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History Lessons
By Molefi Kete Asante
(First Published in City Press, June, 2004)
There is nothing better for black
people than our own historical experiences when we want to understand
what is going on in the world. A few days ago I was speaking with
a woman who exclaimed, “The movie on the passion of Jesus
brought me to tears.” I was extremely polite to her when I
said, “All sufferings of humanity cause me pain.”
Isn’t it strange how easy
it is for us to identify with the suffering of someone we did not
know in an era a couple of thousand years ago in a movie produced
by a white man who shows Jesus as a European, although a swarthy
one, and yet cannot identify with the suffering of our own people?
I am convinced that black people
are the most humane people on the face of the earth. We reconcile
and forgive more easily than any people I know. I believe that this
is because we have a great love for humanity and an appreciation
for the ordinariness of all of us under heaven. Yet we are also
rather complicated when it comes to our relationship with our own
pain, suffering, and death.
What I propose is that we re-consider
how we view history. Interrogate each story and every incident from
the standpoint of our own humanity and you will see in a new light
the realities of the world. I have been doing this for the last
thirty years and it has made a big difference in how I approach
what is going on in politics, culture, science, and art.
The horrendous massacres and damaging
humiliations of the American-led war in Iraq, the Palestinian liberation
struggle, and the battle of Africans in the Darfur area of Sudan
against the radical Islamic forces supported by the Sudanese government
are enough issues to cause us to re-examine how Africans have viewed
reality. Of course, we must never underestimate the power of the
media to distort our images of ourselves and the power of the media
to promote the images of others.
Why are the Greeks considered the
fathers of philosophy?
Why are the American movie heroes considered the best ideals?
Why do the terms “classical” and “universal”
refer only to European art and culture?
I guarantee you the media, books, libraries, television, and other
information outlets have a lot to do with the way we think. What
we make a priority, what we discuss with our spouses, and what we
tell our children can often be because of the media.
I once asked an African American
soldier why he would voluntarily join the American military given
the fact that it has often been used as an instrument to suppress
the liberation struggles and legitimate rights of people. He looked
straight into my eyes and said, “If I did not join the army
then I would be unemployed, have no educational opportunity, nor
future pension.” It was clearly an economic decision for him.
I guess I went away from him thinking,
couldn’t he find something else to do, something better to
do, something more rewarding because it would be to uplift people
and bring about a better world.
The ability of Africans to identify
with the legitimate freedom struggles of other people is well known.
It rests on the fact that for the past five hundred years we have
had to assert ourselves in order to gain our freedom. For the most
part we sympathize with those who have been abused, persecuted,
brutalized, and made mad by the irrational and insane violence created
to maintain control. The Palestinians have suffered fifty years
of intense dislocation, pain, and suffering. In many ways like the
situation was here in South Africa during the old regime, the Palestinians
are brutalized, killed, and humiliated just because they want to
live on their land. Black people understand these situations; we
have been the victims. We are not all like Condelezza Rice or Colin
Powell, serving the interests of the most conservative government
in modern American history. Knowing what we know as people who read
and reflect on the political situations in the world, we cannot
take any pride in black people siding with the oppressor in any
case whatsoever. There is no excuse, no explanation, except gross
materialism and crass careerism.
When a Sudanese doctoral student
at the University of Pennsylvania asked me to assist him in finding
a job in the United States after he had completed his degree, I
inquired about his position on the political situations in Sudan.
I also wanted to know how he felt about the continuing battles with
the SPLA inasmuch as this was before the cease fire. He said to
me that he was an Arab in Sudan but in the United States he was
an African. I did not quite understand the distinction because he
looked just like any other African in the United States. But he
explained that some of the ethnic groups of Africans in the north
of Sudan had given up their language and adopted Arabic as their
language and culture and so saw themselves as Arabs.
On the other hand, in the United
States, a person’s African origin, skin color, appearance,
and history determined whether or not one was black. Thus, the brother
who could escape blackness in Sudan and perhaps feel superior to
other Africans found himself black and African in the United States.
Political and social histories differ from country to country. I
realized that when I visited South Africa for the first time and
was introduced to someone who said they were colored or the person
with them told me that the person was colored and I recalled thinking,
how odd?
In the United States, if you have
one drop of African blood, you are technically African. It sounds
silly but it has worked well for the African in the United States
because it means that there are no coloreds, only blacks, Africans.
It is no longer a question of biology, but of history, that is,
were we oppressors or the oppressed.
Everything is instructive. The
photographs of abuse that have come to light showing American and
British troops gloating over the humiliations they have caused the
Iraqi prisoners are not unlike the images of lynching in the American
South. The white American cultural practice of lynching was rooted
in a psychology of sexuality and violence.
The system that created lynching
of Africans in the United States was absolute power over powerless
people. It was evil, ferocious, brutal, and corrupting in all of
its aspects. It was developed in its greatest degree of degradation
in the United States. The African was treated with utter disrespect.
During the enslavement, no laws protected the African from any cruelty
the white could conceive. The man, woman, or child was at the complete
mercy of the most brutish of people. For looking a white man in
the eye the enslaved person could have his or her eyes blinded with
hot irons. For speaking up in defense of a wife or woman a man could
have his right hand severed. For defending his right to speak against
oppression, an African could have half his tongue cut out. For running
away and being caught an enslaved African could have his or her
Achilles tendon cut. For resisting the advances of her white man
a woman could be given fifty lashes of the cow-hide whip. A woman
who physically fought against a man’s sexual advances was
courting death, and many died at the hands of their enslavers.
Among the punishments that were
favored by the enslavers in America were whipping holes where the
enslaved was buried in the ground up to the neck, the dragging blocks
attached to the feet of men or women who had run away and been caught,
mutilation of the toes and fingers, the pouring of hot wax onto
the limbs, and passing a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the
enslaved. Death came to the African in vile, crude ways when the
anger of the psychopathic enslaver wanted to teach other enslaved
Africans a lesson. The African could be roasted over a slow burning
fire, left to die after having both legs and both arms broken, oiled
and greased and then set afire while hanging from a tree’s
limb, or being killed slowly as the enslaver cut the enslaved person’s
phallus or breasts. A person could be placed on the ground, stomach
first, stretched so that each hand was tied to a pole and each foot
was tied to a pole. Then the white enslaver would beat the person’s
naked body until the flesh was torn off of the buttocks and the
blood ran down to the ground.
So you ask me, what do I think
about the passion of Jesus? You ask me, do I believe that the photographs
from Iraq are true? What about the passion of Hector Petersen? What
about the passion of Bantu Steve Biko and a thousand others?
There is no lesson greater for
us to remember than the lessons learned from our ancestors. There
is nothing more courageous for the Afrocentrist than to resist all
forms of oppression. Join me in creating an Afrocentric revolution
in our thought. Start this process by redecorating your house with
African fabrics and designs or forming a study club where you read
and discuss Afrocentric books. In all your doing, do good to others.
Molefi Kete Asante is one of
the most published contemporary scholars, having written more than
sixty books and three hundred articles.
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