Black People : The Maafa

sundiata

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May 31, 2003
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Beloved, several years ago, Dr. Marimba Ani coined a word for us that has shattered the historical constraints fostered upon the dialogue of the nearly half a millennium of Black freedom struggle in Amerika. Thereby, like Cheik Anta Diop and others before her, wreaking havoc upon duly imposed Eurocentric academic thinking. In her book, Yurugu, An Afrocentric Critique of European Thought and Behavior, she opens up pathways for us to view our immediate lives within the context of the whole panoramic of our historical struggle for human rights and unfettered dignity in this country. She helps us to use history as the 'clock' that Dr. Clarke taught us would help us to tell our 'time of day' in the world. As that 'compass that helps us to find our way on the map of human history!'

Her lectures are engaging, as she brings the Maafa to life for us as a living entity of spiritual, political, social, and cultural malfeasance on the part of a European White Amerikan collective who have expressed from deep within the core of their colonial settler will to power, a curious blood lust for these Afrikan captors of war. The Maafa we learn is a virus. Terms like 'The Black Holocaust' become inadequate to us because looking through a Black lens we 'un-loose' our stolen memory, and discover that in the span of centuries, we have not simply experience one holocaust, but several, coming as they do like tornadoes in a never-ending hurricane. And claiming as it has, the lives of several hundred million of our brethren.

The Maafa is this very process that today continues to engage us in a state of never-ending war. That began with the initial kidnap and capture. The warehousing of Black captors in hell holes on the west coast of Afrika, in dungeons like Gore Island, and then on through the brutal Middle Passage, that horrible season of rupture. Where she tells us, that the sharks would follow these ships for months, and that the stench of death could be smelled five miles away. And now, a century and a half removed, the Atlantic Ocean remains the world’s most replete cemetery, because all of Europe did participate. Today, this ocean still washes violet in the blood of our people. The Maafa is both the Diaspora, and the many holocausts that we continue to endure.

Article 5 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.



Many of the millions of newly freed slaves, in destitution, and in an onslaught of desire to locate their scattered families, would depart the plantation, left with nothing more to carry on but the hunger in their hearts, and their former slave master’s last name. Yet, even though as in a river, there were then extant many of the streams of historical Black Amerikan consciousness, after this heinous centuries old crime, Amerka would not ask these tortured freedman and woman what they would now want in their lives. They would not receive reparations for this horrendous crime against humanity. There would be no plebiscite of the people. And, even after that period in this process was over, we would watch the quick erosion and early betrayal of any true effort towards Black Reconstruction in Amerika. The initial persecution of newly elected Black officals (echoing the carnage of the late 1970’s and 80’s), and the final death blow that would incubate the further dehumanization of the now New Afrikan Nation. And then, we would witness the evil birth of Jim Crow / Apart-Hate in Amerika. Inaugurating one of the most barbaric seasons of cannibalistic violence in the annals of mans inhumanity to man. After slavery, the White male power collective in Amerika, would cowardly come to project the savage and unrestrained lust and access that he had once universally had to Black women’s bodies, on to the Black male. They would now characterize us as but mere animals with an uncontrollable desire to rape White women.

There is a bit of the seed of the White Amerikan discordant colonial settler collective mentality in the scenes of many of these carnivals of bloodlust, rope and fire, slow savage torture, and unthinkable mutilation, claiming as they did the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Black men, women, and children, living still within the whim of White accusation. Astonishingly enough, few of these victims of unmitigated horror ever received a mere pittance of even a semblance of justice, nor any compensation for these state-sanctioned medieval crimes of violence and abuse. Neither would any of the millions of the perpetuators of these crimes ever receive one hour of counseling for their madness. They just continued to live amongst us. Today, when we see affluent White teenagers deciding to shoot up their high schools, it is as if a nation is regurgitating its violent history. No, slavery was not over. The ritualistic nature of the overwhelming majority of these bizarre orgies of blood, so often attended by tens of thousands of White men, women, and children, their faces universally contorted in a rather eerie sexual glee, as they carved and roasted their Black victims, only to adjourn to a feast, carrying with them curiously back into their homes, their treasured blood soaked trinkets of Black horror and genocide. Here it is that we began to witness that the contemporary demand for reparations in the Hip Hop era, does not exist simply principled upon the paradigm of the crime of slavery, but encompasses the total Maafa, the very scene of this saga of never-ending war and genocide.

Many come to the shores of Amerika in the mist of a concentrated dream for a better life for themselves and their children. But you tell me of but one child of the Maafa who has not once awakened in the mist of a violent nightmare, and the Maafa is that Freddie Kruger forever invading a people’s desire for true freedom.

Dr. Ani broadens the discourse for us, helping us to truly free ourselves. We breathe, and the fog seems to clear a bit better for us. We now discover a greater insight into the very mirror of own history. This hour, we realize that the Maafa solicits to primarily assault and steal the conscious memory that we own of ourselves. This is why the Maafa would demand the taking of our names, of our conscious speech, our universal spirituality, and even the very concept that we have of the beauty of our own culture. Sometimes it may appear that we simply seem not to be able to remember from one day to the next. In an atmosphere of trama-induced mind control, the Maafa seeks to repress our conscious and subconscious memory. We forget what Michael Jackson was getting into shortly before his demise, or what Michael Jordan was doing prior to his father’s death. Even today, as it is Israel who has just recently bombed Syria, we seem to forget that it was the U.S. that first issued the provocation. More importantly, we fail to connect the dots witnessing even in our own lifetime that every war of Amerikan foreign aggression has carried the backdrop of ritual domestic cleansing. Just like The War on Drugs, and The War on Crime before it, The War on Terrorism is sure to metamorphosis into a War on Black People. Last week, Bush the Younger said that “Nations that support terror, are complicit in a war against civilization!” To him I say Ashe! This week Cuba is threatened with a colonialist mandate. Now, isn’t that something?

