“Words impose themselves, take root in our
memory against our will.”
“The Words We Use Influence How We Think!”
“I am grounded in my history and my ancestry
as anybody I know.
I walk with them. I
live with them.”
Oprah
Winfrey in
Answering the Call: A Conversation with Oprah Winfrey.
The
Washington Post Magazine. September 18,
2016
This narrative, as a continuation of Part 1, pays tribute
to our ancestors’ humanity, intelligence, creativity and enduring resistance in
the demonic face of unspeakable trauma and torture to their minds, hearts,
bodies and spirits.
I’ve often wondered what language my kidnapped
African ancestors spoke. Nigeria
alone has 250 ethnic groups and languages.
My curiosity intensifies when, in a store or restaurant or on public
transportation, I hear brothers and sisters from the Motherland talking to each
other in their own language. Did my
ancestors, who endured the crushing pain of being ripped from family, friends
and familiar environment speak Twi (pronounced “chwee”), spoken by the Akan people in Ghana,
or Wolof, spoken by the Wolof people in Senegal? Wolof people have an international reputation
as tailors, woodcarvers, and traders. A
popular Wolof joke goes: When Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, a Wolof
tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Gorgui
(sir), would you like to buy this product?" My father, Henry Pierce, Jr., was a tailor
and owned his own business. Henry
Pierce, Sr. built houses in Black neighborhoods in Anniston, AL, known for its
White citizens’ hateful and murderous attempt to burn alive Civil Rights
activists that were traveling on the Freedom Riders bus in 1961. High on a hill, at 226 Walnut Street, he built a spacious
2-bedroom house for my grandmother, Mittie Pierce, an outstanding
seamstress. In the same segregated city,
my maternal grandfather, Harrison Littlejohn – a Black Seminole - owned real
estate and 2 businesses in the “Black part of Anniston.”
Did anyone carry Wolof blood whose Ancestors spoke the language?
Maybe
my kidnapped Ancestors spoke Bantu? Twelve Bantu
languages are spoken by more than five million people throughout southern
Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda-Rundi, and among the Shona, Xhosa, and Zulu societies
in South Africa. While western education
systems teach that Africans came only
from an oral culture, Toni Cates confirms that “The nations of the Nile Valley, such as Egypt, Ethiopia and the Sudan
and the independent states of inner West Africa had a strong literary
tradition…”
With
over 2000 different languages spoken among African groups, Africa is home to
the highest linguistic diversity in the world, according to Shigeki KAJI, Graduate School of Asian and
African Area Studies, Kyoto
University. A study of 100 inhabitants in a city in
western Uganda
found that “the average speaker knows
4.34 actual languages.” “Multilingualism,” says Kaji, “is one of the most salient features of language
in Africa.” Yet, despite their
copious language skills, global racists/haters (like the 2017-2018
orange-haired resident at 1600
Pennsylvania Ave.) have historically and continue
to degrade and revile African intellect and abilities.
Historically, kidnapped and enslaved Africans
are the only people whose languages and names were brutally extorted from them;
intentionally, systematically and savagely
suppressed, then eliminated, resulting
in the majority of African descendants, like myself, only speaking the
oppressor’s language. (Rare exceptions included renowned poet, Phyllis Wheatley,
kidnapped from Africa as a child, who spoke 3 languages without facing
punishment from her northern enslavers.)
To have a language connotes/denotes/equals a people’s value and identity. As many Native Americans declare, language is
essential and central to identity. Some question whether “one can be Navajo, Apache, or Crow without speaking the tribal
language.” Kari Lydersen wrote in
her article, Preserving Languages is about More
Than Words, that “A language is considered extinct when the last person who learned it as
his or her primary tongue dies.” So,
I wonder: Who was the last person who
spoke the language of my Ancestors? And,
again….WHICH language was it?
Language,
Domination and Valuable
Knowledge Lost
 |
| https://bostico.uk/images/africa_languages.jpg |
In The Haunting of Hip Hop, author, Bertice
Berry paints with chilling clarity the anger, terror and pain “Ngozi” (a male
protagonist bearing a female’s name; Berry explains why in her book) and other
kidnapped Africans - from different
tribes - endured while imprisoned in the enslavers’ ships’ nauseating bowels. Ngozi narrates that he couldn’t understand the
languages of the other tribes, nor could he understand “…the words [of the pale foreigners], but his spirit could interpret the[ir] hatred.”
