Simba Sana was born Stephanie Givan in a small town in Western Pennsylvania in the mid-1960’s. Her parents, Joseph and Merribel Givan, had moved there in the early 60’s. Joseph had grown up the son of illiterate farmhands in rural Mississippi. When he was 16 a group of local white boys beat him senseless for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. After threatening several times to hang him, they finally settled on knocking him to the ground and kicking him until he passed out. When he woke up a few hours later, he ran straight back to his house, packed his bags, and headed for the nearest big city, Memphis. It was in Memphis that he met his future wife, Merribel Stanton, who lived in one of Memphis’ poorer black slums with her four siblings, parents, maternal grandmother and a variety of cousins who came and went as they pleased. They met at a civil rights rally that turned violent, the first that either had attended, and the last. Both realized that they were not made of the stuff that it took to stand their ground and fight the good fight, so after a small wedding ceremony at the Memphis City Hall, they took off together to find someplace where they could just be left alone.

 

The newlyweds finally settled in a small steel mill town in Western Pennsylvania where Joseph got a job at a company that didn’t care about his lack of education. In the heavily unionized mill he was quickly making good money, and although as one of the few black employees he was sometimes the butt of a joke, it wasn’t really unkindly meant and he took no great offense. Merribel managed to take a secretarial class and soon had a part-time job as a “gal-Friday” at a local business. And soon after that, their first and only daughter, Stephanie, was born.

 

The Givans tried to give Stephanie everything that they had never had. Joseph was now a supervisor and they bought a small house in the “suburbs” of their small city. Stephanie went to grammar school, junior high, and high school just a few blocks from her house. She was always the only black kid, and although she was never really treated badly, she never really felt like she fit in either. She hated her family vacations when they went back to Memphis, or worse, Mississippi. Her parent’s tacky relations were poor and lived in disgusting conditions. She had absolutely nothing in common with her cousins, and thought that their stories of discrimination and cruelty were made up to impress her. She certainly had never even seen anything like that, and as the only black kid at her school she certainly should have if it existed. By the time Stephanie was in high school she refused to go anymore with her parents. It was more fun to stay with her best friend. Allison Weaver. Allison was everything that Stephanie secretly wished to be: blond and blue-eyed, with a big chest and a tiny nose. Stephanie spent hours trying to make her hair as straight as Allison’s, but it never came out right.

 

And so Stephanie successfully navigated high school as best she could. Her picture was in the yearbook every year. Here she is on the volleyball team, there the cheerleading squad, and over here second runner up for Homecoming Queen. Academics weren’t too important to her. She was more concerned with being popular and trying to be just like everyone else.

 

When it came time to go to college, she was disappointed that the only place she could go was the state college about  two hours away. Although her father had managed to avoid losing his job during all the layoffs, he had taken some pretty big pay cuts. With no high school education he couldn’t really look elsewhere, so State it would have to be. And with her so-so academic record, no one was going to give her a scholarship. Stephanie let her parents know in no uncertain terms that she hated them for short-changing her this way, but she told Allison, who was going to Penn, that she had chosen State because it had a “really, really good program”.

 

Stephanie’s world completely changed when she went to college. For one thing, she had classes for the first time with other black kids and quickly made friends with them. Most of them had come from backgrounds similar to hers, but many were “activists” working for various political groups. Stephanie became mesmerized by her new friend’s beliefs and causes. She joined the Black Students League. She volunteered at the Black Unity Caucus. As if by magic, Stephanie suddenly became Black.

 

It was at the Black Student League’s quarterly meeting the she met Lawrence Johnson. Lawrence was from southern Ohio, and was a radical. He taught Stephanie that everything they had been taught in school was a lie. He opened her eyes to injustice against blacks. He taught her to find discrimination everywhere. But most importantly, he taught her that she was African.

 

For Stephanie it was like a light going on in her head. Suddenly it was clear to her why she had always felt out of place in her little town, at her little high school. It was because of her African heritage.  Stephanie read every book her college library had on Africa, and the slave trade, and on modern black struggles. It became clear to her that she was the result of destiny cheated. This was not who she was supposed to be, this was not where she was supposed to live. Her great-great-great-great grandmother had been an African Princess. They lived in a great African civilization where the people were at one with nature, in tune with the spiritual world, and never fought or spoke unkindly to one another.  The children were all raised in harmony by their villages, and each and every child knew that they were special and loved. Stephanie believed that her great-great-great-great-grandmother must have been preparing for that day when she would be an African Queen, when tragedy struck. A group of ruthless white slave traders came one day and captured all of the people of a small village. Stephanie’s great-great-great-great-grandmother was there tending to a sick child, as was captured along with them. This was the beginning of the end for the great African civilization. Repeated slave raids eventually destroyed it, along with any record of its existence. In the meantime, the African Princess was put it to chains and locked in the hold of a ship bound for America.

 

Of course, Stephanie’s imaginary bloodline was partly true. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother had been born in Africa. But she was the fourth wife of a minor farmer whose crop failed and who sold her to a neighboring farmer for enough food to feed his family. This farmer in turn was killed during a raid by a neighboring village that captured Stephanie’s ancestress and sold her to African slave traders on the coast, who in turn sold her to the Portuguese slave merchants who then transported her to America. But Stephanie was never to know this.