The same elite cabal that runs this country, runs the media. Malcolm taught us to ‘invert the reality’, animating the contradictions, in order for us to witness the narrative complicity of their cultural production. Suddenly Beloved, you come to realize that the Flintstones is not really a comedy at all, but actually a very painful memory, that is but ‘shrouded in humor’. Yet this media can be a natural poison for us. They have an enormous capacity to ‘manufacture reality’, and they do. Rather, they manufacture the ‘illusion of reality’ (Maya or The Matrix). Yet we have a duty to the most youthful amongst us to ask ourselves at this crucial juncture in our history, what is it that is our sense of space and time in this world? What are the true ordering principles of our culture? And, where exactly, is the cultural center of our Universe?

The Generation Gap

White people have had generation gaps in their cultures for centuries. There was never any doubt that little Megan and little Joshua had no second thought to reply in a crowded market---------“No mommy, you shut up!” But this new Black Generation Gap is somewhat of a phenomenon to us. Because, for nearly twenty-two generations we have universally likened our struggle to a relay-race with each generation naturally accepting the burden of passing the baton on to the next. But I summit to you, that no ‘dis-ease’ is born of an immaculate conception. These are the sins of the father visited upon the sons.

The cultural imperialism of the 1980’s, and the ‘high jacking’ of positive conscious rap, in order to foster and project today’s degenerate image of Hip Hop around the planet, and the outright assignation of positive creative leaders like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara, Cheik Anta Diop, Harold Washington, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and others, is but a shadow of the mad and violent purge of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and the outright facist bloodlust and murder of Black Freedom Fighters all over this country. Righteous men and women defending our community in the mist of yet another genocidal war, who simply believed that ‘even a dog has a right to wage revolutionary struggle!’ This is but a microcosm reflecting in the mirror of that enormous season of violence fostered upon the independent New Afrikan voices emerging in the mid Sixties. From Cointelpro to Now-intelpro. The splintering off, and repressing of our voices, is a constant theme in the evil Willie Lynch course of the Maafa. Those who refuse to look deep into the mirror of their own history are indeed condemned.

The Fracturing of Wholesome Black Discourse

Lost to the Amerikan lock-step of mind control, many it would appear are quite unaware that the mid-last century Black Freedom Struggle was indeed more than simply a Civil Rights Movement. Actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. Again too, at this time there were then volatile many streams of historical Black consciousness. Yet they would all come to gel with two equally strong postures of identity each vying for the hearts and minds of Black people. One, lead by an elite class seeking ‘Civil Rights’. The other, considering this a political ‘mis-step’, as it was not yet time for us to be trying to do the ‘electric slide’ with the White majority. They saw our struggle strictly in terms of an overall ‘Human Rights’ objective. The one was largely integrationalist, and the other contained aspects of integration and historical Black (maroon) separatism. The one was largely of the pure Negro mindset, and the other, New Afrikan Nationalist. When that nationalist spirit came to grow, capturing the hearts and minds of the grassroots, it was immediately and viciously set upon, by a criminally insane and racist U.S. Government. And, this was done with elite Negro complicity, producing a kind of malignant Civil Rights tribalism that would see a whole generation of now splintered Black leadership seduce the Black Nation into a political strategy that would graciously enrich their lives, at the expense of every Black community in Amerika. In turn, further ‘ghettoizing’ the Beloved Community to the economic whim of a national populace that still to this day considers us the political dumping grounds for the nation’s ills. This would become the initial fissure that twenty years later would produce a generation gap.

The Maafa would snatch up some of the most brilliant and committed leaders in Amerika. The massive expenditure of the U.S. Government to exact this purge upon the sovereignty of Black internal discourse, largely orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover’s illegal and illicit Cointelpro program. Extinguishing the voices of so many, and locking down so many more, after kangaroo trials, putting them up for life in hell holes all across this nation. In the last thirty years, have you ever heard this tribalistic Civil Rights cabal of splintered Black leadership petition loudly for the release of these warriors? In the Hip Hop era, there is no Reparations Movement free from the demand for the release of our political prisoners and prisoners of war. Today, we see all around us the very symbols of the old Negro guard being ‘sat down’, and once again, the quick betrayal and the final resounding death blow to the Second Reconstruction in Amerika. This is something that intones the dire necessity for a generation of earnest internal dialogue.

Thankfully for us, an unprecedented legion of Black solider scholars has come to the fore. Of which Dr. Ani is very much a part. They have worked as a sort of rear guard, cultivating what Dr. Caruthers calls ‘Afrikan Deep Thought’. They have truly come to be about the business of the of the rescue and the reclamation of Afrikan History. Helping us to free ourselves, in order for us to be able to view our lives through our own lens. Ever broadening the dialogue, and helping us to become whole again. Helping us to heal our nation.

Towards the dawning of the new age, the conscious voices of Hip Hop set the architectural foundations for the cultural warfare to come. It is a youthful morphic resonance that seduces the Kundilini energy of the planet. Even as the Maafa seeks to bring yet another season of terror and repression into our lives, in order to again traumatize us into repressing our indigenous memory. This hour we live within the pulse of a Universe that is favorable to us. We are a people as old as time, and we remain fortified by the indomitable spirit of our Ancestors. We are a people who shall continue to carve out a future for our children. We know that the womb is supposed to be sacred to us. That it is the center of our Universe. When we hold in our hands the fluttering fragile heartbeat of one of Hip Hop’s children, we become aware that old souls are returning to us. We pick up the baton again, and pass it on, so that we may restore our place in the march of humanity.


T.S.A
 

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