On Wednesday night, February 27, at the Bishop Sylvester Memorial Center on Regent Street in Belize City, the UBAD Educational Foundation (UEF) held the third in a series of lectures, this one titled, “Black Consciousness – from Africa to Belize”. Presentations were made by two guest speakers: Nuri Akbar, Belizean born Political Science major, an African-American resident on a visit to his hometown Belize, is a Muslim brother who became a student of the UBAD revolution through his involvement with the BREDDA organization of Los Angeles; and Omitade Adediran, a Trinidad native, is a Psychology major who also grew up in the U.S. and credits her African consciousness development with her initiation into the Yoruba community in the U.S. She once lectured at the University of Belize and is now retired and resident in Bullet Tree in the Cayo District. She has been living in Belize for the past twelve years.
Brother Nuri focused his presentation in discussing “the colonization of the imagination”, a phrase he said he borrowed from the late reknowned historian/linguist/anthropologist Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, to describe the damage done to our collective psyche by the legacy of the slavery experience. He ended with some advice on how to begin reversing this process, which is at the root of much of our problems as a people today.
Brother Nuri said that in trying to deal with today’s social and economic problems, people of African descent need to realize that we are “not just dealing with the after effects of slavery, but at a deeper level with the colonization of the imagination,” the unwholesome, unhealthy and crippling mental outlook and attitude that results when we “internalize the myths and falsehoods that were told to us by the colonizers…believe lies about ourselves…believe that your history began with slavery, and that you came from a broken and battered people, who created nothing and made no contribution to the development of advanced science, mathematics, architecture and the creative art forms….believe that we are a cursed people…and that nothing good can possibly come from within our own creative thought process.”
Brother Nuri ascribed a lot of the crime, as well as social and economic problems being experienced today, especially among our young people, as having its root somewhere in this “colonization of the imagination,” because it “affects the way we relate to ourselves; it affects the way we treat each other; it affects the way we use each other…”
Brother Akbar took the opportunity to caution parents about their children’s use of the internet, which, like television, is an addictive item, but “the computer is even more powerful because it is an interactive process. Which means that your child can go into any chat room and talk literally to anyone from any part of the world. They can go to any website, from hard core pornography to sex chat rooms, and even how to make a bomb….. The internet is a vital tool that can be used for positive purposes…but we must be clear about its negatives.”
However, he advised adults to make positive use of the internet, which can be a very effective tool to increase our knowledge and help “break the barrier” created by this “colonization of the imagination”, from which we all suffer to some degree. “…This is a great technology. It connects us with the rest of our family in Africa, in the Caribbean, and Asia… We have no more excuses for not learning about our people and our history….Every one of our major scholars and teachers has a web site on the internet … where we can go on …and retrieve important information.”
In winding up his presentation, Brother Nuri emphasized and illustrated the clear manifestation of the negative effects of “colonization of the imagination”, as demonstrated by the way we talk to our children, and offered the advice that it is critical that we work to free the minds of our people, starting with the little children. He continued, “A few days ago I witnessed a father shouting and cursing the worst of profanity you can imagine to his son; this was a baby who was less than two years old. And today I also witnessed a mother .. in this case the child was doing the cursing, and this child was less than two years old. I’m saying that there is coming a point here… where we are becoming our worst self enemy. And I don’t want you to brush this off and say, it is the culture….it is an accepted norm. We can blame television; we can blame the internet; we can blame everything else; but the way you conduct yourself with your child, the way you communicate with your child….. at two years old… and you’re wondering why at fifteen and sixteen they turn into a monster, that none of you can recognize? It begins when they are two years old.”
“And that is why none of your rehabilitation programs, none of your state sponsored programs is going to work. Understanding the root cause of this is essential to us addressing the condition of our young people in Belize today. It’s not about more jails. It’s not about more law enforcement. It’s not about capital punishment. It
The way you communicate with your child. And until that is changed, I am saying to you that we have an uphill struggle in this little beautiful but potentially powerful country called Belize.”
Sister Omitade Adediran started her presentation with an audio-visual clip of various scenes from a Yoruba village in Africa, with music, drumming, singing and dancing. It was relaxing and invigorating.
The recurring question in Sister Omitade’s presentation was, “Why have we forgotten?”, referring to the enslavement of our ancestors and the slavery experience. She argued why it is important for us to now remember, as a means of healing, so we can better move forward. And she concluded with her advice on a way forward for our people, setting standards of leadership for, defining and giving respect to our elders, to enhance the re-development of our social structures, borrowing from the best attributes of our forgotten African traditions.
