Sorry brother Kipenji.
I have just posted the same article from Business Tribune by comrade Billet Magara. Just a coincidence.
Take care
Mitayo Potosi
From: Owor Kipenji <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ugnet_: Just how resilient is the black race? Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 22:55:49 +0100 (BST)
Just how resilient is the black race?
Business Tribune 18 September to 24 September 2003
http://www.btribune.co.zw/2003/sep18_sep24/features/001.htm
I have been asked many times whether it is my preoccupation to try to set right the wrong done to the world, particularly to black people by years of oppression. This usually makes me feel like a cigarette in a massive dome, which has no real presence until someone lights it up. So often we are cowed into a corner by conventional wisdom that demands we must behave the way everyone else does.
We must not question why past wrongs were done to us. We must be meek good boys and girls who listen attentively to those deemed more intelligent than we are as a race. We must refrain from "digging up the past" because it can only divide us, they say.
As an individual, I cannot possibly stick my neck out and claim the crown for defender of the defenceless or guardian of the past. My strident voice is nothing without the whispers of those who agree with me. But I will be damned if anyone can persuade me to turn a blind eye on history, with all its glory and gory episodes.
We could never learn to appreciate freedom if we did not juxtapose its image with oppression. Can we learn how to do good if we have no idea what bad or evil is? What kind of a race is it that has a selective memory that chooses to ignore all the bad things done to it simply because it "brings back bad memories"?
It is so comforting to hide our heads in the sand and pretend it all never happened, but the future itself will be nothing without its past, good or bad.
I have debated this with all manner of friends across the colour line and despite the heated verbal engagements, we are all agreed that the truth of our pasts black or white, must be known to our children, so that at least they can look back and feel a sense of revulsion to that which is inhuman and hug those concepts that see us joining hands as equals.
The intention is not to make other races feel guilty about their past misdeeds, but to allow them to rise and show that the ghosts of the past have been exorcised and the future is nonracial. But is it?
There is no race on this planet that has ever been subjected to greater torture, humiliation, mass killings and rapes than the black race. It has seen the arrival of the Asians in Egypt and Ethiopia, resulting in the displacement of the black pharaohs to the south and the annexation and vandalisation of artefacts and monuments such as the Sphinx and the great pyramids and the subsequent defacement and erasure of documentation of black history at those sites.
Black people have seen the rise of the gorgon of slavery, its brute force and complete dehumanisation of a race and its near annihilation. Films that serve as historical re-enactments of slavery such as Amistad and Roots among others, far from setting the clock back, actually make us sit up and see ourselves for what we are and what we ought to be.
A scene in the film Amistad that depicts the captain and sailors trying to solve the problem of overloading is especially burned into my memory. The ship is in danger of sinking, so some "cargo" must be thrown overboard in order for the weight to be reduced and hence allow the vessel to stay afloat.
So black slaves are chained neck-to-neck, arms handcuffed behind their backs and made to sit close to the edge. The angry sea pounds the sides of the creaking vessel like a hungry shark in a feeding frenzy. At the end of the long human chain, a heavy iron anchor is tied to add more dead weight.
Then the "cargo" of slaves is tossed into the water, with those resisting also dragged along by the sheer weight of the anchor and other sinking comrades.
One beautiful African woman sits demurely across the deck and watches in tears as her husband meets his watery fate. She is holding their two-year-old baby on her lap.
Rather than suffer the rest of the journey alone among these strangers and foreigners, she flings herself in a back flip dive with her infant clasped to her bosom, into the angry sea and drowns together with the man she loves. Even acts such as these could not persuade the slave masters to believe that Africans were human and capable of loving.
Instead, young African women with breasts like the horns of gazelles were selected for salacious "entertainment" for sailors and their captains. Men were whipped and manacled. It is a known fact that more than 12 million Africans died in the part of the Atlantic Ocean now known as the "Middle Passage" on their way to slavery in the Americas and Europe.
What is curious about human history is that the 12 to 15 million Africans who died during this period are not valued by white economic historians as much as the nearly six million Jews who were slaughtered by some deranged Austrian German-Jew called Adolph Hitler.
The Jewish genocide is called the "holocaust" but the black genocide is never referred to as such. Think of what it must have been like for the dislocated families that survived slavery on either side of the Atlantic. "Why didn’t they just fly back to Africa by plane?"
Young people today find it hard to understand why there were no planes or computers or guns at that time. Some do though, but the depth of ignorance even among adults is alarming. How does one begin to explain why grown men and women were exchanged for barrels of rum (alcohol), cloth and guns? Compensation for Jews was granted and a new nation was created for them where there had been none before.
Africans in the Caribbean and Americas today yearn to return "home" but those who do meet a new painful challenge. They encounter "brothers and sisters" so mentally colonised and so unaware of the politically correct attitudes to receive their long lost kin. Diasporians are so hurt, and rightly so, when their reunited kinsmen call them "Negroes". Years of miseducation accounts for this. We become strangers to our own reflections.
