“There is no force like success, and that is why the individual makes all effort to surround himself throughout life with the evidence of it; as of the individual, so should it be of the nation.”
Marcus Garvey
The Republic of South Sudan was accepted into the United Nations today as the 193rd member nation. The sight of their flag once again being hoisted, this time now alongside the family of nations, made me wonder just how scattered we are in the Diaspora. The vast majority of Africans in the Diaspora have little knowledge of where in the land our forebearers started out.
We've been told that the slave ports where on the Gold Coast; they've shown us images of the slave forts where we were rammed in like sardines. On a side note, it really is a mindfuck to think that people could have actually behaved like this and have the audacity to call their captives barbaric. Getting back, the pirates who plundered Africa, or as a Ghanain man once informed me, Alkebulan, attempted to cut the very root of the people away from the Elders. Without going into the fullness of the Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade, the evidence of that forced seperation is still with us today.
We've been told that the slave ports where on the Gold Coast; they've shown us images of the slave forts where we were rammed in like sardines. On a side note, it really is a mindfuck to think that people could have actually behaved like this and have the audacity to call their captives barbaric. Getting back, the pirates who plundered Africa, or as a Ghanain man once informed me, Alkebulan, attempted to cut the very root of the people away from the Elders. Without going into the fullness of the Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade, the evidence of that forced seperation is still with us today.
South Sudan's success in achieving independence, in securing a distinct national identity, seperate and apart from the seperate and distinct "family" groups, is a model to take heed of. Those of us scattered in the west, who envision that one day we would return home, must consolidate our efforts. We must agitate with one focus, one aim. That of no longer being denied the God given right to know our ancestral lands. We must decided jointly, in open collaboration with our family in the land, on place that we can also look to as home. It is an issue that, while we never created for ourselves, none-the-less divides us more than differing traditions.
Maybe we can have a chance to raise another banner in the land representing not only the children of the bondsman and bondswoman still "stuck" throughout the Diaspora, but also to honour the Elders tangiably. We may forever remain in flux until that happens.
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