My thoughts on 2007 are more or less as I expected they would be at the start of the year. I knew it was going to be a dread year for people of Afrikan ancestry, as evidenced in the rationale behind our (Nu-Beyond’s) creation of B.L.A.K. Friday (Black Liberation Afrikan Knowledge) in January 2006 to counter the onslaught of the Wilberfarce myths. I knew it would be a year when every form of unfreedom, from child exploitation to the white/European sex slave industry, would be cast in the mainstream media news items as slavery. The main purpose of which is to fatally distract and ultimately confuse those who are reliant on white people to give them the ‘truth’ about a black historical experience that impacts our present lived reality. I knew it would be a year when all and sundry—including many blacks who are not sure where they stand, politically, socially, culturally or spiritually in a racialised, European dominated world—would crawl out of the wood-work, claiming they are ‘helping’ Afrikans to understand the legacy of ‘slavery’ by ‘celebrating’ the so-called abolition and kowtowing to their white masters. Their unified mantras of ‘more are slaves now than ever before’ therefore we must strive to ‘set all free’, only making sense when the specificity of what racist Europeans meted out to chattel enslaved Africans is reduced to other forms of unfreedom. The fact is that this particularly brutal, unique and unjust episode in human history is generally whitewashed and consequently divorced from its contemporary significance to the dire global predicament of the Afrikan branch of the human family. That is why you can have white people walking from wherever, to prove whatever, adorned with shackles and chains (yes I mean adorned as I am sure my ancestors were not designer fitted with their manacles and shackles), parading in carefully staged coffles in what for me is an obscene form of publicity stunt; and the worst insult to my Afrikan ancestors who used their historical knowledge of freedom, before the MAAFA, to fight to their last breath to overthrow their oppressors and bring us to this point in this place and at this time.

So with this said and as a means of adding clarity to the above I want to tell you about an incident that happened to me this year that will sum up my feelings about the Afrikan struggles during the so-called abolitionist year. It occurred in May 2007 when I was confronted by two young men in I would guess their early twenties, who took exception to some of what I suggested in my talk. Firstly to the fact that I began my talk by introducing myself as an Afrikan member of the human family, explaining that race is a distraction that denies the historical ‘mixing’ of the human family for millennia; and secondly to my denouncement of the ‘willie lynch’ speech as an absolute joke and a blatant hoax. Their first problem was with the fact that I included white people in the human family membership. For them white people were literally the devil and as such inherently evil. I asked them if this meant that black people were god and inherently good and suggested that if their conclusion was biblically based I have no time for that particular mind-shackle. The second problem was that they were convinced that they were the products of the ‘willie lynch’ speech; this being, in their opinion, the only explanation we need to understand the historical oppression of Afrikan peoples by racist Europeans. Suffice to say that after trying to reason with them (and many others who proceeded to chant me down as well on both matters) to no avail, I suggested they do some research on their concerns. By doing so both they and their defenders, many of whom suggested I was too hard on them as they are ‘young and we have to see with them’, would be in a position to make a more informed choice with regard to that which they staunchly believed. I take the point that they may be young but since when did wisdom and reasoning come with age? You are either prepared to learn or you can live in the realms of blissful ignorance waiting for someone, or something to save you; ultimately to save yourself from doing the thinking for yourself in the first place.

Anyway, about two weeks later I was setting up a Nu-Beyond stall at an Afrikan Liberation Day event when I was once again approached by these two young men. They came to me with the same argument as before and when I asked them if they had looked into their concerns they both more or less stated that ‘they did not have to’ as they knew the ‘truth’. They proceeded to tell me that anyone who does not share their beliefs, especially the ‘willie lynch’ business which they argued proves that white people are the devil and cannot be trusted, is a sell out. I found this attitude particularly disturbing as one of the young men was clearly, what would be regarded in this time as, ‘mixed race/dual heritage’; a fact that he confirmed when I asked him. However, whilst we were in the midst of our discussion there were two Sisters setting up their stall and one of them suggested to the young men that they perhaps need to go away and consider the basis of their argument. They did not even acknowledge the Sister’s presence let alone what she suggested. I did not bother to challenge their disrespectful behaviour. I merely enquired as to whether they had heard of Brother Paul Obinna and they said yes. I then asked them if they knew about his ‘Timeline’, which for me is the singly most important contribution to the Afrikan struggles for social justice that we have been blessed with in a long while. Both of them had seen it and agreed with my view of it. I then asked the two young men which half of the ‘Timeline’ am I to believe as Brother Paul Obinna’s Father is Afrikan and his mother is European. Therefore the European/devil half, according to your irrational rationale, must have some influence on his works, so which half do I accept? The ‘mixed race’ young man suggested I was being extreme, but I cut him mid sentence and told him ‘it nuh mek sense yuh talk as you are half devil and therefore I cannot trust anything that comes out of your mouth’; to which they both left, pretty sharpish I may add.

You may find the above puerile or churlish but for me it represents one of the biggest dangers we face in our struggles for human rights, reparations and social justice. That is too many so-called Politicians, Leaders, Prophets, Preachers, Pan-Africanists, Afrocentrists, Ministers or whatever they wish to style themselves as (most of whom are men) are feeding the minds, especially of our young people, with ideas that cannot stand up to rigorous scrutiny. That is why I am tired of hearing arguments that serve only to further the cause of those who wish to keep us divided and distracted, such as ‘why do you call yourself black?’ ‘Where is the place called black?’ Or the even more convoluted ideal of ‘melanin rich vs melanin poor’ or ‘demelaninated people’ with a ‘calcified pineal gland’ who because of phenotypic (skin colour) differences are not fully human; yet does this mean that if they have an Afrikan partner their ‘mixed’ progeny inherit a half functioning pineal gland? Ask yourself if such rationalisations do not smack of the same form of ‘scientific’ justification racist Europeans used, and continue to use, to ensure that an absolute minority (white folk) maintain their control over the majority peoples (non-white folk) on this planet, in concordance with a system that they created for this purpose in the first place. It is the systemic culture of European dominance and aggression towards everyone and everything that we have inherited that needs to be challenged, trashed and transcended, and this will not be done by clutching at unrealistic straws of falsity and delusion.

Now I recognise that those of us who try, with the meagre resources we have at our disposal, to counter this continued assault on our humanity by a global system that is bolstered by, to paraphrase Malcolm X, a ‘cold hearted media machine that is vicious in its whiteness’, are facing a formidable task, which is why I wrote my latest book Whiteness Made Simple: stepping into the GREY zone. Yet our collective burden would be lightened if we took more time to recognise that we do not necessarily have to agree with one another to deal with our current predicament as Afrikan’s, but at the same time we have to begin to have the right conversations free from distractions based on ego, fear, greed and ignorance. A stance that is evidenced in the two examples of Afrikan self-determination and courage that stood out for me this year, which I will use to close this piece. The first is taken from President Robert Mugabe’s speech to the UN where he unequivocally stated that:

Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and now Mr. Brown’s sense of human rights precludes our people’s rights to their God-given resources, which in their view must be controlled by their kith and kin. I am termed dictator because I have rejected this supremacist view and frustrated the neo-colonialists.

The second is the transcript of an email I sent out on 27th March 2007, which speaks to a real concern of mine which is that right here in the UK many are quick to embrace/support/privilege anything or anyone that ‘come from foreign’, whilst many of the grassroots activists here are left to literally beg bread. Thus:

I witnessed Toyin’s uncompromising stance today on BBC and applaud our brother for having the courage, will and dignity to stand firm and ‘bun dem out’ from the inside. If you saw how his lone action dominated BBC news for the whole afternoon it more than anything shows you that unity is strength and that is what they fear. It is a pity that many who were there did not get up and walk out as this would have demonstrated how we cannot continue to be complicit in our own destruction. They can lay flowers for their people whilst many of us seem to be content to lay down and take whatever they ‘give’ us to commemorate ours.

Hotep!

Dr. William ‘Lez’ Henry