That
hatred zigzagged across time and space in painfully grotesque forms: From branding our Ancestors’ bodies with hot
irons to raping Black women and possibly men; from lynching and cutting off
body parts to bombing cities like Tulsa, Ok, Rosewood, F and Black
churches, like the Birmingham, AL Sixteenth Street Church bomb planted by White
supremacists that killed four little girls; from imprisoning “between 1828 and 1836 about 10,000 blacks” in the musty, cramped
basement in a “slave” pen at 1315 Duke St., in Alexandria, VA, before selling
and shipping them “south to cotton and
sugar planters[enslavers] in
Mississippi and Louisiana,” to genital mutilation and
“medical” experiments on Black women and men, as revealed in two explosive
books on the engrossing history of “scientific” horrors – Dr. Harriet
Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black
Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Dr. Deadra Cooper-Owens’ Medical Bondage and the U.S. government’s infamous
Tuskeegee Experiment;
from a hate-filled White policeman saying on camera “We only kill Black people” to murders of
Civil Rights activists – Black and White (like Viola Liuzzo,
a White woman, in April 1965). And, the list goes beyond sanity.
Donna
Britt, in her Washington Post article,
recalled, as a child during the Civil Rights Movement,
“watching the snarling white faces on TV,
so monstrously contorted with rage that even young black kids like me had to
wonder, ‘Why do they hate me.’” Britt assessed that “The only thing racists hated more [than Black people] were the whites helping them.” Hence, the KKK/Nazi member’s murder of Heather Heyer,
a White woman who was protesting hate in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017. Like a virus, the haters recruit others on their hate-generating Internet websites.
This hate… in America and around the world….from
where does it spring? Jealously?
Ellis Cose’s The Envy of the World: On Being a
Black Man in America addresses that possibility. The late
Dr. Frances Welsing stated
in her psycho-genetic theory publications, The Cress Theory of
Color-Confrontation and Racism (White supremacy) and The Isis Papers,
that “in the majority of instances any neurotic drive to superiority and
supremacy is usually founded upon a deep and pervading sense of inadequacy and
inferiority.” Does the hate originate from some Whites’ inner well of
feelings of inferiority, due to their minority status on the planet? This
status may be in jeopardy considering two medical studies. One: A38-year study found a 52.4% decline in sperm levels among White males on three
continents, North America, Europe and Australia. Two: “White
women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past
decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early
1980s,” Eli Saslow wrote in his Washington Post article in 2016. Or, maybe the hate these people harbor for Black-African people is as
simple as having warped minds and hearts after being struck by the force of
evil energy from something like “The IT” in A Wrinkle in Time story.
“Not
Speak African”
After
Ngozi de-boarded the enslavers’ ships’ hell-holes and set foot onto another
continent, the hatred he sensed extended in the form of “breaking” - a
vital,
abusive and divisive conditioning process that involved anxiously and aggressively forcing our
African Ancestors to
“not speak African” - designed to disconnect them from their
roots/culture/identity. Bell Hooks challenges readers to imagine our
ancestors’ “…trauma as they were
compelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with[in] a [brutal] colonizing European culture, where voices deemed foreign could not be
spoken, were outlawed tongues, renegade speech.”
I close my eyes and imagine how
their hearts were shattered with overwhelming despair slicing into every nerve
and cell in their bodies. No wonder,
centuries later, African people throughout the world suffer from post-traumatic
stress (PTS) and psychological chains of slavery, as documented in Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s
Legacy of Enduring Inquiry and Healing and Na’im Akbar’s Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery.
Hooks sighed -
“Oh, how to remember, to re-invoke this
terror…,”
“How
to describe what it must have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were
historically forged in the place of shared speech; to be transported, abruptly,
to a world where the very sound of one’s mother tongue had no meaning.”
Unforgiving feelings of loss of their language had
to have resonated fear on a quantum leap level. English, French, Portuguese and Spanish became the
sounds “….of slaughter and conquest…;” “….a form of
terrorism…;” “a place of struggle,” wrote Hooks. In the original TV series, Roots (1977), after an adult “Kunta Kinte” (James Amos) escapes the enslaver’s plantation (land stolen
from Native Americans) and finds the woman he loves, she desperately and
fearfully whispers to him to “not speak
African;” the enslaver “don’t like us
to speak African” she cautions when he says a few words in his language. Centuries later, I venture to say that every single
one of the hundreds of millions of descendants of kidnapped Africans scattered
throughout the Diaspora, like I, know not what language our African
Ancestors spoke.
A
critical production value/element missing from Roots was/is an actual demonstration of an African language. The telling of this holocaust or MAAFA (a Kiswahili word) would be richer, had the producers
taken the time to include an African language with English subtitles, as
thankfully, was done in BET’s epic drama, The Book of Negroes and the landmark movie, Black Panther.
As groundbreaking and necessary as the Roots series was/is, omitting a
distinct language supports, on an overt and covert level, White supremacists’
historical lies that “Africans came from
nothing; had no culture; no language; were savages” as millions of Black and White
children and I were taught from K-12, as well as in some colleges and
universities, before the inclusion of African American and African studies, in
the U.S. Disturbingly, that fake news still resonates within
the White population today. Since, via the encompassing and immersive mass
media, Roots’ audiences see and hear all the characters in Kunta Kinte’s
African village only speaking English, this omission serves to justify the “no
language” lie.
