In Memoriam: Baba Oduno A. Tarik

Black people of various political, religious and cultural backgrounds continue to celebrate the life and legacy of Baba Oduno A. Tarik, a prominent Garveyite, master teacher and horticulturist who died on Nov. 22 at the age of 76. 

For nearly 60 years, Tarik, affectionately known as Baba Oduno, maintained a significant presence in the D.C. metropolitan area, and other U.S. cities, among Nationalists, Pan-Africanists, Christians, Muslims, African spiritualists, Rastafari brethren and sistren, and all those in between. 

In the days and weeks following his transition, contemporaries and students alike are yelling, writing, and further solidifying a motto that Tarik popularized: “There is no culture without agriculture!” 

This past summer, Tarik cited his grandparents, George Washington Carver, the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, and Psalm 41 as inspirations behind that saying during a segment on The Lion’s Voice Network. 

“I got a little bit concerned about the consciousness of the Kushite … the Yoruba community and other communities,” Tarik told Lion’s Voice Network host Dejazmatch Kwasi Bonsu. “They put certain cultural contexts more predominantly ahead of going to the earth and feeding ourselves.” 

On the morning of Nov. 25, dozens upon dozens of people converged on Universal Mortuary Services in Northwest for Tarik’s Islamic funeral service. For more than an hour, family members, friends, community members, and comrades reflected on Tarik’s impact on their lives. 

Later, drummers set a festive mood on Kennedy Street as pallbearers loaded Tarik’s casket onto a hearse. Tarik’s final ride was to a burial ground in Fredericksburg, Virginia. 

A memorial service scheduled to take place in the coming weeks will provide community members ample opportunity to speak about Tarik’s legacy.  

Oduno A. Tarik: A Race Man

In 1947, Tarik was born in Beaumont, Texas as Albert Lee Ferdinand Woods. Amid his community’s accumulation of resources and institutions in the Jim Crow south, he developed a historical and cultural consciousness based in Black self-reliance. 

During that period of his life, he learned about Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Marcus Mosiah Garvey and other Black historical figures while under the auspices of teachers, spiritual leaders and other community elders who practiced a “race first” philosophy. 

By his late teens, Tarik was attending college in Seattle. In 1968, he became a member of the Evergreen Division No. 50 of the Universal Negro Improvement Association — African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), the entity that Garvey founded in the early 20th century.  

Years later, during the early 1970s, he served as a teacher in Muhammad University of Islam in Denver. 

During his early years in the UNIA-ACL, Tarik learned about Garveyism from Sarah Lynch, a UNIA-ACL Black Cross nurse and Garvey confidante. In his subsequent travels across the U.S., Tarik came into contact with other Garveyites who kept the movement alive after Garvey’s conviction and deportation.  

Such encounters fueled Tarik’s aspirations to do the same in the nation’s capital. 

Revitalizing the UNIA-ACL in D.C. 

Upon moving to the District in the mid-1970s, Tarik studied at the University of the District of Columbia, founded the “Our Own History Club” and hosted the “History is a Weapon” radio program on WPFW 89.3FM. 

Years later, in 1980, Tarik joined the late William Jackson-Bey, the Rev. Willie Wilson and others in founding what, for several years, became known as the Woodson-Banneker Div. 330 of the UNIA-ACL. 

He served as the founding division president and had a hand in writing the division’s charter at Union Temple Baptist Church in Southeast, where he and his family were congregants for several years. 

In 2005, Tarik became a chartered member of and chaplain for UNIA-ACL Division No. 183, also based in D.C. In that role, he continued to travel throughout the D.C. metropolitan area, and across the U.S., dropping gems of knowledge about African-American history, agriculture, Universal African Nationalism, the Black Press, and the history of the Black church. 

Those who came across Tarik in the D.C. metropolitan area learned about Nannie Helen Burroughs, as well as Bishop Richard Allen, David Walker and Noble Drew Ali. 

Mwariama Kamau, vice president of UNIA-ACL Division No. 183, spent much of his years alongside Tarik, gleaning wisdom and learning the organization’s protocol from the towering elder. Part of that experience, he said, meant memorizing various UNIA-ACL rituals and songs, including the Universal Ethiopian Anthem, which members recite at every general body meeting and event. 

Upon joining Division 330 in the late 1990s, Kamau took on leadership roles that further immersed him in Garveyism and brought him into contact with Tarik. At various events, he acknowledged Tarik as an audience member and asked him to provide remarks. 

As Kamau recounted to The Informer, Tarik spent the following years traveling across the country, on behalf of parent body leadership, delving into the history of Garveyism and emphasizing its modern-day relevance.

Tarik’s effectiveness, Kamau said, stemmed from how he connected various strains of Black nationalist teachings with Garveyism. “Baba Oduno’s familiarity with and affinity for people of various political, religious and cultural thought enabled him to successfully endear them to Garveyism,” he said. 

