What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes


Le Moor,

Slavery crippled a lot of us. That what it was supposed to do wasn't it?

But we survived because not all of us lost our minds, our culture, our sense of Africanness - our dreams of freedom.

But lets be honest about Slavery, too many of us know little about The Maafa. There are Africans who could tell you more about the premiership football league battles or all of the previous contestants of Big Brother in detail down to their shoe sizes, than could tell you 2 ethnic African groups that were enslaved, over the centuries of genocide that transported their African ancestors to the Americas.

How important is this?

Well what informs our reality is our perception of the past. If we know of our past and how we have struggled, what has been, who has being important to us, we will have a reality that is based on our interests, our history, culture etc. Our mind will be our mind; free, and under our control. To brainwash someone, often you make them forget their reality - you make them become someone they are not. After a while, they will have a "new reality". A "Modern" one.



We come from a reality where Africans were routinely:
Burnt
Raped (Both male and female)
Limbs cut off
Tongues cut out
Foetuses cut from pregnant African bellies
Languages stripped from us
Histories forgotten
Slavemaster imposed Gods, thrust into our people's minds and soul


Lets stop here because this list of atrocities would not stop....... and remember this went on thru generations......



Africans resisted all of this, hence why we can discuss our history in forums such as BNV, but how has this resistance manifested itself in the lives of our people?

For me Marcus Garvey's movement represented that continous African will of self-determination, that has it's roots firmly in our opposition to enslavement. The fact Garvey's movement, is the greatest overt example of Pan Africanism to date, then allows us to reflect not only on that movements faillings, but the historical legacies that hindered Africans realising that their own freedom lies with themselves and themselves only; nothing and nobodyelse is going to give us liberation, we will have to take it ourselves.

Today we find Africans who are ashamed to be connected to their ancestors who struggled through centuries of blood and torment.

Today we find Africans who tear down other Africans simply because they can, yet cower in front of people who have always hated them, whilst controlling their economic, political, social and spiritual lives.

Today, the African physical aesthetic, is celebrated when Africans make themselves look like Europeans - who themselves lie in the sun encouraging skin cancer trying to look like us.

Today we send our childern to schools where they are taught their people have never been anything of worth - except when once a month "Black History" becomes an issue for children who are "Black" 12 months of every year.

Africans have the richest continent on Earth, yet wherever we live, we internalise our social and political place as beneath others as part of our progress and struggle. Progression from what? Slavery??


If our people thought and walked with the reality that all other peoples have learnt from and literally descend from Africans, the lives we live would not be as they are now. Slavery helped impart a consciousness that says our slavemaster's reality is ours. To think for a people or system that enslaves us is crippling. It means that such a people can never really be free until they learn to look at reality with the analysis and knowledge that has us at the center - our interests and desires as paramount.

When Africans, begin to see themselves and interact with each other as an African-Centred people, without need for explanation or apology, then, Africans can begin to acknowledge that we have become sucessful in liberating our minds from the horrific trinity of African kidnapping, the shark infested Middle passage and plantations designed to kill Africans and leave no evidence of the crimes, anywhere.

Until then, the argument that Slavery's legacy is real and amongst us, is easily made evident. Freedom becoming something that great Africans talk about in dreams. While our people rot waiting.


I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

Martin Luther King
28 August 1963