In
The Book of Negroes, Aminata Diallo (exquisitely played
by Aunjanue Ellis) and her husband (Chekura Tiano played by Lyriq Bent) speak
one of 3 African languages. English
subtitles are shown throughout segments of the series whenever they speak their
language. What might not be an unlikely, albeit rare, scenario in the hateful,
brutal and non-virtual world of slavery, the readers of Lawrence Hill’s historical book and the TV
series’ viewers hear and see the enslaver order Aminata to “speak a little African” to entertain his
profiteering guests. As with her
language, Aminata never surrenders her name; even the enslavers are forced to call
her by her given African name. She
understands that surrendering her name and language gives enslavers power,
dominance. And despite
White enslavers’ savage beatings to force him to call himself “Toby,” Kunta
Kinte tenaciously hung onto his name in his Spirit. His name was his link to his society, his
people, his culture and encompassed a specific meaning. “Toby” meant nothing and represented European
control/dominance. “When you know your name, you should hang on to it,” declared
“Milkman,” Toni Morrison’s
protagonist in her powerful novel, Song of Solomon.
Names
and languages connected our kidnapped African Ancestors to family and location. For example:
A female named “Chinede” has a specific meaning. The prefix “Chi” in Ibo language (in south-east Nigeria) means "god [or]
spiritual being" referring to the personal spiritual guardian that each
person is believed to have. Similarly, Italian and Chinese surnames,
connect the bearers to a specific Providence in Italy or China, respectively. Extinguishing a people’s names ensures
severing their connection to their original language and roots.
Europeans’
mission to dominate and destroy Indigenous people’s languages around the globe
- from North American to the Caribbean and Polynesian Islands, to Alaska, to
New Zealand and Australia (where the British invaded and planted a penal colonies
for European thieves and murderers), resulted in them erecting torturous “boarding
schools.” These “schools” housed
Indigenous children and youths who were literally “taken” from their parents and natural environment and forced to
live in an all-white world that terrorized and interrogated them into forsaking
their language, culture and identity. For example, Choctaw historians documented that Whites washed their peoples' mouths out with soap if they spoke their language. Ironically,
in one of those schools in Virginia, African Americans taught English to
the imprisoned Native Americans. Absurdly, the U.S. government found the Choctaw language to be beneficial in World War I in the U.S. war against Germany; known as the "Code Talkers." and, paradoxically, as Europeans mounted their
language and culture dominance system, they incorporated the social principles of the people
they brutally oppressed. The Iroquois’ democratic principles, for
example, inspired the U.S.’ Articles of Incorporation in the Declaration of Independence. “The
Iroquois constitution, called the Great Law of Peace, or Gayanashagowa, contains many
echoes of our Constitution, and in a number of respects, is more advanced in
thought than the Constitution that resulted from the Convention of 1787,”
Ira Krakow wrote in his blog.
As they exterminated Indigenous
peoples as described in The Turning Point: European Conquests
of the Americas (1492-1800)
and extinguished their languages, White city planners and politicians claimed
the Indigenous people’s names as markers for hundreds of states, counties,
cities and terrains across the U.S., like Virginia’s Accomack and Appomattox Counties and
Chickahominy and Coccoquan Rivers, and Canada (a Wendat Huron
word meaning “village” or “settlement”). (See a comprehensive list of Native
American names of places and things throughout the U.S at One of Many Feathers.)
As
time went on, European language and dominance over a large segment of African
hostages was complete. In explaining the
sociological dynamics of language, Greg Anderson states that “As long
as people feel embarrassed, restrained or openly criticized for using a
particular language, it’s only natural for them to want to avoid continuing to
do what’s causing a negative response….”
Sadly, from open criticism and conditioning, to learned helplessness, many African hostages began to imitate the enslavers’ degrading description of them, including calling each other and themselves the acerbic and toxic “n-word.” Some Ancestors who became proficient in English also began to criticize and humiliate other African hostages who continued to (secretly) speak his/her tribal language or who spoke “broken English.” Conversely, possibly as retaliation or self-defense, those who spoke so-called “broken English” mocked the Africans who spoke so-called “proper English.”
Sadly, from open criticism and conditioning, to learned helplessness, many African hostages began to imitate the enslavers’ degrading description of them, including calling each other and themselves the acerbic and toxic “n-word.” Some Ancestors who became proficient in English also began to criticize and humiliate other African hostages who continued to (secretly) speak his/her tribal language or who spoke “broken English.” Conversely, possibly as retaliation or self-defense, those who spoke so-called “broken English” mocked the Africans who spoke so-called “proper English.”
