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Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream …‘those who forget will be victims again’

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We must fight again to be African—to rediscover African-ness and to express it in our lives, families, children, youth, communities, churches and above all in the evolution of our young nations, says Andrew Wutaunashe in his book Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

I PUT it to you that Blackness, African-ness, has been and continues to be under siege and assault.
Black people must not only survive this siege, but must simultaneously fight it in order to make the life-giving essence of African-ness survive in the same ways the Jews and other nations have fought for the survival of their essence and existence.
I am sure you must be wondering how I think the colour of the black skin is an issue in this assault.
The primary target of the peoples that dispossessed the black people was of course space, resources and primacy.
I watched a historical movie in which an English king was underlining to his chancellor in the British winter that the Empire must survive so that the English may have their sunshine around the world.
Even predators like Cecil Rhodes came to Southern Africa for sunshine on medical advice.
Gold, ivory, diamonds, land!
The lure was irresistible.
But in order to justify the enslavement, colonisation and dispossession of the black people, a philosophy had to be created.
This philosophy was that the black person, because of the colour of his skin, was not really human, but rather some kind of savage animal species.
Writings, teachings and statements to this effect were propagated, until even in families, children were trained into this line of thinking.
Some white Christian missionaries had a tough time challenging this thinking among the predator class.
This philosophy would make it right to dispossess or slaughter the black people then have a good night’s sleep after killing ‘apes’ even for sport.
Colonialism or enslavement became a humanitarian work in which savages were trained and civilised.
A favour was being done.
And ideas like this die hard.
I visited a European nation a few years ago, and while we were going up the elevator, a little white boy kept tugging his mother’s dress and telling her something while he excitedly pointed at me and my black companions.
My black interpreter laughed, and I couldn’t help laughing too at the innocence of the child when I was told what he was saying.
The little boy was saying to his mother, who no doubt had taught him, in private, this identity of the black Person, “Mama, monkeys!”
It’s tragic, I know, but it still brings a chuckle to my throat whenever I think of it. Yet you can still see the evidence of this kind of upbringing when black people are called apes at sporting events and when political philosophies like apartheid and segregation, still fresh in our memories, hold entire nations to ransom.
But worst of all, it still results in economic and social dispossession through prejudice and discrimination.
I find it at this moment necessary to record a disclaimer.
I do not recount the above history to whip up racial hate and conflict.
This book is not about hate, just as all the accounts and commemorations of the Jewish holocaust are not about hate, but about the preservation of a people and their potential contribution to mankind.
Blackness, African-ness is essential for all mankind in the same way the vegetation and its photosynthesis are necessary for human survival.
It must be fought for, and I am grateful for people of all colours who have fought and continue to fight in good conscience to help the black people survive blackness and cause its essence to survive to benefit the world.
In God’s economy, it was the slave trading Pharaoh’s daughter who preserved the Jews’liberator, Moses, from her father’s death sentence.
We black people will never forget William Wilberforce, who fought in the British Parliament for slavery to be abolished.
We will never forget the Christian missionaries who fought moral battles against their people to assert that black people are equal and as human as other peoples. We will not forget the white people who fell in our struggles and even white nations that supported our wars of liberation.
We will not forget the protests and boycotts by white individuals and groups that benefitted our struggles.
If we forgot, we would be denying one of the key characteristics of our black essence.
But my mission is to call all black leaders and people again to the message so aptly enunciated by the Rabbi—Im ayn anee lee, mee lee?/ If I am not for myself, who is?
You see, there are several things all black people must realise if we are to survive the assault on blackness, on African-ness, and to fight for the survival of the God given essence of our blackness so that we can make our contribution to mankind. We must firstly recover our sense of value, dignity, beauty and divine origins. Secondly, we must assert ourselves with a determination to take our fair portion of the space and resources of the earth.
And thirdly, we must react radically to rid our minds of the effects of the assault against Blackness.
Chief of these effects is that those who fought us don’t have to fight us anymore because we are fighting ourselves by despising our blackness and allowing others to be our judges and heroes and aspiring to their standards.
We must fight again to be African—to rediscover African-ness and to express it in our lives, families, children, youth, communities, churches and above all in the evolution of our young nations.
We must then stand side by side with other peoples as Africans, not as a confused mass defeated by premature assimilation.
A critical step in this direction is to realise that ‘those who forget will be victims again’.
It continues to puzzle me why our black politicians, Governments and religious and other leaders are working so hard to cooperate with the current weapon of those who destroyed us in the past.
This weapon is that of sending black people into a race to ‘forget things which are lethal for a people to forget’.
Our dispossessors first buried all the positive history of the black people because they knew fully well that those who don’t know where they are coming from will not know where they are going to.
Black people and their children know only white history and heroes.
Then they buried the entire record of the holocaust of black people for 400 years at the hands of white people.
Black people, unlike the Jews, know nothing anymore about the slave trade, colonialism, resources of which they were dispossessed and how.
They are keen to forget about their struggles and wars of liberation, preferring to teach their children about Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln and the battle of
Waterloo.
Their own liberators are not being taught to them as heroes, and an African youth admires United States Marines attacking Iraq rather than Umkonto We Sizwe, ZANLA, ZIPRA, MPLA, FRELIMO, SWAPO or MAU MAU armies fighting for the liberation of black people.
Names like Bantu Steven Biko, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and others are forgotten as are ideals of Pan Africanism—simply because it is now supposed to be politically incorrect to express ideas of African-ness.
We are the only people who need no identity while other nations remind us day and night of their ancient wars whether just or evil, and keep their heroes alive on our screens and publications!
This is the kind of social, cultural and political folly which will lead Africans, black people back to political, cultural and economic slavery.
Only this time it will be voluntary.
If black people are not for black people, then who is?

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