The loss of a connection to our African ancestral lineages has created ever-widening fissures in our identities where the most bizarre and ahistorical notions take root.
Category: History
Climate disasters as social entropy
Over time, the capacity of states to respond to climate disasters will diminish. The frequency and scale of those disasters will increase, eventually resulting in a situation that has already become normal in some parts of the US and the world, wherein people–living in the milieu of partial recoveries–struggle to carry on their lives in the midst of the detritus of environmental catastrophe. The long-term consequence of this, of course, will be a decrease in security, health, and well-being. These things are, I believe, inevitable. However, actions can be taken to reduce these vulnerabilities and to make local communities more resilient and self-reliant.
Delusion
Conspiracy theories enable poorly informed people to feel like geniuses.
Denying African Origins
A Swahili proverb says “A false story has seven endings.” Part of why attempts to bypass our African origins rely on the mythical is because they negate the empirical. Such tales accentuate the implausible because the plausible is so apparent.
10 Questions for so-called Black Native Americans (i.e., those who deny that we are of African descent)
1. If our ancestors aren’t African, why do we primarily have West African haplotypes? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4048334/
2. Why do we eat African foods? How did these crops get to the Americas? https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/how-enslaved-africans-influenced-american-diet/4816356.html
Why is our diet not identical to the Native American diet? Consider, for instance their relationship to corn in contrast to ours?
3. Why do we speak a language (AAVE or Ebonics) that has African syntax, rather than the syntax of Native American languages? https://www.academia.edu/17776766/Africanisms_in_Contemporary_English
4. What is this and how did it come to America? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo#/media/File:Bluegrass_banjo.png
5. The earliest Muslims in the US were Blacks. Where did they come from? How did they get here? They said that they were brought on slave ships. They actually told their stories. Were they mistaken or confused? https://nyupress.org/9781479847112/servants-of-allah/
6. Many Africans in the 18th and 19th Century used the term African in the organizations. Examples include the African Lodge, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the First African Church. Many of those who lived during these times were taken directly from Africa or had forbears that were. Were they mistaken? Were they confused?
7. Many African Americans gave their children African names. Why didn’t they give them Native American names? Were they confused about where they came from? https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/names-and-naming-african
8. Many Africans wrote narratives of the experience of enslavement. Where are the period narratives that affirm that we are, in fact, native to the US?
9. If we are native to the US, are Afro-Cubans, Afro-Brazilians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Afro-Columbians, etc.? If so, why does so much of their culture also derive from Africa? Such similarities defies coincidence do they not?
10. Why are our fighting traditions African-based? Why aren’t these methods of fighting found amongst Africans and not the indigenous population of the Americas? https://uscpress.com/Fighting-for-Honor
The reality is that our relationship with the indigenous population has been complicated. We have collaborated with them (i.e., in instances of insurrection), extirpated them (i.e., as in the legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers), and been exploited by them (i.e., as in slavery). However, we are not them. We are Africans.
To quote Edward Wilmot Blyden, “Your place has been assigned you in the universe as Africans, and there is no room for you as anything else.” The embrace of such a sublime reality as our inherent Africanness is the very foundation to our regeneration as a people.
The lunacy of denialism
The violent birth of European modernity, established as it was atop the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans, would prove so devastating that even today some descendants of the latter flee from memory of this terror into the lunacy of denialism.
Impoverished notions of freedom
African/Black people are strongly encouraged to embrace a notion of freedom that centers on the self-interest of the individual, rather than one wherein self-determination and sovereignty are our principal objectives. The former striving is reinforced across the cultural landscape, while the latter is portrayed as an unattainable myth or heresy.
African or American: A reflection on persistent absurdities
Recently on Twitter (that bastion of civil, intellectual discourse) a user posted that many of us had been duped into believing that we are African descendants due to the machinations of two European intellectuals, Franz Boas and Melville J. Herskovits. This statement was a part of a larger conversation about the idea that African Americans are really indigenous to the Americas. While I am loathe to engage in such non-sensical discussions, I decided to briefly weigh in with a few simple remarks.
