximately 10,000 at that time or about 9% of the city’s population. In the next ten years they would have five children (2 girls and 3 boys) who were raised to value education and make their way in the professional world.

It was as professionals that Stephen and Manet Flower made their mark. Within two years of hiring on with the Fort Worth public school system Manet was promoted to “director of music” for the three “negro schools.” She took her students to the larger community by putting on choral programs (“festivals”) of African American folk music. Stephen, after sixteen years teaching in the school system, resigned in 1919 to become the first “General Secretary” of the “Negro YMCA” of Fort Worth. Both were talented, ambitious, and entrepreneurial. Manet refused to be defined by conventional categories; she played the piano and pipe organ, sang, and painted.

Stephen Flower made the Negro YMCA a center of the Black community, setting up a trade school and employment “bureau” on site. On the side he led a male quartet that performed African American folk songs and spirituals for audiences both white and Black. It was only natural that they would collaborate. Their first joint effort was a pageant, “Up from Slavery,” which she wrote and they co-directed. A decade later they took another original pageant, “The Voice,” to Chicago, Illinois for the golden jubilee of the National Baptist Convention of America.

In 1926 Manet organized the Negro Music Institute of Fort Worth, out of which grew the Texas Association of Negro Musicians (TANM), a branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM). She was elected first president of the Texas branch and published the national magazine, The Negro Musician, out of Fort Worth. her self-appointed mission was to promote the education of young African Americans, using children’s natural love of music to get them interested in education in general and their African roots in particular. Stephen served on the Institute’s faculty.

In the summer of 1928, Manet Fowler brought the TANM to Fort Worth for a four-week course of study that she called “a Master School” that drew faculty from all over the state. Stephen was the school’s vice president and treasurer. It was so successful that the Fowlers brought it back the following summer, which was a busy one for Manet. She persuaded the national organization to hold their annual convention in Fort Worth. The week-long event drew some 1,300 people from all over the country and included a grand parade through downtown.

Somehow during these years, Manet Fowler found time to study voice at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music (Chicago), winning new plaudits as a “dramatic soprano.” After 1929, she was much more in demand as a singer than at the keyboard. In 1930 she gave a recital in Fort Worth that combined classical pieces, negro spirituals, and what the newspaper described as “genuine African melodies sung in native languages.”

Manet Fowler dreamed of transforming her Masters’ School into a year-round school teaching not just music but also African art and culture. (She personally disdained the term “negro” as demeaning.) Finally, in 1933 she realized her dream when she opened the Mwalimu School of Music and Creative Art in New York City. (The name is Swahili for “noble or distinguished teacher.”) As the home of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the perfect place. She had already formulated the “Mwalimu Creed,” a statement of personal growth that combined elements of Christian piety, 19th century naturalism, and self-improvement philosophy, promoting “the good, the true and the beautiful.” The school’s curriculum combined vocational with liberal arts with instruction in music, interpretive dance, “artistic photography,” African history, “elementary journalism,” and cosmetology.

The school’s public face was the Mwalimu Festival Chorus, which she directed. They sang in English, German, and Yoruba as well as other “African dialects,” and their repertoire included classical, contemporary, and even opera. The highlight of those concerts was what they called the African national anthem, “Nkosi Sikele U Afrika.” By mixing musical genres and styles she wanted to show the “Negro [sic] contributions to [world] culture,” as one newspaper put it. Within a year she had her students performing in some of New York’s finest concert halls and touring.

After Manet moved to New York in 1933, Stephen remained in Fort Worth working for the YMCA and through that organization for his own people. In 1932 what was now known as “the Colored Y” hosted the Negro State Teachers’ Association of Texas convention, requiring accommodations in private homes. Three years later he presided over the opening of an expanded “Colored YMCA” that was still more about social services than athletic activities. In 1938 he resigned and moved to Harlem to become “director” of the Mwalimu School. He and Manet also began performing together again in recitals where they both sang while she accompanied them on the piano.

The Fowlers spent their final years living in Manhattan. She performed, led the school, and served on the board of the NANM. She also launched a booking agency for Black musicians. Occasionally she came back to Fort Worth to visit family and keep in touch with her many admirers. In 1962 she attended the 50th anniversary of the Colored High School’s 1912 graduating class.

Stephen Fowler died on October 28, 1965 at the age of 84 while attending the Empire State Baptist Convention in Syracuse, New York. He was buried in New Jersey’s Rose Hill Cemetery. Back in Fort Worth his memory flickered briefly in 1989 when the school board was casting about for a name for a name for a new elementary school. One name suggested was that of Stephen H. Fowler, but trustees rejected it because the name was hardly a household word even in the Black community and “would promote little neighborhood identification with the school.”

Manet Fowler died in New York City on February 16, 1976 at the age of 80 and was buried with Stephen, literally in the same grave. She did not even rate an obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her hometown had forgotten her. Her papers eventually wound up at Yale and Emory universities.

