Still Our Ancestors Cry!
By BaBa Omowale Eng
(Continued)
What has been your experience in dealing with white people caught doing wrong? So now we come to the point of talking about the harms. Forcibly taken from our homes, by gun, sword, trick or manipulation, it was done against our will. Then came the rapes and the hanging, all instruments of war to break and subdue people who became captives. Then the starvation. Then the three-month journey in the bowels of ships, packed like sardines stripped naked without regard for male and female gender. Then the process of dehumanization that was engaged in when shore was reached in the Caribbean which the enslavers used as breaking ports.
There, in those breaking ports Africans were subjected to public hanging, public castrations and public disembowelments in order to instill extreme fear in the minds of captive Africans who were forced not to speak their own languages upon the threat of having their tongues cut out. These were planned and executed systemic engagements against Black people and we were forced to use only hand signals and grunts to communicate. That is how our people, The First Hueman Beings on this planet were stripped of our humanity as they were made into entirely new beings that would be called and treated as chattel, enslaved Negroes. Think about that part for another moment.
My People, what is chattel? What is a Negroe? Is there a place called Negroe land? Well, according to my studies chattel is property, inanimate and not human and there ain’t no place on the planet called Negroeland! That designation and treatment of Hueman Beings had never been engaged in. There had always been servitude that resulted from conquest where captives were made to serve the conquerors for a period of time and then either die or move forward in whatever social system, they found themselves in. For example, before white racism infected Arab culture. Bilal was an Abyssinian that had been captured by Arabs and for a time he was held captive and made to serve his captors but there came a time when his worth was recognized and he was elevated to a stature equal to most of his captors, even to the point of marrying one of their best and most sought after and beautiful women in Arab society, and given the esteemed honorable position of the caller to prayer for all Muslims in that area of the world. In that example we must think about and remember that everywhere the white man has gone on this planet he has infected that population with white racism.
Any place or civilization on the planet white Europeans have raped the women and enslaved the children and men. That is what they would create for the Africans they enslaved. They would set the tone of convincing themselves and then convincing us and the rest of the world that we were other than human, hueman. We did say we would talk about the Maafa, right?
Yes, well these are the truths of experiences of our Ancestors as they were forced into the transatlantic slave trade. It is their bones that lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean floor from Africa here to North America, from Africa to Brazil and Africa to every other so-called European nations on earth where the slave ships landed by our enslavers or by us when we took over slave ships and made our way to land.
Yes, that is a part of our story as well. Some of us were able to take over the ships from our Captors and sail to other parts of the world, and yet everywhere we went when the whites got there, they fought to infect the land and people there with their ideology of race and their delusion of white supremacy which they first had to lie and convince themselves of and then keep us in the lies and convince us of. So, today, my beloved Black people, we are defying all the lies and embracing the truths of Black humanity which requires us to study.
Don’t just believe what I say, take it on as a mission to find out for yourself. All I ask is that you reject the lie of our inferiority and do the work of studying our history to erase the mystery and find the truth of our Humanity.
Your Brother/Servant, BaBa Omowale Eng