In some African traditions, the griot told the story of the local population: the village, the family, or the clan. The griot put together the threads of the story that represented the different people who took part in it. He saved these threads and kept them safe. He savored them, treasured them. He wove them together to form a cloth, a whole that combined the variety of colors and shades into a pattern that told the story of the people.
The people then heard his story. Her tongues bleed her. Her feet danced it. His hips rocked him. His hands drummed on it. His fingers carved it. The stories of his ancestors, treasured, remembered, shared and preserved for future generations.
I was very lucky because my African American mother taught me from an early age to be proud of my heritage. When she told me about the experience of slavery, she told it from the perspective of those who had resisted and survived that slavery. So she encouraged me to think of slavery and resistance as the same thing: a person who was enslaved resisted that slavery as a matter of course. She told me stories of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth that still inspire and inform me, almost 40 years later.
In Afrika, under colonization, people were also often cut off from their heritage and even forced to speak European languages. Under an education system that left them unable to locate their home villages and unable to speak to members of their own families, they were unable to communicate their experience to their own communities. And they were taught to believe that they were superior to the ‘backward’ people of the rural villages, and encouraged to adopt European religious practices, modes of behaviour, etc. However, they often have a stronger sense of their heritage than we in the diaspora can have.
During the time of slavery, Africans were not allowed to tell our own stories. We were not allowed to speak our own languages, or even name our own children. They stole our stories and rewrote them in distorted ways. These distortions were then used to define and control us.
But still, the Africans told their stories. They whispered them. They lovingly sewed their babies’ names onto their blankets. They told the stories of their homes, though much has been forgotten. His fingers remembered. They baked them into breads and cakes, stirred them into soups, stews, and rice. They braided them into their children’s hair. and planted them in their gardens.
They invented their own words and their own languages. Creole. Dialect. Gullah. They created new art forms, new musical forms: jazz, blues, reggae, rhythm and blues, gospel. Though much had been forgotten, stolen, lost, rewritten, or distorted, much remained.
In the African Diaspora, we have been brainwashed for hundreds of years into believing that we are inferior to other races. During and after slavery, our ancestors were told that they were only fit to work and serve their white masters, who were stronger, smarter, and more capable than they were.
Today, we see these stereotypes being perpetuated, in slightly altered but still clearly recognizable forms. In screen roles, including television and film, as well as advertisements, we often see black men portrayed as criminals or gangsters: tough, tough, and violent. We rarely see black men and women portrayed as loving husbands and wives, and parents, in stable homes and relationships, or doing jobs as bankers, teachers, or other authority figures.
We have swallowed the distortions, the changes in our stories. And too often, we have believed them.
Jak Dodd created the Nubian Jak board game because of this syndrome. He told me:
“I worked as a social worker with many young black men and women. I found that many of them had a very negative image of themselves. If you asked most of them how they would describe or see themselves, or who they would identify with, they didn’t have many black role models in Britain… So they would identify with African-American achievers and Jamaican gun culture.
This brainwashing is usually subtle, but it is very powerful. Too often, we are unaware of its effect on us. Our negativity about ourselves and others limits the type of opportunities we attract. It creates a sense of helplessness that often leads to aggression on our part when we get frustrated by the limitations placed on our lives.
These negative images have a profound effect on our psyche: our conscious and unconscious mind. It becomes almost inevitable that, faced with this overwhelming handicap, we will develop an inferiority complex. This negative attitude that blacks often have about ourselves and each other is passed down from parent to child and from generation to generation.
As journalist Henry Bonsu told me,
“If you have no sense of your foundation, you’re a skeleton, you can’t do anything. This is what happened. And you feel no shame about anything. Nothing is below you. There should be codes of behavior. It should be anti-black mugging. and rob someone. It should be anti-black to attack your teacher. Because you’ve always had discipline. You’ve always had balance. But unfortunately, it’s become very black to do these things for a while. a certain group of kids. They think that’s what it’s like to be black, about being rough and tough.”
