Mirrored Histories, Looking At the Man in the Mirror this Time
Writing by Jes on Thursday, 12 of March , 2009 at 2:00 pm
Liberia is a liberated country. A country of slaves. Freed men who left American soil and American bondage to make the journey back home. Back to Africa. Men who were in full AMISTAD mode. They are the ones who followed the Marcus Garvey motion, jumped back on the boat and went HOME.
And they landed on some land, saw the Africans sitting there, cooking fufu, running around in their huts, singing songs and beating on their drums. Instead of grabbing some kente’ cloth and finding a place in the Congo line, they declared these native Africans (indigenous people) uncivilized and felt that it was their duty as exposed African-Americans to colonize and create this country to what it should be.
See, all the Ex-slaves could be identified because their names had American context. They were Harrisons, Johnsons, Parkers, Smiths, and any other name that had been branded into their pseudo by whip or threat of a whip. So the building, creating, and conception of this new government came from all the imported Africans and they let none of the Africans who were already there part of the process.
In fact, it seems that they a lot from their time in the states because what they created once they finished was an oppressing system that left the ingenious African out of basically everything. Americanized Africans where the ones who could send their children to school, gain governmental posts, and build a strong foundation for their family and assets. And so while they became stronger and more liberated, just like their country promised, well the Africans who stayed on the land, the ones smart enough to avoid being captured and sent to their slave world, they became more ostracized in their own world.
But, don’t fret. Equality was possible for every member of the country. All you had to do was throw away your native, indigenous family name and create an American last name. Once you do this, your status would change and all the doors that were shut to you would slowly creep open. So basically once you lose your identity, you could gain a new one. Erase your family history and worth in order to be something in life.
Now this sounds all civil rights movement, but these things were still occurring in 1980’s. This repression only elevated a little once the ingenious people were able to put one of their own into a presidential post (Go Obama!). But of course like in every great Negro novel, drama prevailed…but that is another post.
So in Liberia, the liberated land…a country that has been freed, released from boundaries (dictionary quote)…there wasn’t a true sentiment of that statement for all people and today, when you ride down the streets…. you see the results of that.
Even though Liberia is coming out of a war (which partial stemmed from the feelings of an oppressed group against the powers that be), there are people who have something to work with and then majority who walk the streets in full hustle mode because there is nothing for them at all. So they grind the roads trying to make what little change can help them through the night until they wake up in the morning to begin this race all over again. This day-by-day prioritizing puts them in a predicament that it is near impossible to change their future. Any time they take away from the day to better themselves is potential money that doesn’t come home. So how do they take a literacy class, start school, pay for children’s education, sacrifice any one thing to improve themselves? Them becoming better is putting their family in a worse situation. It is the pendulum that doesn’t stop swing.
And we did this to ourselves. I had often had a vision of a black nation. One of Kwanzaa celebrations and harmony, what would we be if we didn’t have the history of slavery, poor education, Jim Crow discrimination, and unfair racism and in all my vision I would have never predicted what I witness and see in Liberia. The fact that we as brothers and sisters of the same skin were able to purposed with hold the rights that we argued, fought, died to have on another people because we were afford the power to do so.
So what is it, is it us? Are we like that as a black people? Or is that human nature, to gain on others backs? Is it the testorone in men that want to conquer? What is the factor that corrupts us as people to close our eyes to others in order to be superior?
More to come…
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