SLAVE NARRATIVES: Africans & African-Americans

Slave narratives: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html


A deeply implanted bone lives inside of the African-Americans psyche. The person, African, within us cries the anguished cry of abandoned children in the winds of remembrance and time. I have lived in Africa and learned to keep my experiences and that relationship to myself because Black American revulsion towards Africa is deep; and with a firm grip cripples the genius of our soul. Being sold to European slavers, for whatever the reason, is an open wound. How do we heal it?

Forget the white man for his time being here on Turtle Island is his own contradiction. Our contradiction is his conflict of ideals and ethics. But our need to heal begins in Africa. Africans sold us to Arabs, the one truth Farrakhan, and Muslims tend to ignore. Our tendency to glorify Africa and talk incessantly about Kings and Queens of Africa is annoying in light of the relatively small number of Kings and Queens in the populations. Beyond romance we might fancy the clothes but the spirituality, the root and soul of a people has been replaced by a keen devotion to Christianity as sold to us, spirituality defined by White people, and a sense of self-worth own by defeat and acceptance.

Ritual and ceremony rooted deep within the soil of our homeland is centuries old, tested and powerful. The very thing that sustained us during the Middle Passage and the centuries of rebellion and submission was our tribal teachings from whatever tribe and village we came from. Being Christian is fraught with contradictions we chose not to address so we suffer at the hands of our own fears of being whole, being powerful and free.

“Freedom given and not fought for is not freedom.” An older man told my young ears this many years ago, and it sits in the intelligent side of my own contradictions; my own dumb shit. It has been difficult coming to grips with what Africa did to me. I have a reasonably good idea where my African blood comes from. The spirit of it is a known story in my family and the fight for freedom is the very fodder of story and blood within the Woods’ clan. But not every African-American is willing to make that journey of self-discovery. It is fearful and without promises of the ‘good life’. The white conquerors and missionaries traded the essence of their being for our spiritual genius. Now we hold the ‘acquisition of things’ as the rule of soul and society. Whites around the country are clamoring for change and are finding salvation within an African context. They are seeking the Dagara medicine people, the healers and sangoma’s of the Zulu, the babaloawas of the Yoruba, the teachings of the Aboriginal people’s of Australia, and the spirituality of the Sora, the Akan, the Baruya of New Guinea and the Mayans. Their journey is leading them away from the spiritual plight of the people they enslaved in America.

“We design our truths by what we believe.” – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories