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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
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