Rarely
taken into consideration is that part of the reason for the “broken English”
was grounded in the fact that “Many West
African languages have no ‘th’ or ‘f’” wrote Vincent F.A. Golphin in his essay, Language
is Important for African American Growth.
Consequently, we might hear some African American speakers say “wid” as
in “Come wid me,” dis instead of this, dese instead of these, dos instead of those, and
dem instead of them. Birthday might be
pronounced “birfday” which has a “f”
sound despite the alphabet not being a part of the original African
language. Hooks noted that historical
examples of these kind of “…grammatical
construction of sentences…” are heard in old “Negro” spirituals.
“People used to believe that
African American English was illogical, poorly constructed, and inadequate for
any cognitive or linguistic growth. But,
while it is certainly different from standard English, it is not inferior,
declared John R. Rickford, a Stamford University professor, who serves on the Linguistics Society of America’s governing board.
Distinguished
author, Zora Neale Hurston was criticized and undermined by
African American “intellectuals,” such as W.E.B.
Dubois, who considered
her distinguished and now celebrated book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a disgrace to the progress of the
race because it featured the “ruptured,
broken, unruly speech of the vernacular” of southern Blacks. “Ruptured” speech exists within all
races. For example, “several English sounds are missing from the Japanese
language entirely: "c," "f," "l," "q," "v,"
and "x."” Consequently, since
there is no “l” in the Japanese language, Japanese and other Asian people may
be heard pronouncing the word “color” with a “r” sound, as in “coror.”
Chinese language doesn’t have a “v,” so a word like “vinegar” might be
pronounced as “winegar.” Assimilated members of other ethnic groups -
Italian, German, Polish, Welsh, Irish, Jews etc. (who chose to “come to America,”
unlike kidnapped Africans), have also been observed ridiculing family members
and friends who don’t speak “proper English.”
Today,
many African Americans are embarrassed when they hear Ebonics
and label the speakers “ignorant” or “stupid.”
Professor Rickford told the Washington Post that Ebonics “is a survival reflex handed down for generations.” Dr. Wayne O’Neil, head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said “If Ebonics isn’t a language, then tell me what is.”
In
the end, European language dominance has reinforced the repugnant tendency of
humans to humiliate and bully one another and increased strife and social
division within races, worldwide.
COMMUNICATION: “This
is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk…”
“I think of black people meeting one another
in a space away from the diverse
cultures and languages that
distinguished them from one another,
compelled by circumstance
to find ways to speak with one
another in a ‘new world….’” Hooks
As
African hostages endured the White enslavers’ whips that bloodied their backs,
that Josiah Henson’s (a.k.a. Uncle Tom) father endured, plus his ear was cut off, as savage punishment for protecting his wife from being raped by an enslaver (see my post - Uncle Tom A Traitor! Really?), they also analyzed, measured and, in some cases, mastered the oppressors’ language to strategize and execute ingenious survival and escape tactics.
that Josiah Henson’s (a.k.a. Uncle Tom) father endured, plus his ear was cut off, as savage punishment for protecting his wife from being raped by an enslaver (see my post - Uncle Tom A Traitor! Really?), they also analyzed, measured and, in some cases, mastered the oppressors’ language to strategize and execute ingenious survival and escape tactics.
Our Ancestors understood that by employing
the oppressor’s language “…intimacy could
be restored [and] that a culture of
resistance could be formed that would make recovery from the trauma of
enslavement possible,” says Hooks.
It wasn’t long before speaking the oppressor' language resulted in the
construct of lyrics in songs with hidden messages to alert hostages to escape
opportunities (e.g., “Steal Away to Jesus,” “Wade in the water/God’s gonna trouble the water” and “Follow the drinking gourd”).
Escape. An
unrelenting, ongoing quest. Throughout
each heartbreakingly cruel voyage from the Motherland, our Ancestors plotted
escape strategizes. Those who succeeded, beginning in the early1500s, created “Maroon” communities and
developed their own language, an amalgamation of their Mother Tongues and the
oppressors’ language. Maroon communities, where “intimacy could be restored,” were
structured in surrounding forests and
caves in Hispaniola (now Haiti/Dominica Republic), Mexico, Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela,
Guyana, Honduras, Surinam, Ecuador, Argentina); the Caribbean, including Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Panama, Barbados, Guadalupe, Belize, Curaco, Granada, Jamaica, Trinidad/Tobago, Antigua/Barbuda, and the
United States - Florida (as documented in The Exiles of Forida, by Joshua Giddens), Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and the Great
Dismal Swamp on the North
Carolina/Virginia border, and Georgia, where they created the Gullah language which has been
correlated to the Krio language spoken in Sierra Leone.
“Some maroon
communities grew large enough to defeat European armies and take over islands,
such as Jamaica and Haiti,” John Tidwell wrote in American Legacy Magazine, in 2003. Literature and the movie 1804, documents how enslaved Africans defeated the French and made Haiti
the world’s FIRST independent country from European bondage. Political and human rights activists assert
that this self-emancipation is the core reason American and European governments, today, collude to suppress the African
Haitian people.
Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons was among the famous leaders who sustained and inspired their Maroon
communities. Her tenacious and
exceptional military leadership,
and astute maneuvering abilities (much like Harriet
Tubman), were recognized, in her lifetime and beyond, as a
symbol of unity and strength, by Maroon communities as well as the enslavers. Other remarkable Maroon leaders include Cuffy, a
so-called “house ‘slave’,’” who led a revolt in Guyana. Undoubtedly, there
were many more.
Of course, if anyone was re-captured, he or
she endured unspeakable crimes from White enslavers. One re-captured African, enslaved by Augustus
Holly of Berrie County, NC, was wearing
“a coat that was impervious to [bird] shot, it being thickly wadded with turkey
feathers,” wrote Charles L. Blackston, curator of the Charles L. Blackston
Afo-American Collection, Temple University.
To
quell African revolts, some enslavers signed treaties with Maroons, which
suggests that some Africans might have known how to read (assuming the agreements were written and not oral, and acknowledged
their independence, as they
did with Tacky in Jamaica.
According to Enclyclopedia.com, descendants of Maroons still live in Brazil
and the Caribbean in “enclaves
in several parts of the hemisphere, remaining fiercely proud of their Maroon
origins,” and speaking their own language.
Africans who did not escape to Maroon communities
also developed their own forms of
communication, amalgamating their mother tongue with the enslavers’
languages. In Jamaica, it’s Patwah (or Patois); in Haiti, it’s Papiamento and Haitian
Creole, and the Gullah
language, spoken today by African Americans in and around the
Charleston/Beaufort, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia regions, which as noted earlier, has
been proven to be connected to the languages spoken in Sierra Leone.
A few Maroon-themed documentaries and dramas include Akwantu, Queen
Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess and History of
The Moore Town Maroons - Maroons of Jamaica – Documentary. The
latter can be seen on YouTube.com. I was
fortunate to experience an interdisciplinary
interpretive performance about “marooning” (an expression used for colonies of “Africans who escaped [from plantations] to hills, mountains, and forests upon their arrival to the
Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries”), by the Untamed Space/Renegade Performance Group, at the Kennedy Center,
in 2017. This national dance troupe also can be seen on YouTube.com.
The more I learn about my ancestral history,
the more I don’t know, but want to
know. I already knew that our Ancestors’
languages were expressed in the form of talking drums that generated powerful
complex meters and propulsive beats. At
the 2018 Pan-African Back to the Roots
Festival in the “ancient, mystical city of Ife
(an ancient Yoruba city in south-western Nigeria),” King Ogunwusi
stated: “Drums make us who we are and defines our whole being. Drums help us send the messages of happiness,
sorrow or coded messages from creation.”
“Coded messages from creation;” how intriguing.
Snatching the drums from our Ancestors did
little to deter them, however. They
simply devised other clever methods of communication in the ongoing quest to
escape. Like our hair (yes, our hair),
specifically the power, virtue and elegance
of traditional African braiding. Thanks to Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, co-authors of HAIR STORY: Untangling the Roots of Back Hair in America, I
was blessed to learn and marvel at how our Ancestors implanted escape codes. Our hair, that aggressively maligned growth of
enchanting coils; maligned - even today - by other races, as well as a generous
number of Black people, played a
strategic role in communicating beyond the oppressors’ language. “Escape
routes were often carved into elaborate cornrows design,” says Tharps,
Associate Professor at Temple University. “Four rows might signify needing to travel 4
miles. A looser braid might signify
meeting at a cotton field.” On
dreadfully numerous occasions, cruel enslavers forced African hostages’ to shave their heads to impede this form of subterfuge.
The insulting and demeaning deed also served to disconnect the hostages
from their African identity. In The Book of Negroes, the enslaver cut off Aminata’s hair as punishment. ((Could this psychological chain to slavery, as well as
the fact that Black women are the only race of people who have had to file lawsuits against
corporations for wearing braids in the workplace, subconsciously impact our hair
psyche; be among the myriad of reasons millions of Black women are obsessed with hair other
than their own glorious mass of curls, degraded as “kinky” and “nappy”? In 1987, Cheryl
Tatum sued Hyatt over that company’s hair “policy.” Hundreds of Black women in the media have complained that they are "encouraged" to not wear braids or naturals, otherwise they won't be considered for "on-air" positions across the board (including news and entertainment), in television news. Black hair issues also impacted many African
American males, especially in the 1930s through 50s. But their need to fry their scalp with lye to
“straighten” their hair (called a “conk”) wore off by the 1960s. Actor, Denzel Washington is seen going through the painful process in Spike Lee's Malcolm X. Still, in the 21st century, some
websites give Black men instructions on how to “straighten their hair.” A
Living Single (1990s) episode bravely addressed Black people’s issues with
our hair through the baritone-voiced Kyle Barker, when he spoke to his employer
about his pride in wearing his short, neat locks and refused to “change,” as
suggested by his Black co-worker, even if it meant losing his job.))