In developing her argument, Sister Omitade started by discussing the historical African cultural and spiritual world view. “Everything that African people do is an expression of African spirit.” Drawing from her Yoruba cultural background, she forwarded the view that all African religions were basically monotheistic. But they saw manifestations of God in all His creations, from the trees, the water, the animals; everything in creation had a purpose and a meaning. The spirituality, the values and customs, the harmony created by the common outlook of interdependence, “groupness” and collective responsibility were all aspects of the pre-slavery African character. Sister Omitade argued that, as a people, not only have we forgotten our history before slavery, but we have forgotten the slave experience itself; and she proposed that the reason we have forgotten is because the knowledge was suppressed in our ancestors, whose “forgetting” became a necessary psychological defence mechanism in order for them to endure and survive the physical and emotional hardship and terror of slavery. The fullness of our African character became subverted as our survival response to the dehumanizing process of enslavement and the slave experience; and, in order for us to regain our whole character, we need to retrieve our more distant but glorious past; but to do that we first have to cross the bridge of pain and sorrow over the more recent slavery experience.
She presented a short clip from the movie Amistad, to emphasize the fact that present day descendants of African slaves were birthed by the survivors of the brutal Middle Passage, and to show that these people had endured the most dehumanizing and traumatizing experience imaginable, and that some of this terrible psychological trauma must have had an impact upon the psyche of their children. How can there not be a tremendous effect upon generations born of parents who experienced such immense tragedy, pain and degradation; and “why have we forgotten?”
Sister Omitade’s message was that the violence we inflict on each other in our society today, both physical and psychological in downgrading and disrespecting each other, has its roots in the pain endured by our ancestors that has not yet been addressed. “The source of the pain we inflict on each other, is the pain not yet resolved from our past.” We need to reclaim our past, to understand what happened to us, and what we had before the MAAFA, the African slave holocaust. She then read the following passage, “One aspect of African liberation is finding a way to bring some psychological, emotional and spiritual closure to the trauma that we have experienced in the last 500 years, also known as the MAAFA, the African slave holocaust. The MAAFA has been the least discussed human tragedy. Yet this segment of African human time has crippled a continent, its people, its children and the children of the diaspora. What has probably made this tragedy even more horrific has been the inability of its victims to talk about it freely, openly, and express our grief without shame or embarrassment. Yet, enough has never been written about the effects and aspects of this holocaust on the social, economic and cultural evolution of the African continent, and the children that it lost into genocide and the genocidal nature of an emerging European capitalism seeking free labor to build its cultural empire. The European aggression against African people reached a 100-year apex of violence and brutality, as 100 years of the trade in human beings destroyed and erased the existence of whole villages, people, traditions, rituals, ceremonies, histories and languages. At the apex of this barbarity it is estimated that 60 to 90 million Africans’ lives were lost in the Middle Passage, not to mention the huge toll of African human life lost on plantations in the Caribbean, North America, Central America, South America and Europe. African people died for the sole purpose of increasing the wealth and domination of Western Civilization at the expense of Africa and her children. Her children have died in untold numbers under different styles of enslavement, including colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, segregation and cultural assimilation. It has resulted in African people betraying each other, and the pursuit of authentic self determination on the continent and in the diaspora. It is a deep spiritual pain of unmeasured effect on African peoplehood world wide.”
Sister Omitade then continued from where she had left off with her argument for us to reclaim our past as a necessary step in the process of psychological healing. “…It is true that our path for liberation of African people lies in our knowledge and adoration of where our past was great, and reclaiming that past so that we can move forward into the future.”
She argued that the violence prevalent amongst our people, is directly linked to the psychological violence and pain experienced by our ancestors. “…It is important for us to begin to look at this issue of the pain…. The pain that we inflict upon each other is evidence of the pain that we have not resolved from our past…. And we do inflict a tremendous amount of pain on each other… We disrespect each other. We kill each other….. I don’t think that there is any greater harm that we can do to our society than for us to kill each other… because in essence homicide is suicide… homicide will kill us all eventually….”
“… It is important for us to understand, ‘why have we forgotten?’”
She then showed another clip from Amistad to further search for an answer to the question, “why have we forgotten?”
“…. What we just witnessed … we had to get this film from a European… Stephen Spielberg. Not one of our own people thought that it was significant enough to do that…. And most of us feel so uncomfortable… And what do we feel uncomfortable about?…seeing people naked.. naked…..That’s the first thing they did… Hopefully, once when we get beyond that…. that these people had no clothes on… we will realize that the ones who remained on the ship, are the people who gave birth to us…. And out of that trauma is how they broke… and how then they broke us… And you can see some of the same nigger patterns… even though we are no longer on the ship… amongst us… You can see the same greed… the same asking for handouts… When I get my thing I keep my thing… I make sure that nobody else gets any… unless they kinda get it from the side… the same fear factor that we have to deal with….. that at any moment violence will break out… at any moment we can be killed…- These are the reasons that we have forgotten…”
Having answered the question “why we have forgotten”, Sister Omitade declared that it is now very important for us to recall and revisit our past, if we are to go forward with renewed strength as a people. “..And at the time, it’s a great defence strategy… But now, it is 2008.. And so now, it’s really not worth my while… It is no longer functional for us to continue to forget … We have to recall this pain… We have to touch into this pain… We have to release this pain…And we have to figure out then what’re we gonna do when we get through it… We have to stop being angry at each other… We have to figure out how we’re gonna work together…..”