“When he became president, you found people in the Rasta movement, Nation of Islam, and Moorish Science Temple in the UNIA and gravitating toward Baba Oduno’s personality and teachings,” Kamau continued. “Long after he was no longer president, Baba Oduno picked people’s brains and made sure they sang the Universal Ethiopian Anthem wherever. He was one who maintained the Garveyite appeal to the masses.” 

Wilson, pastor emeritus of Union Temple Baptist Church, credited Tarik with channeling the District’s fervor for Black consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s. He told The Informer that, for decades, he and Tarik continued to work together, even crossing paths at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in Northeast during baptist minister conferences. 

“Baba Oduno was very astute in his knowledge of what Marcus Garvey and the UNIA had done for that to be the way for Black people to progress in this country and in the world,” Wilson said. “Those accomplishments would be the education for those who didn’t know about the great works of Marcus Garvey. It encouraged their own development for self in their own community.” 

Tarik continued carrying and preaching the legacy of UNIA-ACL until his death. The longtime UNIA-ACL leader’s casket was draped in intricate red and black cloth to signify other organization leaders who have become ancestors.

A Remnant of D.C.’s Black Past 

Going back as far as the early 1980s, Tarik spent a great deal of time on the campus of Howard University (HU). Standing at a towering 6 feet, 8 inches, he could often be seen asking students questions and tying together seemingly unrelated Black history and cultural factoids. 

Tarik also wrote at least one article in HU’s Hilltop newspaper and counted as a fixture at protests and Black cultural events. In time, student activists came to appreciate him as a spiritual father, maintaining relationships with him long after graduating from HU. 

Howard alumna Ida Jones said she remembers conversations with Tarik being instrumental in the shaping of her scholarship about the Pentecostal church. She told The Informer that Tarik, who she met in the late 1980s, always made his presence known near HU’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center as a scholar who bucked the academic hierarchy. 

Tarik’s legacy, Jones said, reminds her of a time in D.C.’s history when Blackness permeated all elements of city life. That’s why she counts him among D.C.’s most prized institutions, along with Blue Nile Botanicals and Pyramid Books. 

For Jones, Tarik represented the old-school, African spirit of the Black community, especially in the way that he revered prominent Black female figures like Bethune and Ida B. Wells. In terms of his spiritual orientation, she said that Tarik’s affiliation with Union Temple Baptist Church, more than anything, hinted at his rejection of Eurocentric paradigms.  

“Baba Oduno was never one to promote Christianity in the western framework,” said Jones, a university archivist at Morgan State University in Baltimore. “If you spoke to him, you would hear that blending of faith and an understanding of a supreme being and other smaller deities. I would really appreciate his conversation. Just seeing him talk about the earth and talking about planting. All of these things have elements of Africa, and just living in concert with the universe.” 

As Greg Carr, an associate professor of Afro-American Studies at HU told The Informer,  Tarik represented the true essence of the Black community. Upon meeting Tarik in the fall of 2000 on “the Yard,” Carr brought him into the classroom. 

Carr told The Informer that, on many occasions, Tarik energetically and enthusiastically engaged young people in conversation about a bevy of topics that enlightened them to hidden African-American figures. He went on to say that Tarik brought a similar energy in other District venues, including the National Press Club and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation legislative conferences where he conveyed a perspective that either sparked deep thought or discomfort. 

“In academic spaces, Baba Oduno helped recenter students in the real foundation of why they were at the university,” Carr said. “They were at the university as extensions of the Black community. Baba Oduno didn’t ever move from the center [of the community] to the periphery where the university stood. He would be unconventional in an academic setting but he was conventional in a community setting.” 

Falani Spivey, a D.C. native, filmmaker, and farmer, said her memories of Tarik go back as early as her teenage years walking along Georgia Avenue in Northwest. She called him and the late Hasinatu Camara of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party remnants of a “Chocolate City” that’s gradually slipping away in the era of gentrification. 

In the last decade, as Spivey increasingly immersed herself in agriculture, she took heed to Tarik’s motto “There’s no culture without agriculture!” However, as she told The Informer, much of her conversations with the elder Garveyite involved Black history,  culture, books, and current events, more than agriculture. 

Even so, Spivey recounted taking in wisdom that translated to her life as a farmer. She recognized Tarik’s penchant for speaking to young people and building a bridge between age groups. She said that, in itself, made Tarik’s motto all the more relevant to people dedicated to passing along wisdom over the generations. 

“It’s embedded in Baba Oduno and it’s part of our culture,” Spivey said. “We came here because of agriculture. I’m honored to have been around Baba Oduno and have figures like this in my life. These are rare people you could reach out to and touch. Baba Oduno was one of the few people that could make you feel like there was still a little something going on in D.C.”