Vanguard: Feminique Redefining our blackness By Angela Agali For the past three weeks, Dr. Femi Olugbile has focussed on the need for the black man to reconstruct his consciousness for a more positive change. He talked about the possibility of having a black Pope and of developing our sense of technology as well as making a strong statement in the black diaspora. His articles couldn't have come at a better time. In a nutshell what he is striving to say can be reduced to three questions: What were we? What have we become? What do we want to become? These questions become very pertinent especially given a process of globalization that presupposes a formidable centre that continuously seek to integrate the margin. Yet, all over the world today, people are fighting and seeking for their distinct identities. Most of today's wars have this issue of identity at the centre. People want their own land, their own language and even their own cultural ethics. However, some of us Africans are still oscillating between who we are and who we want to be. Now, if you do not know who you are, how can you know what you want to become? One important thing he noted was that some African-Americans are even more conscious of their black roots while some of us here strive more towards being un-African. Now we are supposed to be lucky because at least we can identify with our roots but the African Americans are neither here nor there. Most of them long to be rooted so they bear African names, wear African clothings, and resort to African religion. Last year, Ishmael Reed, a writer and multi-culturalist talked about Jesus as Orisha. If an average Nigerian had voiced such a thing, he would definitely be branded a blasphemer and yet somewhere in your mind you wonder whether Orisha is not the same thing as deity. For us to achieve those things that will lead to constructive changes in black-life, we need to redefine our stance concerning our roots. We need to really understand who we were before the "civilizers" came. We had our own world and technology, then the white man came and we became soul-less. Yet these soulful human beings were civilized enough to think up guns and bombs. They were so civilized and sympathetic to our darkness they brought us God and ruin. We had our spears and arrows; yet in spite of our imposed darkness we never thought about more evil technologies that would destroy other worlds. It is funny when some people emphasize the fact that blacks sold their fellow blacks into slavery. Even if we have a situation where every black refuses to sell his brother; the gun would have taken care of such a situation. The gun it was that took care of other situations, like resistance. We should however always bear in mind that evil is a universal concept, just like goodness and truth. Slavery or not, we would have still connected with other worlds somehow. You cannot expect somebody to love you and believe in you when you do not love and believe in yourself. Belief and love means that you are willing to transcend the self by harnessing all your positive potentials to make better the whole which you are part of. And believe me this thing starts with very little things. Now, we all have been through a very rough time here in Nigeria. Thinking about this country, there is no way one will not be bitter, especially this generation. It is not enough to always hurl that cliche at us of thinking about what we can do for our country. Our country should also think about us, because without us there won't be any country. Government has continuously failed us because of misdirected policies and greed. It would seem that only the crooks are meant to survive, so everyone seeks to cheat every other person. This tendency as funny as it sounds is more evident within the masses, who to survive has devised every crooked means to cheat a fellow poor man. This digression becomes necessary because we cannot rule out of what such bitterness does to a person's psyche. You are more concerned with assuaging that perennial hunger than in asking questions about a root that has been obscured by existential problems. In other words, since we cannot even afford basic needs like electricity (I am writing with a candle light in spite of the senseless bill dangling on my head), employment and water, it then follows that we cannot do anything right. It should therefore not be shocking that some people believe that the white man's rule was the best. Theirs worked at least. Yet like I pointed out earlier, believing in oneself can be achieved, in spite of government. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------