“To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.”
John Henrik Clarke
John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies, and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. They New York Times called him a self-made and angry man.
“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.” — Carter G. Woodson
Africa, the “Mother Continent,” is the oldest inhabited continent on Earth. The Egyptian civilization is more than 5,000 years old. There were other civilizations in Africa before Egypt. Egypt is an African country. Its people are African.
Africa is home to more countries than any other continent in the world. These countries are: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the island countries of Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Comoros.
The most populous country in Africa is Nigeria with 206 million people. The United States has 340 million people. There are 50 million people that identify as African American in the U.S. That’s roughly 15 percent.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: Countries of the world continue to plunder Africa and it’s to the their benefit to strike deals and bully individual countries rather than work with a United Africa. Bully Economic Countries will keep Africa “Third World” forever. Just as those countries stole 15 million people from Africa and made them slaves, they will continue to keep Africa subjugated. Economic Slavery never ended.
You’re concerned with African history when you should be concerned with African future. A rising tide rises all boats. As the worth of African people rise so will the worth of the diaspora and blacks in America. We’re the orphaned children of Mother Africa. No great grandmothers or great grandfathers. No ancestral home. No real place to call home in America. Slavery severed ties and destroyed, erased and corrupted us forever. We are qualified as African-Americans. Is that another way to say 4/5s. We continue to build boats and sailing ships in anticipation of better seas.
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise”.
I was told the guy third from the left looks a lot like my Great Uncle Robert. Grandma almost never talked about him but he’s the reason she and her two sisters came north. Slavery may have ended but the conditions in the south got continually worse after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, what had been Plantation Law was now the Law of the Land. There was the Constitution, Jim Crow, and the Black Codes, all separate and not equal.
Whippings, rape and murder were always plantation practices. Now there were no “owners” but the practices and, most importantly, the rules had only slightly changed and not for the better. You weren’t owned but you weren’t free. You sharecropped, barely fed your family and got nowhere. Even if you died, the family was responsible for your debt and debt was just another name for slavery.
Being in prison was worse than being on a plantation. In prison, you were locked in a cage and only allowed out to work. There was no male/female interaction. You worked until you died or they killed you. There are few records on how many men survived a southern prison sentence. Any infraction could get you killed and almost no one cared. You were a criminal with no rights. You labored everyday. It wasn’t slave labor. It was Convict Labor, the new term to cover this new status. Master was now Warden.
So the bits and pieces suggest Great Uncle Bob was arrested as a vagrant even though he worked harder than most. It was Sunday and he was on his way to see how mom and his sisters were getting on now that he worked six days a week in town as a blacksmith’s helper mostly mucking out the town stable. He generally slept in the barn so he’d be there, working, at dawn. He was accosted, by “patrollers”, arrested and sentenced to 6 months hard labor. Three months later great grandma heard he was dead. Upon hearing her hopes and first born were gone with no inkling how he was killed or even if he had been buried she died. She was sure he had been killed. She always felt he was the type of man that would be murdered.
So his sisters knew it was time to leave Maryland. There was nothing to keep the in the south. That was Spring 1900. Two of Great Uncle Robert’s sisters wound up on Long Island and Cornelia, my grandmother, the youngest girl, that could pass if she wanted to, landed in Harlem. A story for another day.
Fried Chicken & Philosophy 