This week Andrew Wutaunashe in his book Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising says every black person should read or watch Alex Haley’s Roots, and that it should be made a compulsory part of every black child’s education.

“Im ayn anee lee, mee lee.” – Rabbi Hillel

DON’T feel too bad if you can’t make sense of the words above.
They are Hebrew words approximated with our usual alphabet.
They are the words of Rabbi Hillel who was one of the Jewish teachers in the days of Roman occupation and oppression and the Jewish struggle against it.
Im ayn anee lee, mee lee, simply means if I am not for myself, who is?
In other words:
The first person who must believe in me is me.
The first person who must affirm and support me is me.
The first person who must stand for me is me.
The first person who must fight for me is me.
I believe the black people, the African nation worldwide, have priceless lessons to learn from the Jewish nation, the Jewish people, worldwide.
There is an uncanny similarity in the histories of these two nations which seems to me to be no coincidence.
Both peoples have experienced in uncanny ways unique brutalisation by other peoples in the jungle of human competition for space, presence, resources and sheer primacy.
Words like enslavement, discrimination, victimisation, oppression, subjugation, dispossession, displacement and genocide are common to these two peoples in ways experienced by no other peoples in the known history of mankind.
The journey of the Jewish nation through history to the present day makes intriguing and inspirational reading.
Convinced from the very beginning of their divine origin and destiny as well as of their uniqueness, value and selfworth, this through the voices of their founding fathers and prophets — the Jews navigated perilous waters and have survived to make outstanding contributions to mankind in every field.
Literature, Religion, Economy, Culture, Politics — all these fields are enriched by luminaries from this one nation.
Who would have imagined that Moses, Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, the Oppenheimers, Henry Kissinger, Golda Meier, Madeleine Albright and many others would all emerge singularly from a people who can only through the ages be described as a threatened species?
The Jews survived enslavement in Egypt, colonisation by the Romans, several Diasporas from Babylon to the post 70 A.D. dispersion which ended in 1948 with the birth of the State of Israel, economic plunder from Rome to Adolf Hitler, prejudice and genocide which climaxed in the holocaust — the slaughter of over six million Jews presided over by Adolf Hitler in the 1939 to 1945 Second World War and a present day existence in which they are surrounded by hostile peoples.
From it all, they emerged with a philosophy embodied in two words: never again. Simply put, this means, like Hillel and the other prophets taught them, they will be for themselves and they will fight any and everything that seeks to destroy them as a people.
You may agree or disagree with the politics of this people, but one thing is clear — the Jews are an outstanding study of a people who have survived without other peoples’ permission.
Let us be clear about two principles which are two sides of the same coin.
These are principles which the black people, beginning with our religious, political and other leaders, going on to every man, woman, boy and girl, must of critical necessity, adopt.
First, it is the God-given duty of every people to survive the efforts of other peoples, no matter how cunning or brutal, to destroy or to extinguish them.
Second, it is the God-assigned mission of every people to fight for the survival of the essence of who they are, for only from this essence can they make their God — assigned contribution to mankind.
Put in another way, this is a world in which the black people must wake up to the fact that they are a threatened species.
Because of this, the black people must, a) Survive Blackness and b) Cause Blackness, African-ness, with the essence of its God-given riches for mankind, to survive.
There is no doubt that Blackness, African-ness, has always been under mortal threat and assault.
History also clearly testifies that this assault by other peoples is not coincidental, but rather planned and orchestrated.
Witness first the Slave Trade — a traumatic holocaust which Arabs and white people brought to Africa.
With weapons superior to the black people’s bows and arrows, they captured mainly young black men, women, boys and girls.
In chains, they packed them in ships’ holds like cargo to sail, cushioned by their own excrement and surrounded by the rotting corpses of fellow kinsmen waiting for disposal, to distant lands like the Americas.
There they sold or auctioned them off to white people who would force them to labour in plantations and other vehicles of the masters’ enrichment at no charge. Every time I visit that slave post on the West African coast and see the ‘Door of no return’ where black people, snatched from their families, exited the dungeons to enter the slave ships, I suffer fresh bouts of horror and trauma.
But I do it, lest I forget.
Witness the 1884 Berlin Conference in which a people united by the white colour of their skins, sat down around a table, and as brothers, cousins and nephews, held a workshop in which they discussed how they could divide portions of the African continent and people among themselves without fighting among themselves and killing anyone of their own colour.
They sanitised and dignified this table where the strategy for the slaughter and dispossession of the black people was planned over cups of tea, with the name, ‘The Berlin Conference’.
This culminated in the era of colonialism in which Africa was divided, occupied, ruled and its resources plundered and exploited for and from Europe.
Witness the fact that the evil of colonialism was in our time dismantled, not voluntarily, but by sustained liberation struggles and wars in which many more black people were slaughtered.
Witness also the fact that the genocide of black people through the Slave Trade and colonialism far exceeded the genocide of the Jewish people both in numbers and in scope.
The black people were not only slaughtered physically, but were left in many cases with the eternal trauma of being bereaved of their identity, origins and culture.
To date a white American, whether in Brazil or in the United States, can tell you the tribe and village in Europe where he hails from, while the African-American has no idea where he came from, his tribe or even his name!
This not by choice, but because the slave master forcibly erased African identity and nomenclature.
I believe every black person should read or watch Alex Haley’s Roots, and that it should be made a compulsory part of every black child’s education.
Providentially, the only essence of African-ness which the white slave master could not destroy was the black skin, and this blackness should be treasured and used by African people as a rallying point for their unity.
Witness the fact that through the traumatic after effects of slavery and colonialism, most black people in Africa and around the world are fighting hard to become little Englishmen or Frenchmen and that black young people everywhere are a study of identity and cultural schizophrenia.
Witness the fact that directly as a result of this traumatic history, most black people suffer from an almost chronic case of industrial size inferiority complex among peoples of other colours, and if things continue as they are, will pass it on to their children.
Witness the fact that in the larger picture, again because of these traumas, the vision of many black governments and politicians is simply to please or be acceptable to the standards and judgments of white people and governments in particular.
To be continued