I was in the Nation of Islam for years while growing up it helped me to get my discipline right. For that I am forever grateful but my gratitude is to the people that fill it's ranks not it's leadership. I never met Min. Farrakhan so I don't owe him anything but I do owe Brother. Anthony Muhammad for showing me a whole lot of strength and courage which inspired me to become a changed man. Many times we want to attach ourselves to someone great or something great and ignore the small things and people in our lives that have made a huge changing impact upon us. Why do we do this? Low self esteem.
Slavery in my opinion happened because we as a people had low self esteem. When we disrespect our fellow man and especially our own kinsmen we are suffering from low self esteem. Life presents challenges because as we enter life we enter Yin and Yang the two great dualities from which comes all our struggles to find balance and peace. We are poor so we want to be rich or we are rich and we want to become richer either way it's a want. There's so many reasons listed to why Africans enslaved other Africans but the dumbest reason is that Europeans made this happen.
We know from historical research that slavery started in Africa from forcing persons to mine gold and other metals goes way back into African history. Slavery started as a fine or punished for criminal behavior and to those who owed debt. When we fast forward to the Western Slave trade we find a very complex and dynamic story that engulfed West Africa. Driven from Egypt by hoards of Islamic touting Arabs and warring Greeks and Romans the African people settled in West Africa. Split up into different tribes and nations strong and mighty and weak and small Kingdoms fought each other for supremacy. We had a tradition where we burned alive all criminals and persons the Kings and nobles didn't like in a pit of fire. It was an aweful scene of weeping families and men and women doused with oil completely over their bodies tied together with rope and lead into the pit of fire by warriors with pointed spears.
Europeans upon arriving witnessed this act and thought what a waste of life. They had heard from Arabs whom the Africans had sold slaves for centuries how good of workers African slaves were. So the Europeans struck deals with the Kings and Nobles to give them guns for the lives of these slaves. But when the Kings ran out of slaves to give the Europeans who killed most of their slaves for fear they would grow in number returned asking for more the Kings pondered. So war was started with smaller weaker nations to capture more slaves to sell to the Europeans for guns and gun powder this is how the slaves came for war refuges but the wars were contrived still by the African Kings. The Africans wanted to so much like the Arabs, Asians did to emulate the Europeans power by conquering all of their neighboring tribes and nations to build an empire to compete with them. But this constant warring amongst themselves and the selling off of their best and brightest lead to the continent being weaker. As the Asians soon found out when the Japanese emulating the West conquered most of Asian but it only made the Asian people weaker as a whole and the Europeans the strongest people on the planet.
So where are we today? Still in denial. The Asians have dealt with their sins of betrayal and we as Africans still blame Europeans for the fall of our greatness. Nothing or no one can make you great only you can make yourself great. Nothing or no one can make you nothing only you can make that happen. The big picture is that we as a people are due reparations but the small picture is nothing really changes until we change our historical perception. The pain that we caused ourselves continues. We continue as African people to slaughter ourselves in the name of power and greed on the continent and in the diaspora we murder each other for money and frustration. Most of the people who would dare try to lift us up or tell us the blunt truth we have killed.
I pray to the creator that the African people realize we are our own worst enemies. I pray that we admit our greatest sin of all the enslavement of our own kind. And O' Creator I pray that you give us confidence and self esteem so we can stop taking our stress out on each other and make us to live like human beings instead of animals.
Posted By: John Washington
Thursday, September 23rd 2010 at 2:47PM
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