“The question which you have always been asking yourself… why have I forgotten?… what am I afraid of? Even today, there are things that make you afraid… Even today, … the fear often comes out, or is expressed by us as a preference… ‘I don’t like that’… . Usually it means that you are afraid….. and so you just say, ‘I never like that’…. because that way you are off the hook, for trying to do it…”
“… We have to be asking those questions… We have to be asking, why do I get defensive when someone gives the side of the Africans?… Why do I feel like I want to attack them, or stay away from them, or I am suspicious of them? Why do I abandon my ancestors with the majority around me and spread that it’s not important or relevant? Why do I suddenly say, well, ‘Oh yea, I don’t wanna talk about that either’? Why do I remain silent when the things look wrong?.. And what are my dignity and honor worth? These are the questions that we should be asking ourselves everyday…. We see all the challenges that are presented to us… And we have to be asking the question, ‘Where do I stand?’ ‘What is my stand?’”
In trying to answer those questions, Sister Omitade made some observations towards finding the answers.
“…. In African culture, people are given names that remind them of their destiny…why they came to earth…. we all came to earth for a reason… When our identity was removed, we lost a lot, because there weren’t the things to remind us of who we were….”
“… Then we got to various places on this side of the world, and laws were created to make almost everything that we related to illegal, whether it was drumming, or gathering in groups of larger than five, or practicing spiritual traditions,…all of those things became illegal, and punished.”
“… We’ve forgotten because religion has been used as a means of quoting scripture to support enslavement, invoking fear by creating suspicion against everything that appears different, using mis-education to rob us of our sense of place, our sense of history and our sense of lineage, and using mis-education to teach the power and glory of European history and to perpetuate the myth that the first great civilization was Greek. It was not. My ancestors 2300 years before the common era BCE, had the religious and spiritual system that spoke of one god and talked about a philosophy of … relating to each other based on the principle of “miad”, which is divine justice, order, harmony… Our ancestors believed in the power of God through nature and through all things that lived and were created by God. And so therefore, long before.. there was even the notion of a Greek civilization, we had civilization.”
Sister Omitade continued by making some observations on our present condition, and some of the fundamental African concepts that mitigate against some of our present failures.
“Every single country in which African men reside in numbers, they are incarcerated in numbers.” This is an uncontested fact, but there must be an explanation that does not entertain any suggestion of racial inferiority.
“The whole concept of being and grounded and rooted in nature is very important…” This is tied to the African world view and spiritual relationship with all of creation.
“Survival of the group… it’s very important that we all survive… so important that individuals are prepared to die for the survival of the group…” The African idea of “groupness” and communal living.
“Also, very primary is the whole concept of the unity of the male principle and the female principle…There is no creation without both….. and if we allow divisive forces to come between us, then we are missing the point of what is creation…”
Sister Omitade wound up her presentation, having analyzed the problem, by suggesting a road map for us to find a solution to the dilemma of our condition as a people. She proposed as a first step, that elders take the lead, and she defined her meaning of “elders”, according to her African Yoruba tradition
“What’s missing now in our society? I firmly believe that what is missing in our society are elders who are willing to stand up and be counted, and who are willing to reach out and counsel young people. Young people are anybody under 50…. Elders need to start standing up… and becoming legitimate…. Stop fooling around, saying one thing and doing another….so that people will listen to what we have to say….” (Is it revealing that under the cruel physically taxing system of slavery, life expectancy was rarely over 50 years? Note that perhaps the greatest slave leader, Toussaint Louverture, attained the stature of leader having passed 50 years of age, perhaps by virtue of not being confined to the full hardship of the plantation.)
“When elders fail in their duties, they will suffer in the future…on a basic level, you feel unsafe walking down the street… When elders fail to do rituals on behalf of the community, then youths are violent and act out, and adults, meaning everybody under 50, act confused and bewildered and don’t know what to do about the problem…. So it’s the elders who must stand up, because we are part of the solution; it is very important for us then to purge ourselves of what we’ve been taught… and this means,… someone said it earlier… ‘well, they never taught us that’… Back in the 60’s someone once said… ‘why would you expect that your oppressor is going to teach you that which will liberate you?’…. So it is our obligation to stand up and figure out what we need to learn… And if you ask yourself those questions that I posed at the beginning… then you can know what directions we need to go into in terms of learning the things to start to build yourself back… We must release the negativity that we have been taught about ourselves and about each other…. We must release that… and so purging ourselves of all of those things… and replacing it with the truth, with facts… Always check out your facts… With that, you study African cultures, and understand the way in which those cultures worked, so that we can pull back those things that will help us to solve our problem….”
The night ended with a brief question and answer period, as it was well past the scheduled 9:00 p.m. end of the lectures. The audience, though not standing room, was attentive throughout both presentations. Moderator Sister Yaya Marin Coleman thanked the presenters on behalf of the audience, and promised another lecture soon in the UEF lecture series.