We can see the effects of this brainwashing on modern British African youth. Those whose parents or grandparents were born in the Caribbean and raised to think of Britain as the Motherland often find themselves searching for their identity. In the 1970s, many turned to Rastafarianism. These days, some of them, having rejected the mainstream culture, turn to gun violence and gang violence as a means to seek a positive identity as strong black men and women. Others identify too much with the mainstream culture and seek to fit in and be accepted by white society, so unaware they are of their heritage.
Also, our ignorance affects how we deal with the racism we experience. When we are not aware of our heritage, we are not as resourceful as we could be in our responses to racism.
We do not strive to be all that we can be. Instead, we settle for being second, third, or fourth best. We don’t make life or world changing decisions, we let someone else make things better and hope things don’t get too bad. How often have you complained to your friends and family about your noisy neighbours, or your council tax bill, or complained to someone at the bus stop about the late bus? Have you taken this complaint further?
And this is a problem that affects both whites and blacks. When one section of society does not live up to its potential, the whole of society suffers: we see rising crime rates, we have to pay the police and jail criminals, we live in fear of being robbed or attacked . And the person who might have discovered the next cure for cancer may be sweeping the floor of the local supermarket or sitting in a prison cell right now.
Conscious black adults have to take responsibility for turning this destructive tide, this tide of toxic and negative thoughts, beliefs and attitudes.
Celebrating black heroes and heroines allows us to decide for ourselves what images will inhabit our minds. The more we celebrate our black heroes and heroines and share their stories with each other and with society at large, the more we can enjoy our true heritage as an African people.
Many African people, like Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave, having escaped slavery in North America, published their stories, often as a way to support themselves financially. Some, like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, also went on speaking tours recounting their experience of oppression to a wider audience. These speakers were important participants and leaders in the abolition movement in the United States. Many of his speeches and narratives still exist, inspiring us on how our ancestors used their strength, wits, and courage to survive.
Caribbean slave narratives are not that numerous, though it is highly likely that many more as yet undiscovered narratives languish in libraries, universities, and people’s attics. In Britain our stories often went unrecorded. Many British dealers kept the material to sell to American collectors. The late Len Garrison, founder of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, was fully committed to building a monument to celebrate the presence of black people in Britain. He told me:
In the late ’60s and ’70s, when I was talking about this collection, I went to a few museums to ask if they had any material related to black history, and they’d say, “Yeah, people are coming.” us with materials”. I remember the Labor History Museum said: “But we don’t collect”, we simply told them that we don’t know anyone who is collecting it, and so nothing was being collected. One would imagine that history labor relates to blacks as it did to whites.But they hadn’t picked it up.
He took the initiative to search for black souvenirs when and where he could find them. He told me,
“I used to clip articles out of newspapers. I just collected them. But eventually, I started building the collection by going to antique shops, Portobello Road, and thrift stores.”
When Africans celebrate our heroes and heroines, we take control, we take charge of how we see ourselves and others. The more we know about our ancestry and heritage, the more empowered we are by this knowledge. This changes our entire attitude and behavior. We are no longer at the mercy of the negativity with which we are constantly being bombarded. And we have the opportunity to pass on our positive images and attitudes to our children. And when whites celebrate black heroes and heroines, they reap the rewards of living in a multiracial society.
Africans are good at everything: architecture, astronomy, astrophysics, and that’s just the ‘A’s. We are scientists, teachers, explorers, educators, philanthropists, healers.
Blacks are heroes and heroes. We are successful. We each have our own black success stories to tell. The more we share them with each other, the more we create an energy of love and positivity that surrounds us and affects our lives. It helps us attract and connect with the abundance of the universe. It affects the types of opportunities we attract and helps determine how we respond to these opportunities.
We have to take responsibility for our lives and the lives of our children and others in our community. We need to take control of our negative thought processes and do whatever it takes to reverse them. Then we will be able to experience the brilliant and glorious abundance of the universe to which we are entitled and which is our birthright. And the whole of British society will benefit from our continued successes.