Of course one is entitled to their cherished familial narratives, but do note that families make all sorts of dubious genealogical claims. Richard White writes about the the differences between history and memory in his book Remembering Ahanagran. I have found a number of grotesque errors in my own family “history”, errors that defy empirical verification.
Secondly, the idea that enslaved Blacks were African is not an idea that had to wait for Franz Boas (1858) or Melville J. Herskovits (1895) to be born. Many African Americans in the 18th and 19th Century knew of their African origins and took great pride in them. Martin Delany knew of his African origins. So too did Paul Cuffee and Harriet Tubman. For this generation of African Americans, the memory of Africa was fresh and undeniable. Further, they named their institutions after Africa: African Lodge, African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Free Schools, and so forth. Our 18th and 19th Century ancestors were not confused about who they were. Nor was such knowledge derived from “theories” of Western-trained academics.
In fact, narratives like these persist into the present-day and is the subject of books like Wendy Wilson-Fall’s Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic which notes how the memory of Madagascar, or more specifically Malagasy ancestry has been retained by African American families. I actually know people for whom such a narrative exists. I also have Malagasy ancestry, but my confirmation came via DNA testing. Kwasi Konadu’s Akan Pioneers: African Histories, Diasporic Experiences explores the cultural legacy of the Akan in this hemisphere. The Igbo Diaspora in the Era of the Slave Trade by Douglas B. Chambers discusses the Igbo in the US and the Caribbean. This is just a short sample, there are other texts that discuss the Kongo and Yorùbá in the Americas.
Lastly, when one considers that the average African descendant in the US has been in here for nine or ten generations, and that this means having 510 or 1,022 genetic ancestors. I find that narratives of being native and not African generally rely on the story of a single ancestor, rather than the hundreds or more to which one owes one ancestry. Genealogical research is arduous and relies on empirical evidence. Not sole narratives, as even these are subject to critique and verification.
Bridges, not walls
Given the salience of alienation in this society, it is unsurprising that the politics of atomization retain such popularity. In these times one could simply manufacture identity constructs or conspiracies or political agendas that no matter how mad would attract a following.
What is perhaps lost in the headlong rush towards division ad infinitum is an appreciation to the degree that such actions erodes the basis of community. Absent this, our capacity to exist as members of a society greatly diminishes. Further, our resolve to act in concert towards desired ends (such as addressing climate change, which threatens to nullify our species or to empower our communities) cease to be viable.
The politics of atomization has proven itself as an expedient means to garner attention and to rally the disaffected given that it peddles in fear and loathing. Alternatively, it has not proven itself sufficient to compel people to act towards a broader vision of the future based on hope, mutual respect, or a recognition of our interdependency. In its most grotesque forms, solidarity is decried and disunity is lauded. Such thinking dismisses Pan-Africanism as an anachronistic fiction, while identity constructs based on our subjugation by European settler colonists or our descent from those whom they enslaved is considered cutting-edge, if not radical.
I am reminded of a Swahili proverb that states “Bora kujenga madaraja kuliko kuta.” It translates into English as “It is better to build bridges than walls.” Indeed, we need to build the bridges that will carry us into the future.
The Ancient Aryan Concept of Freedom
In Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, Jacob H. Carruthers wrote, “The Greek concept of freedom which is also characteristic of the Aryan way, is drawn from the concept of the Chief God (Zeus or Wodin) who is completely free to do as he wants, e.g. to rape any goddess or woman, to exploit or destroy any god or man according to his whim.”
Though some may not see the relevance, this is what we see all around us in the west deployed as a form of absolute freedom or hyperrelativism–a contemporary discourse with ancient roots. It is a freedom from all constraints. A freedom to pursue infinite hedonism or depravity.
In the our day, such a notion of freedom has been hailed as radical or revolutionary but it is neither, at least from an African worldview. This acknowledgment begs the question of how freedom might be conceptualized with human well-being and communal flourishing as central concerns.