A better indication of the Fowlers’ significance is not how many pages they rate in the history books but the recognition they received during their lifetimes. No other Black woman of the first half of the 20th century was covered more extensively in the nation’s newspapers, not Madam C.J. Walker and not Mary McLeod Bethune. She was an early proponent of Black nationalism and though a latecomer to the Harlem Renaissance, she contributed greatly to the acceptance of African American culture by the white mainstream. She was honored in 1972 at the same time as Duke Ellington and Ramsey Lewis by NANM. Stephen, too, quietly challenged the status quo in Fort Worth by his performing and transforming the local YMCA from a lily-white organization.

Together Manet and Stephen Fowler broke down walls and blazed a trail in education and the arts from Fort Worth to New York City. They brought the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance to Texas, and they deserve to be celebrated in the age of “Black Lives Matter.”

A mother and her long-lost daughter reunited after five decades in the most unusual way. Lisa Wright was good with going to her grave not knowing who her real mother was until her son’s curiosity to reveal her genetic makeup led her straight into the arms of her real mother.

Wright, who is now 54, said she grew up knowing her real mother gave birth to her when she was 18. Her adoption was a closed one, so her adoptive parents and biological mother never met.

“My (adoptive) mom told me, ‘Your mommy loved you, but she was really young, and she knew she couldn’t take care of you. I wanted the baby so bad, and that’s why your mom let me take care of you. You weren’t abandoned. This was just the best thing for you,'” Wright told Today in an exclusive.

Her son was curious about her genetic heritage and suggested she does a DNA test. Wright was not hesitant, and the results launched an avalanche of surprises that changed her life forever. “I get an alert, and it says, ‘This person is your uncle,'” Wright said. “So, I just reached out and said, ‘If you’re open to it, I would love to chat with you to see what all of this means.'”

She connected with her uncle immediately, who realized from the get-go when Wright revealed her birth date and the circumstances surrounding her adoption that she was the daughter of his sister who gave her up to pursue a career in Hollywood.

A few days later, Wright got the call she had been waiting for. After 50 years, she was finally speaking with her mother, actor Lynne Moody, who had given up all hope of ever reconnecting with her child. Interestingly, Moody never had another child after her.  

“When she was born, they covered my face, my eyes, so that I couldn’t see her,” Moody said. “But I could hear her cry. All I could say was ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.’ As a mother, you never, ever, ever forget. During those 50 years, all I did was try to learn how to live with it. I didn’t know if she was hungry if she was alive if she was happy if she was adopted.”

Moody also turned out to be a character from Wright’s favorite sitcom from the mid-’70s. She starred in an ABC series ironically called “That’s My Mama.”

“I grew up watching my mother on TV and didn’t even know it,” Wright said. “‘That’s My Mama’ — that was our must-see TV. We all sat down and watched ‘That’s My Mama’ every week, and who knew? No idea. … And that’s my mama!”

Since then, Wright’s son has met his grandmother. Wright has also met her four sisters from her biological father’s side as well as more relatives from Moody’s family. Sadly, Wright’s adoptive parents did not get to witness this reunion because they had passed away.

Moody’s take home for everyone is that we “keep the faith” because “life is full of surprises sometimes.”

A noticeably pregnant Nigerian woman has nabbed a Taekwondo gold medal at the ongoing biennial National Sports Festival. Aminat Idrees trained for months before the multi-sport event and she was not going to let her current condition stop her from participating in the event after being cleared by her doctor.

Footage of the 26-year-old beautifully executing different combat techniques in Poomsae, the non-combat form of Taekwondo, was shared on Twitter. Idrees won gold for the Mixed Poomsae category and took home medals from other Poomsae categories.

As part of Team Lagos, and this being the first time the team won gold, Idrees was one of the leading medalists at the sports festival. Apart from winning gold in the Mixed Poomsae category, she also took home silver in the female team Poomsae category and won an individual bronze medal in the same category.

Idrees said being able to participate in the competition was a “privilege.” “It’s such a privilege for me. I just decided to give it a try after training a couple of times… It feels really good,” she said.

“Before I got pregnant, I have always enjoyed the training, so it didn’t seem different with pregnancy,” Idrees added.

The organizers of the National Sports Festival taking place in Edo State were elated by her performance and described her win as “inspiring”. However, some Twitter users criticized her for endangering the life of her unborn child.

One user said, “If you are seeing this and you going about how strong a woman is, you are a fool The organizers that allowed this to happen are mad The woman herself is mad and she needs someone to tell her What in f**s name is she trying to prove There is breaking the barrier and then stupidity.”

Another said, “This rather Sickening than Inspiring.”

But some jumped to her defense and attempted to explain the category of sport in which she participated in. Idrees explained she got clearance from her doctor as well as the organizing body of the games which certified her fit to participate in the sport. 

She told CNN that many people have a misconception about the sport, adding that this is the right time to educate people on Taekwondo. “Taekwondo has two branches: the combat sport and Poomsae — which is a form of exercise…just displaying the hand and leg techniques in Taekwondo. I participated in the Poomsae event,” she said.