 

No, in Stephanie’s mind she was the descendant of an African Princess. And this Princess has born the shackles of slavery with such nobility and greatness of character that even the cruel slave masters on the Plantation treated her with respect, recognizing her regal bearing for what it was. Her children became Freedom Fighters, each and every one of them working the Underground Railroad and personally feeing thousands of slaves. After the Civil War they must have taken positions of great importance, as befitting their noble lineage.

 

This is where Stephanie became annoyed, for she failed to see how descendants of African royalty could have fallen as low as rural Mississippi. She began to hate her grandparents and parents for she saw as the squandering of their heritage. She adopted all things African to remind herself of her true origins. She and Lawrence founded the African Student Alliance on campus. They changed their major to Political Science, and made sure to tell everyone that their emphasis was “African Studies” even though no such program was offered. They decorated their dorm rooms with African masks and drums, wore dashikis and head wraps. On visits home Stephanie castigated her parents for their lack of knowledge about their African background, the abandonment of their people’s traditional ways. Her bewildered parents tried to help by calling every relative they knew for possible anecdotes of the long lost royal African ancestress that Stephanie was sure they had, but to no avail.

 

Stephanie and Lawrence got married in their senior year of college, but not before they had decided to change their names. Henceforth, Stephanie would be called Simba Sana, which her African books assured her meant “A Lioness of Her People” in African. Lawrence would now be called “Kunta Kunika” which meant “Lo, A Brave Warrior Has Come” in African. Before graduating they successfully petitioned the college administration to have “black” officially dropped in favor of “African-American” in all future usage.

 

Everyone was confused when they got the wedding announcement, having no idea who these African people were.

 

After getting married, Simba Sana and Kunta Kunika moved to Pittsburgh so that Kunta could go to grad school. Simba got a job in a local used bookstore, which enabled her to keep up on African issues. She founded a group of like-minded Africanists, some of whom believed that all African-Americans should emigrate to Liberia, which as everyone know was an enlightened, tolerant, democratic African haven.  Kunta pursued a degree in African Relations, but along the way fell in with a group of Rastafarians. For him it was like a light had gone on in his head. Kunta now realized that it was not enough to embrace your African heritage. You also needed the spiritual enlightenment that came from the Caribbean cultures. The African-American may have come from Africa, but his salvation was to come from Jamaica. 

 

Kunta joined the Rastafarians United For World Peace. They met at his house daily after classes, smoking a lot of ganja and having truly insightful discussions on how the world could achieve peace. You had to visualize peace, and peace would follow. It was so clear to Kunta, so logical. All of his activism was a waste of time. He needed to visualize, not organize. Simba, too, found that she was more in touch with herself during these sessions. Jamaica just had to be this incredibly peaceful place. She couldn’t wait until she actually met someone from there.

 

Simba herself was not happy working for someone else. She knew now that her true calling was to open a bookstore/coffeehouse. A place where people from all walks of life could spend time, hang out, and just be. A hassle-free environment where creative minds could meet. She and Kunta and the Rastafarians came up with the idea of a cooperative bookstore that would specialize in African and Jamaican literature. And so, armed with a Minority-Owned Small Business loan, they opened Karibu.

 

The name Karibu was chosen to reflect the fusion of cultures that their store would represent. It was a name that blended the African language and the Jamaican language.

 

Simba’s parents came to the grand opening, although they were mostly ignored by the dreadlocked, beaded, headdressed, bangled, hoop-earringed crowd. Simba had been annoyed when her father showed up wearing a tie. At least they seemed to pay attention when she instructed them on how to celebrate Kwanzaa with the Kwanzaa Starter Kit she had given them. Merribel commented that cards were “certainly colorful”. Whatever that meant.

 

The store did pretty well at first, but after awhile Simba and Kunta felt that it wasn’t cutting edge enough. After living a few years in Pittsburgh, they realized that it was the urban kids who really had it going on. Simba loved to listen to their stories of the “street” and she never failed to compare her own boring  Middle-America background unfavorably to the experiences that her assistant Sha’Nelle had had growing up. Sha’Nelle’s first boyfriend had been arrested when they were both 16, and she always said how glad she was to have little Keshawn to remind her of him while he was in jail. S

 

Sha’Nelle’s life was real. It was now. It was where it was at. And Simba was down with it. She and Kunta began stocking their book shop with hip-hop CD’s and jewelry. Their store was now truly a window into the whole African-American Experience. On a visit home for Kwanzaa (even though Joseph and Merribel still insisted on putting up a Christmas tree), Simba enthused to her parents about how much more real life on the mean streets of Pittsburg was than this boring little town out in the sticks. She told her parents in no uncertain terms that she always felt like she had been handicapped by not having lived in a ghetto, and couldn’t figure out why her mother winced and turned away. She had by then, of course, forgotten about her Memphis relatives.

 

And so it finally had come to this, the pinnacle of her life. Simba and Kunta (or “K” as he was now called), were hosting a reading at Karibu by the hottest new star on the Street lit scene. He was going to read from his new book “A Thug’s Life”. Simba couldn’t wait. Maybe someone would get shot.

 

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