“We make our words a
counter-hegemonic speech,
liberating ourselves in language.”
Hooks
In
some cases, after learning the oppressors’ language, our African ancestors
cleverly defied the indignity of the auction block by using the English
language against the enslavers. “We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech,
liberating ourselves in language,” says Hooks. Diana
Ramey Berry invites readers to listen to our Ancestors' voices of self-liberation "in language" in her extensively researched and revealing book, THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH:
The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a
Nation,
that “fly[ies] in the face of our traditional portrait of slavery, which tends to
depict the enslaved as witless and powerless,” wrote Wiley Hall, 3rd
in his book review. Among her numerous
accounts, Berry
acquaints us with an African hostage named “Ponto” who took “the oppressor’s language and turn[ed] it against itself.”
Standing
on the auction block in Richmond,
VA, he used the oppressor’s
language to contradict the shouting auctioneer’s boastful descriptions of
him. When the auctioneer told satanic
purchasers of human flesh that Ponto was 32 years old, Ponto corrected him and
put his age closer to 40. (Berry explained that
older individuals “soul value” increased based on wisdom and stability, while
their market value decreased). When the
auctioneer portrayed Ponto as a “first
rate plantation hand, strong and able-bodied,” the hostage interrupted,
saying, “Gentlemen, I is not able-bodied;
for, in the first place, I is troubled with sickness; and in the next place, I
has got a wen
on my right shoulder, as big as an Irish potatoe! [sic]” This is but a few of what must have been
hundreds of demonstrations of how our Ancestors “clung to their sense of selfhood, physically, mentally and spiritually”
and attempted “To heal the splitting of mind and body…, and to recover ourselves and
our experiences in language…..” Hooks wrote.
Liberating
ourselves and attempting to recover ourselves and our experiences in language
is also evidenced in our music like the blues, ragtime and jazz, and the unique tongue-twisting "scat" that Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Cab Calloway and other African American
musicians/singers created and embedded into their songs. “Scat” is another form of Black vernacular
speech that speaks “…beyond the
boundaries of conquest and domination.” The character “Kyle Barker” (T.C. Carson) in the sitcom Living Single,
demonstrated an exceptional example of this African American language art
form.
The
“…revolutionary power of black vernacular
speech [is] not lost in contemporary
culture,” says Hooks. Current
examples are boldly, even aggressively, demonstrated in sociopolitical
hip-hop/rap commentary, where words spew in nanoseconds like talking
drums. “[They] twist and stretch their vowels in the name of drama. Percussive power of their consonants. They have an acute awareness of the places of
articulation in their respective mouths, and they play them like drums,”
wrote critic, Chris Richards/ Washington Post/January 2017 in his review of expressionist, Young Thug and Future’s album. Witness also Snoop Dogg’s “hizzle” and “fasizzle,” and Black urban words like
“hateration” and other words configured with the “ation” suffix. African rhythms and beats exist in
these articulations.
Popular words like be-bop, doo-wop, jazz,
boogaloo, boo koo (a lot of something), boo (my friend or lover), bling-bling,
booty call, gig, good googly moogly, bad maama jaama, sukey-sukey (as in
“awwwww sukey, sukey now”), ya ya, ooo poop pa doo, phat, hipster (a term used during the 1930s jazz age) and many other phrases, emerged from
African communities throughout the U.S., as expressions of liberation and recovery We also
facilitated semantic shifts in the tone and meaning of existing
words and phrases, such as “cool, it’s all good, I gotcha, I got yo back,
bro/brotha, sista/sistah, you-go-girl, bump n’ grind, cra-cra/crazy, hit me up,
off the chain, off the hook, homie, word, step off, in the house, just sayin’,
everything is everything, shout out, woke, and DAP (acronym for Dignity And Pride). Webster’s online dictionary describes the current popular word
“Woke”
as “a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a
dialect called African American Vernacular English…”; a byword for social awareness that
likely started in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu's song "Master Teacher." Physical communication like high 5’s, swag, and the fist
bump (dating back to the late 1980s and denigrated by White critics but now is
a global expression among nearly all cultures) continue to emerge, and dances
like the huckle buck, the Charleston, jazz, electric slide, cake walk,
jitterbug, butterfly, etc. All having
African foundations.
