Amandla

amandla. also mandla. <meaning: POWER> origin- Zulu; South Africa. Chanted during the political uprisings against the apartheid regime. In relation to the release of Nelson Mandela.

The Black Lives Matter protest is going on in America. The palest colour is biting their tongues. Similar shades from the same palette are quiet, hoping they will never be found out for the slave trade they are carrying on right now beneath our noses. The rest of the world is attempting to remain politically correct and unstained. Africa is secretly wondering whether to even step in, whether we even belong to this cause. I call it Africa because The Partition of Africa happened. That is why they call it Africa. They know our history more than we do.

I cannot really blame black Americans for the divide between us and them. And neither can I fully blame us for it. I suspect that some of the contributors to Anti African sentiment and suspicion, is that in the 60s, while they were fighting for civil rights, we were getting scholarships from our former colonial Masters to go to Europe and study medicine. We shall never fully understand the impact of their experience and most of us will never live it. A mustard seed planted by their oppressors is the comfort is that at least they are better than us who remained, “better than those Africans in ‘Africa'”. Add to that, the ‘rumours’ that some African Kings allowed slave traders to raid their villages in exchange for beads and rifles and therefore making us complicit to the slave trade that led to 400 years of captivity, the imposing of a ‘nigg*r’ identity, targeted incarceration and the current tactical elimination through police brutality.

Can we ever be friends or at least allies?

Alice Walker’s Nettie in The Colour Purple asks whether Africans can at least acknowledge their partial contribution to the slave trade. She does not demand an apology, just an acknowledgement. Listening to the contemporary podcast the Great Girlfriends showed me that its not just anger that simmers between these group of related people. There is a lot more but it all seems to revolve around pain and unanswered questions.

According to the little history I know of my people, slavery is as old as some African Kingdoms. Although I would like to believe that it was an imposition of the lowest level of servitude and serving mainly a class stratification purpose, the real [maybe terrible] details of it are to be found no where. Our oral tradition works against us. However, it did exist in pre-colonial times. Kingdoms invaded other Kingdoms or communities and looted both property, women (who at the time were also commodities) and men who would become slaves. The actual concept of ‘slavery’ as it was in the American context and in the Egyptian Israeli context may be completely different from what it meant in the African inter-community context. Still, this may have been the conducive environment in which Tippu Tip and other notorious slave traders were allowed to thrive.

I think our lack of foresight, our disunity, and our greed have played a huge role in enabling us to destroy our selves. The Imperialists did not have to do much to implement the Divide and Rule policy. They found the one thing that so easily destroys an establishment, disunity.

Another thing. About sowing seeds of mistrust between Black Americans (note that it is now mildly offensive to call a black ‘American’ an African American. And again I see why. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates the dissension) and Africans on the soil is the issue of denigrating Africa’s culture as uncivilised. This angle played very well into mental slavery of the Black American. Now that they were clothed, did they want to go back to swinging their naked breasts back and forth like their ancestors? Or did they wish to go back to rearing lions and living in trees?

And for the Africans, the visual of our ancestors with their demonic ways, the portrayal of our names as weird sounding and ‘un-English’ and the declaration that our languages are unofficial and unrefined was enough to make us so reprehensible to ourselves such that if we could run from our skins we would. Some have. Micheal Jackson did. How proud we are when we replace the earthy beats from drums made from wood and animal skins to loud discordant sounds of a keyboard in our village churches.

It is too late now for English. I can barely write a story in my mother tongue and unlike my mother, I will never think or dream in my mother tongue. A case for English – it has helped in the intermarriages between different speaking people. [Even though a few elders are still squirmish about the thought of having to speak English in the household. I understand their fear because in their times, before us, English was reserved for the office, for school- lest you were punished with a sign post that reports you for speaking ‘vernacular’].

On the hairy side of things, our hair was well placed only if sleekly gelled and straightened – not rough and steel wooly, the kind of hair that would look best with a relaxer. Bad African hair could not go through a European comb. As soon as we were old enough, we begged for a relaxer. We didn’t have to dip a hot comb in the stove anymore, ours would be forever straight with a few retouches during the year. Then the natural hair movement came. It turned out that the chemicals we were layering in our head were not good for us. I could have sworn that some of these hair choices made us less brainy. But just when we were starting to get used to wearing our hair out, Brazilian hair and its counterfeits hijacked the movement.

My sister asked me, if the paler colour would ever give up their superiority and accept that we are all equal, especially since the thrills and frills and privilege had entered their heads. It occurred to me, in that moment as I replied, that no one, absolutely no one ever gives their power away. No one gives you ‘equality’.

No one is going to give us a sit at the proverbial table. We either manufacture our own tables or create an Africa which is indispensable to the table.

On the African American- African relationship, maybe Nettie was right. What if we acknowledged our role in creating the world we are in? What if acknowledged it, even right now? The kind of world we have created where our people have to become immigrants in order to live a good life. A world where people escape to the former colonialist’s land to seek political asylum. We are looking for acceptance from foreigners who benefited from our weaknesses.

Save yourself Africa.