Roots

I had a think about my people the other day. It was after I had finished reading a book that was centered around calling Black people inferior to their counterparts due to the fact that we, in essence, lack the monetary riches to prove that we are true equals with other races. A "consumer race" he called us. We won't unpack the fact that the author somehow convinced himself that the only way an entire race of people could be considered "intelligent" is through the willful oppression of other races. We'll leave that and what it says about him to another day.

I like to finish things I start so I kept reading, all the way to the end, with a bitter taste in my mouth. This isn't a think piece on the innumerable ways in which black people have been wronged throughout history but rather these are the thoughts of a young African about African people. 

I thought about just how much African history has been lost as a direct result of western interference. I think about how hard it must be for a young African to access knowledge and information from his forebearers when they themselves passed on knowledge and information orally. I think about what this lack of texts and scrolls would mean for us as a people in the future. I think about the willful destruction of the numerous African identities because there isn't just one. I think about the vilification of African practices and cultures. I think about how the opportunity for my people to grow out of social/cultural infancy was denied to them.

I think about how history is always written from the view of the victor and as a result, we have been consistently depicted as savages in history when in actuality the savagery of the Europeans reached heights we had never imagined before, the ramifications of which still ripple out through history to affect Africans lives today. Savagery and malice fueled with so much aggression that they sailed around the world and taught people how to be racist. A doctrine based on the simple fact that if you did not look like they did then you were inferior. Greed driven and exclusionary. Ask yourself why the darker-skinned people from any culture and any place in the world suffer most?

I think about how the Europeans sectioned off parts of the continent and created borders that didn't exist before so that they could peacefully lay claim to natural resources that weren't theirs to begin with. The Scramble for Africa marks just one point in history when the African identity was under attack and how some of those attacks persisted into modern times under the guise of capitalism.

I think black people need to concede defeat so we can bounce back. To be brutally honest about our current and past reality, along with our place in the world. We need to redefine what it means to be African. To preserve the parts of our identity that still belong to us while looking to grow and add to them. To let go of trying to correct the past. To let go of trying to revive dead roots and rather just stick the branches we have left in the dirt and water them. Roots will grow. Nature will provide. 

We are just as African as our forebearers. The identity of a people lies not solely in the texts and stories they leave behind but within the people themselves. Just because most of the oral knowledge of our people was deliberately destroyed does not mean that we won't have stories of our own to tell. An identity that we will need to pass on. History is beautiful because everything that is the present will eventually become history too. We, right now, can define what it will mean to be African someday. Just as those before us did.

I say this because the hoteps and Black people in the diaspora have labeled this disconnect from our past as a debilitating handicap. I don't share the sentiment, as an African from Africa I can say there is more to it then just practices and ceremonies.  

We are Them and they are Us. We are proof. We are a legacy. We are here now because they were here then. It's up to us to define what being an African means. What being black means. And not only how we fit into the world as it is right now, but more importantly how we will fit in the world in the future.