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Friday, July 11, 2025

Joy of Ancestry vs Weight of History

by

20110619

We've been told that "they-Africans-came be­fore Colum­bus." How­ev­er, the bulk of Africans sub­se­quent­ly ar­rived in less than aus­pi­cious cir­cum­stances and, as far as we know, were not wel­comed to their "new homes" or, pre­cise­ly, "hold­ing bays" with en­thu­si­as­tic cheers and/or blar­ing trum­pets. "Much blood, sweat and tears" have flowed un­der the bridge that con­sti­tut­ed the hia­tus that spanned en­slave­ment and man­u­mis­sion and/or the longer drawn-out process of eman­ci­pa­tion. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, now, among the African Di­as­po­ra, there's some­thing of an urge to make that sen­ti­men­tal jour­ney down mem­o­ry lane to ex­pe­ri­ence a psy­cho­log­i­cal repa­tri­a­tion, so to speak.

Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with one's an­ces­tral home, in search of one's roots, is not pe­cu­liar to peo­ple of African stock. The fact that there were cal­cu­lat­ed ef­forts at de­hu­man­i­sa­tion and decul­tur­al­i­sa­tion, per­haps pro­vide an added in­cen­tive to deal with "cul­tur­al am­ne­sia," in an at­tempt to at­tain that elu­sive sense of self­hood, self-worth, and, if I may so, "a larg­er eth­nic iden­ti­ty." One of our more promi­nent pro­po­nents of the flaunt­ing of his sup­posed "African iden­ti­ty" jus­ti­fied it with the rhetor­i­cal ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion that "a kit­ten be­ing born in an oven doesn't qual­i­fy to be con­sid­ered as a bread." Broach­ing the top­ic of "eth­nic­i­ty," the not­ed Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Wal­ter Lipp­man sur­mised, "What is called pride of race is the sense that our ori­gins are wor­thy of re­spect."

Eman­ci­pa­tion is a sig­nif­i­cant bench­mark for the African Di­as­po­ra, as it seeks to re­claim its cul­tur­al her­itage and de­fine an "African iden­ti­ty." In­volved as well is what the psy­chol­o­gists call "cathar­sis." How­ev­er, an African-Amer­i­can US sen­a­tor, hav­ing made it to the top of the heap, said, "We, the de­scen­dants of slaves, do not wish to be re­mind­ed that at one time in hu­man his­to­ry we were chat­tel, we were prop­er­ty, we were bought and sold. All we were was 'dust in the wind.'" Hav­ing been bought to the "New World," with­out even lug­gage tags for the pur­pose of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, it's no sur­prise that some are still wrestling with an iden­ti­ty cri­sis and tend to see them­selves as vic­tims, no mat­ter what they have achieved. I sup­pose that there will al­ways be a po­lit­i­cal mar­ket for re­cy­cled pain, dis­tress and syn­thet­ic in­dig­na­tion.

There is al­so the ex­pe­di­ent of us­ing the com­mon mem­o­ry of op­pres­sion as a bond which is, pre­sum­ably, greater than the cen­trifu­gal forces of chaot­ic re­birth and the reignit­ing of the African spir­it.

There is, I be­lieve, a north Amer­i­can-In­di­an say­ing that "You can't tell how a man feels un­til you walk in his moc­casins." There's al­so an old African say­ing that "Un­til the li­on learns to write, the sto­ry of the hunt will con­tin­ue to be told from the hunter's per­spec­tive." It there­fore fol­lows that, with the spot­light on slav­ery in the UN-des­ig­nat­ed year in recog­ni­tion of the African Di­as­po­ra, the voic­es hith­er­to silent and per­spec­tives hith­er­to ig­nored or mut­ed should be al­lowed to bal­ance the his­tor­i­cal equa­tion. Alex Ha­ley may well have giv­en that much of a fil­lip to the African Di­as­po­ra search for the his­tor­i­cal roots. In fact, I un­der­stand that in the US there's the year­ly ob­ser­vance of a "Black His­to­ry Month." Not to be out­done, I un­der­stand that we have our own "Lib­er­a­tion Day."

Ad­mit­ted­ly, it's been the prover­bial "long and wind­ing road" for the African who had been brought, un­will­ing­ly, in shack­les and un­der the most in­hu­man con­di­tions to the "New World." In 1757, the black man in the US was legal­ly deemed 3/5 of a man. In 1857 (100 years lat­er), the US Supreme Court ruled that the black man had no rights that a white man had to re­spect. The Africans were not on­ly de­nied their "hu­man right" but, in the na­ture of things, stripped of their lan­guages, names and there­by iden­ti­ties.

Not­ed black Amer­i­can po­et Maya An­gelou said, "The wrench­ing pain of the African slav­ery ex­pe­ri­ence can­not be un­lived." Some­one else claimed that black Amer­i­cans were robbed of their his­to­ry, and now they're re­claim­ing it for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

Some cyn­ics might tend to dis­miss this as "mawk­ish sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty," but in my view the ca­lyp­so Take Me Back Africa, penned by ca­lyp­so com­pos­er "Jok­er" Devine and voiced by Machel Mon­tano, was "spot on."

As Devine saw it, speak­ing to a com­pos­ite im­age of the African slave and his de­scen­dant, "I am a vic­tim of dis­il­lu­sion... a soul with­out a rest­ing place... lone­ly pil­grim with­out a vi­sion... wan­der­er in time and space... search­ing for my iden­ti­fy. Take me back, Africa." Ob­vi­ous­ly, the "Africa" al­lud­ed to here doesn't en­com­pass a ge­o­graph­i­cal or even con­tem­po­rary one but some ide­alised, ro­man­ti­cised con­fig­u­ra­tion of an imag­i­na­tive en­ti­ty em­body­ing Africa's glo­ri­ous past and rich his­tor­i­cal her­itage.


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