ON October 12, 2020, ACDA conducted the annual MAAFA commemorating the millions who died in the Middle Passage, while being brought into slavery from Africa to shoulder the creation and sustenance of colonies in the Americas.
Before the Africans, the choice was the Amerindian tribes to work in the mines and in the fields to fulfil the labour tasks of the tropical dependency, that which an ill-fed Europe craved.
Coupled with the looting of the civilisations, they found in the Americas their agenda of slave labour and the transferable diseases they brought diminished the populations of the Amerindians by over 80 per cent. Thus, Africans were craved after because they had mastered agrarian systems and animal husbandry ahead of other nations. Their bodily strength and knowledge of the very crops post-1492 colonisation made them perfect candidates. Moreover, they were symbolic of the Moors, from whose shadow the Europeans were labouring to untangle their 800-year mentorship.
The seawall event constrained by COVID-19 commemorated those who paid the ultimate price in the cataclysm of the Middle Passage. It remembered the ultimate toll they paid; collectively we salute your memory today, you reside within us continually.
The tribe of the holocaust are the ancestors upon whose foundations we today stand. In chains, they were taken through the macabre portals of the Middle Passage, shaken by fear and rage, no dreams of redemption nor hopes or pleasant visions of the journey’s end. Soldiers, prisoners of war, tradesmen, farmers craftsmen and women, kidnapped victims, talented sons and daughters of Amon, Ogun, Yemadja, Vodun, Yahweh, the gods of the guilds and skies to whom they prayed, fearing that they would be eaten by these strange, cruel men in the belly of whose ship they were shackled. On their journey to Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara, and all the lands of the Americas, they are not Haitian, Brazilian, Colombian, Jamaican, American, Venezuelan, Cuban, Barbadian and Trinidadian. They all are the tribes that did not come to conquer, devastate and steal, but were captives, shackled and bound and in bondage, their strength and knowledge drawn upon to create the world of the Americas we know today. They are us. The collective tribe that survived, from the ancient human ore of humanity, we are the steel from the fires of the ‘Holocaust’, the ore that passed through the Holocaust of slavery and its greater Lord of mischief. The making of the ‘Colonial’ infusing a spectre of self-loathing, that still haunts us today with the sentiments that are a burden of accommodating creeds rather than the consciousness of the harsh realities endured with its mythic perceptions of mental slavery, sentiments that would subjugate us to an even worse slavery. It is they, the fathers and mothers who survived and persisted, who birthed and fathered our families of flesh and blood around us that we must cast our memories upon today.
Those who survived and endured, so that we may live upon the very soil, had their blood and sweat taken without pay to build plantations, towns and forts, dig drains and canals, to civilise in design of Benin and old Ghana and Kumasi upon which the canals and planted trees of old Georgetown were fashioned. Unknowingly the colonial spectre whispered to us ‘The brilliance of the Victorian design” and how our fathers cherished the lie.
But slowly we are growing out of that past shackle of mind and body to realise that the awakening came with the struggles to make this land whole, not only for ‘US’ but for all others who came indentured or by choice. Our foreparents stood their ground during the protests and resistance of the 1850s for stolen rights, the rebellion of 1905, and for the fundamental holistic organisations of 1919 and 1927 onwards that shaped the modern era. This we must begin to unveil and surround our determinations upon, for without celebrating the profound self awareness through comprehending that divine providence never deserted us, for were we not through culture and thrift resurrected. Redefining ourselves against the onslaught of those who love to hate us, from Voodoo came Jazz, from the drums came Reggae from the flute and the comforting lullaby came the Blues, and the rhythms of the primordial ancestor Mother Calypso, Ogun’s gift, the Steel pan, rhythms that inspired from within to prevail, while others plotted against, around and within us. We celebrate the ancestors; Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, Vesta Lowe, Forbes Burnham, the healing midwives of the villages, Walter Rodney, Denis Williams and Philip Moore, the relatives who perished in the rapids and manmade caves of the goldfields on our behalf over 150 years, and all those who in our lives we did not listen to, but now understand that they had imparted some wisdom to us, to them and those who we have forgotten through very recent times. The fathers, mothers, elder kin who worked into poverty in some cases, as maids, ironing women, shovel men and labourers so we could endure; today it is their day, and we resolve to face the challenges of this day with the courage, wisdom and perseverance that brought us here – now, to commemorate a most sacred MAAFA, in the telling year of 2020, of Pandemic and strife, that we must etch in its true context, within the recesses of our memories forever.
