White powder instead of white master

As we approach “Emancipation Day” in this “emancipation season,” we can expect a series of events promoting “black consciousness,” and pride in our African past, with a view to reminding those of African descent that we are heir to a rich cultural and other heritage and, according to Marcus Garvey, “We were once great and we can be greater yet,” provided we are prepared to, “...free our minds from mental slavery.”

The physical process of manumission was one that could have been consumated by a stroke of the pen or the passage of some parliamentary statute, but the long drawn out mental process of psychological emancipation is quite another matter, leading to all sorts of blind alleys, like the use of race as a decoy to recycle black distress and ancestral pain. In the historical experience of slavery, one can’t help but marvel at the traditions of struggle, resilience, survival and achievement, that we are presumably heir to. It’s quite another matter, of course, to be exploiting the memory of slavery and its psychic scars as opiate and therapy. As such, we become pawns for demagogues who have a vested interest in nourishing a sense of grievance or inflaming passions, instead of nurturing a sense of responsibility and a vision of possibility. Now, I’m not knocking notions of black identity, black pride and black self-esteem, realistically based on achievements — past, current and anticipated.

As I recall, someone once told Bro Khafra Kambon, “We should be harping on freedom rather than on slavery and ask ourselves how we can learn from the experience, and triumph as a people.” Kambon replied, “Because we have not yet crossed the barrier of slavery and haven’t yet reached the point of looking at the positive side of African history and, due to our own negative reflex action to things African, we do not even understand the type of contributions made to the development of civilisation by our African ancestors.” If I got Kambon’s point, then the self-respect and self-esteem of members of the so-called “African diaspora” are contingent on the establishment of an identity that depends on the reclamation of an African heritage that comes with an understanding of African history in all the splendour that European historians have either chosen to ignore or distort. The apparent lack of knowledge of or interest in the historical achievements of Africa has been interpreted by aggrieved Afrocentrics as something of a deliberate conspiracy to denigrate Africa and things African. One such version of the charge goes like this: “It is not the fault of black people that they have appeared to have no great historical achievements to look back on, it’s because European whites stole the credit for all great achievements of past civilisations.” To borrow from a young African-American girl, history then became “His story.”

Slavery in the New World was long in the life of the individual but a short interlude in the history of Africans. Pre-occupation with that period of slavery is most likely due to slavery’s traumatic nature and far-reaching consequences. The victims lost not only their liberty but their cultures, their languages, their religions and even their very names. Their privacy as human beings was severely curtailed and even denied. You might say that slaves were dehumanised and deculturised. Understandably, the psychological reverberations down the years have manifested themselves in both the survivor and victim syndromes where some grasp at opportunities within reach whereas others find in their troubled past the basis for an epidemic of excuses for apathy, inertia, non-achievement, non-performance and all that go with them. The question is that there is need to contemplate the positives as well as the negatives so we can build on the former and come to terms with the latter. Some of the time, we tend to mimic, uncomprehendingly, what happens in the African-American milieu. We need to note that the boisterous and blatantly aggressive elements exhibiting a racial chauvinism may not be locally applicable — though it may be for African-Americans and in their context the line of least resistance.

There are similarities as well as significant differences between the situation of the American black underclass and what some of our politicians and newspaper columnists refer to as our own black underclass. The question of dealing with the young underprivileged and dispossessed is not helped by political opportunists who are little more than leeches latching on to “causes” and who find nourishing grievances — real or imagined — more politically rewarding than nurturing a sense of responsibility. That is not unique to our own situation. We’re aware of the sort of leadership that’s basically “sucking up” to any perceived following, frantically trying to find out where a crowd is headed so the pseudo-leaders can get in front of it.

Addressing her remarks to a national audience, an African-American woman said, “We, as Africans, have to look within and deal with truth. “Unless we have the ability and realisation to deal with truth, we will go nowhere.” Another African-American woman complained: “What slavery didn’t do to us, what the Ku Klux Klan couldn’t do to us, we’re doing to ourselves,” and I might add, that foolish “intellectuals” can be found to “romanticise” us as “noble savages.” It’s hardly a secret that among the black underclass, an area of acute concern is that the “white master” has been replaced by the “white powder” and the “crack of the whip” by “crack cocaine.” What a pity!... The white man’s shame has become the black man’s burden and his one way ticket to hell on earth. “Watch out, my children/It have a fellow named Lucifer/ with a bag of white powder/ and he ain’t come to powder yuh face/ but to bring shame and disgrace to the human race.”