The African rhythms in our DNA are heard in Black vernacular speech, such as
Ebonics,
and are so powerful they even display themselves through African Americans in the deaf community. Gallaudet professor, Carolyn McCaskill, addressed that phenomenon in a Washington
Post article: Sign language that African Americans use is different from that of whites and
the documentary, Signing
Black in America, explores the significant signing differences Some linguists
contend that Ebonics’ characteristics have origins in West and Niger-Congo African languages. The editors of Ebonics, The Urban Education Debate stated
that “African Language Systems are genetically based and not a dialect of
English.” Dr. Wayne O’Neil, head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said “If Ebonics isn’t a language, then tell me what is.”
When African hostages “spoke African,” it elicited
a threat and fear among the enslavers. Black vernacular speech has a similar
effect among many Whites today. Hooks shared: “…when students in my Black Women Writers
class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often
complained. This seemed to be
particularly the case with black vernacular.” This anxiety is laughingly absurd with
reports that some Whites, in an office setting, are uncomfortable with Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday
song. In its fall 2016 issue, Ebony Magazine reported:
“When someone has a birthday,
everyone sings the song the average [EuroAmerican] way. When Black office workers
burst out with Stevie’s version (created in honor of Dr. King’s birthday), it
tends to confuse and perplex the white office workers.”
Language & Re-Naming Ourselves
“Among the various
endeavors that African slaves [hostages]
made in becoming African American in
culture, orientation
was the culture of resistance
involving the process of
re-naming themselves, constantly
reverting back
to their African cultural forms.”
Stripping our Ancestors of their
names under brute force transcended into, yet, another “…attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language.” Renaming ourselves. In the late 20th Century, we began
naming our children with non-European-sounding names, choosing instead
African-sounding names - Shaniqua, Ife, Keyende,
Lumumba, Ma’Layshia, Nubia, Sakai, Tamiyka, Imani,
Imamu, Mtima, Janiyah, and so on. “Through re-naming themselves, African
Americans have continued the
process of cultural
identity formulations and
re-claiming of their
complex African roots
in the continuing
process of redefining
themselves and dismantling
the paradigm that
kept them mentally chained for centuries,” Professor Mphande
wrote.
It’s no surprise that Whites, like Duke
University’s Professor Jerry Hough, are uncomfortable with African
Americans who have what he and, sadly, even some African Americans call “strange” names. In the 21st Century, African
American family members have been known to quarrel over whether a newborn
should be given a “normal” name or “strange” name. This disputation is a huge insult to their
Ancestors. Fear is part of the reason
for African Americans’ objections; fear that the child, as an adult, will find
it difficult to obtain employment, assuming he or she will be seeking
employment from White people. That fear,
however, is being upended what with many African Americans with African-sounding
name creating their own successful businesses, reversing the need to depend on
another race for a job. In politics,
voters don’t blink when electing African Americans bearing African and
African-sounding names to office, as in the case of the current mayor of Atlanta, GA, Kiesha Lance
Bottoms (emphasis on “Kiesha,”
meaning "favorite and great joy," in parts of Africa).
Years
ago, “Leon,”
was a popular name for African American boys.
Famous bearers include the boxer Leon Spinks and the actor Leon.
Some linguists suggest that the name is a derivative of
Sierra Leone,
which was among the African nations from which Europeans kidnapped over 300
million Ancestors (alas, with the aid of other Africans. But, Sylviane A. Diouf reminds us, in her narrative, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African
Strategies,
that we must celebrate the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought AGAINST slavery; even rescued
some Africans from European and African enslavers.
Black
people bearing Eurocentric names (i.e., Henson, Jones, Brown, Jackson, Washington,
Coleman, Goldberg, etc.), connects to the English, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish enslavers’
names and culture, which is why Malcolm Little changed his name to Malcom X,
as did those joined the Nation of Islam. Most Africans on the
African continent managed to keep their traditional family names, despite being brutally colonized by Europeans. On the other hand, millions of Africans bear
the surnames, such ass Mohammed and Abdullah, and express the culture of the
Arabs that brutally colonized them centuries before and along with the
Europeans, as discussed in Identity - Part 1: Why I Never Call My Ancestors "Slaves." Interestingly, the name "Nana," a term African American grandmothers are called means “son of kings” in Ghana, survived all the enslavers’ unspeakable language-destruction efforts. Notably, over the centuries of losing our original languages, hence the word's true meaning, the term has changed gender and meaning, in the African American lexicon.
Language, Identity & Denial/Dismissal
“Languages not only expresse ideas and concepts, but it actually shapes thought…,”
[and is] “intimately linked to the
creation and perception of reality itself.”
Our Ancestors grieved from knowing that
losing their language and their names also meant losing their identity. Because she refused to relinquish her
language, name – hence - identity, a character in The Book of Negroes tells Aminata:
“You gotta let go of that African
thang.” She doesn’t. Instead she smiles, representing those African female
and male Ancestors who demonstrated old-school DAP (Dignity & Pride),
stubbornly holding on to their identity, this being “intimately linked to the creation and
perception of reality itself.”