The Aborigines of Australia were also hunted down like animals and their hair still hangs in some museums in less moral parts of our universe today, the remains of human trophies by privileged hunters of running men. Like their African brothers, they were branded with hot iron bars to give them distinctive scars representing their masters, exactly the same way that we brand cattle and horses with hot irons today!
The pain made many to soil themselves adding more weight to their humiliation. The white "masters" deemed the black Aborigine unfit to rear children and therefore forcibly removed them from their natural parents and brought them up in "civilised" white families.
But just what is it that has made black people overcome these tribulations without losing their sanity? Is it the bigness of heart? Was it the strength of our collective mentality or the brute strength of our physiques that made us survive where noone else would have survived? Was it our ability to adapt quickly to different climes?
They kept their sanity through song and dance, homogeneity where it was possible away from the watchful eyes of the "master". Slaves were not allowed to marry. They were supposed to "breed" young ones who could be sold to any willing buyer without the consent of the parents.
So unhinged was the black mind that the very unit that made him human, that of the family, was denied him. And yet the mind healed. The body toiled on and the eyes saw cities grow out of nothing on the backs of black slave men and women, a thankless task that stole credit from where it was really due.
Today African Americans, Tahitians, Hondurans, Jamaicans, Cubans, Brazilians, Guyanese and many more descendants of kidnapped Africans face the rebuke and biting accusations from their own offspring. They are accused of failure, ineptitude, dimwittedness and uninventiveness in the light of the "progress" made by other races in various fields of human endeavour.
Back in Africa, our own children echo the same questions. "Where were you when other races were doing this and that to you? Why didn’t you hit back?" Of course the questions remain unanswered.
We did not survive because we are a great people. We survived because we had to but we had to ensure that the species were propagated. So we stunned the world and multiplied to levels that were totally unprecedented. Despite the wars and pestilence, the African continues to multiply beyond expectation.
The experts say that after a certain period, Africans will have become so depleted numerically that they will be in danger of extinction due to some pandemic of the era.
Lo, they rise in swelling numbers that defy both logic and sense. The poverty that is supposed to be our death is actually the crucible of life itself, literally. It does seem like an unkind and unreasonable statement to make but it is a fact that poor living conditions worsen population explosions.
So many theories have been propounded on how populations can be reduced but the most glaring one, which is also the subtlest, has been largely ignored. Improve the living standards of people through electrification of residential areas. Improve sanitation; communication and water supplies and the problem of exploding populations will cease to exist.
The only form of entertainment for the poor people in dark unelectrified residential areas is... sex. Poor living standards are the syndrome of African existence. There is absolutely no pride in poverty. How long then will our people continue to look poverty in the eye?
How will this affect their worldview? Can a man from Epworth feel "equal" to one from Kambanje ("Kambanjie" as "maSalhalha" say)? Today, the odds we face are worse than slavery. They are slavery in disguise plus much more.
We continue to lose contact with our own social reality, our children, our families and our values to a point where we cease to exist as a people. The only thing that holds black people together is the strength of their kinship, family ties that give them a sense of belonging. Break this and you break the camel’s back.
The current economic crisis is the biggest threat to our identity as a race in this country. It has seen a hike in everything except standards of living.
Prohibitive bus fares make it impossible for families to visit each other and for workers to sustain jobs and income.
Telephone bills are so scary that most families now consider telephones a luxury in the home. The quickest way for kin to connect is now unaffordable.
Mealie-meal now costs its own weight in gold. Meat is a rarity only eaten during festive seasons.
Milk, bread and water, the only "foods" with the highest yeast content of all daily intakes, continue to nail customers to coffins and crosses. Our burden is made worse by the decrepit state of housing in places like Mbare, Makokoba, Njube, Mzilikazi, Mufakose, Mutapa, Senga, Banket and Rimuka among others.
Open drains weep and belch while future presidents hold important conferences with their chums during a plastic ball match break. The same goes for places in Nairobi, Gaberone, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cairo, Lagos, Abidjan or Yauonde.
Black children stare the future in the face. It grins back at them, bare boned and cloaked and with a scythe in its bony hands.
The conditions in which we find ourselves in today are self-made. We have become our own slave masters who wield the whip, gun or baton. We turn blind eyes to our political and economic foibles. Talking about open drains; there is one sewer drainpipe near Zambia House, by the sparkling new church at the corner of Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and Julius Nyerere Way, (May the African heroes’ souls rest in peace. Cough! Gasp!) in downtown Harare.
Sometimes it really smells of rotten blood and flesh and this at the entrance of the church! Imagine this. This sordid mess is going to Mkuvisi River, on to Manyame River and into Lake Chivero from where our drinking water comes! (Are you still thirsty!?).
After all the horrible stuff that has happened to us throughout history, is it not yet time for us to really stretch our legs and spoil our people (of all races) rotten by making sure that their living standards are raised?
We live in memory of our history’s forerunners. They survived slavery, colonization, racial genocides and medical experimentation. Should we allow this to happen to our offspring too and by our own hand? I think not.
Billet Magara writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted on [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 263 023 259380
---------------------------------
Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo!Messenger
_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
-------------------------------------------- This service is hosted on the Infocom network http://www.infocom.co.ug