“Language
provides a sense of place,” wrote
Hooks, which is why other ethnic groups –
Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Italians, Germans, Irish, Polish, Swedes, Indians
from East India, etc., righteously and rigorously acknowledge
their racial and cultural identity. The View’s Joy Behar proudly
exclaims: “I’m Italian.” When we walk
by Irish pubs or taverns, we don’t see “Irish-American” signage. When we go to Chinese or Thai restaurants,
“American” is rarely included in the signage.
Of course, identifying with their roots is easier for other races
because they were not brutally stripped of their language, and, any descendents
that don’t speak the language, at least, have direct knowledge of and access to
their Mother Tongue.
Loss of language contributes to the reason that, along with other
historical socio-political forces, hundreds of thousands of African
Americans and Africans throughout the Diaspora have “let go of that African thang” and fiercely reject
their African heritage. Pathetically, a massive population of African
Americans will call themselves the “n-word” before calling themselves
“African;” even “African American.” Hooks
reminds us that, “…it is not the English
language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it; how they shape it
to become a territory that limits and defines; how they make it a weapon that
can shame, humiliate, colonize….,” as with the dreaded n-word and redskin. The latter derogatory term has been reported to reference what
Whites said when they killed Native Americans and used and sold their skins as
trophies.
Unlike Ryan Coogler,
director of the Black Panther movie, who confirmed in a number of press interviews “I’m African…..” after research and inner
reflection, actress Raven Seymone stated: “I’m an American. I’m not African American.” (Critics say that “American” is code for
“white.”) In 2014, Gayle King (Oprah’s
best friend),
as the only African American host on the national broadcast, CBS this Morning, exclaimed that she doesn’t identify
with the “African American” description, preferring to only call herself
“Black.” Wendy Williams announced the
same preference on her show. Well, where
do these people think having the honor and privilege of being “Black” comes
from? Why dismiss their African roots; their
Ancestors? I submit that losing our language
is linked to so many Black people denying and dismissing their African identity.
A
DC Metro bus operator, from the Dominican Republic,
told me he used to call himself “Black,” but changed to calling himself
“Spanish” while in high school.
Identifying with being Afro-Dominican was out of the question. The bus operator doesn’t know that the island of what was once called Hispaniola
(now Haiti/ Dominica), when invaded by the Spanish, was inhabited by millions of
Arawak people. In less than five years, they were nearly
exterminated “from overwork, massacres,
and other brutalities at the hands of the [Catholic] conquistadores; they succumbed to European diseases; some committed
suicide” wrote Dale A. Bismauth in The Caribbean: Culture of Resistance, Spirit of Hope, edited by Oscar L. Bolioli. The “…conquistadores
vowed to kill twelve Indians daily in honor of the twelve apostles. A thirteenth was to be immolated [to kill, especially by burning] in honor of
Jesus Christ! Such was the ferocity with
which the Spaniards treated the Arawaks that by 1520 their subjugation was
complete.” Soon after, the Spaniards
began their brutal snatch-and-grab of our Ancestors. “From
1517 onward, Africans were brought in large numbers [nearly 2,000,000
million] to the islands of Hispaniola
[Haiti/Dominica], Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico and to the mainland of
Central and South America,” wrote Bismauth.
Of
course, the “Spanish” bus operator with strong African features (melanin, nose,
lips, hair) never learned about this history, and, unfortunately, his denial
and dismissal of his African heritage impedes any investigation. Sadly, he has plenty of company.
Writer, Barrington M. Salmon tells readers the story, in Who are your people? Finding Family through DNA Genealogy, of Anaisa Bayala who remembered her mother putting chemicals in her hair to straighten it at age 4. Bayala said “Mom tried to hide our culture.” Her mother was born in the Dominican Republic. Bayala said that despite obvious African physical characteristics, “they claim to be ‘Indios,’ Spanish or anything but African.” They even go so far as to say they got their complexion from “being in the sun.” (Note: The Dominican Republic government has been actively evicting Haitian people, who are blessed with more melanin, from the Dominican side of the island).
Identity denial and dismissal is also linked to White enslavers’ (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Scott Key - who wrote the Star Spangle Banner, and so on) sexual abuse/rape of African women resulting in millions of Africans throughout the Diaspora carrying European ancestry, causing further identity conflict. Rosa Parks spent a part of her career investigating and documenting White men raping Black women in Montgomery, AL. Famed author, Toni Morrison, in her interview with The Guardian, is quoted as saying: “There are two things I want to see in life. One is a white kid shot in the back by a cop. …. The second thing I want to see: a record of any white man in the entire history of the world who has been convicted of raping a black woman. Just one.” Daniel Holzelaw, an Oklahoma police officer, convicted of 18 counts of sexual assault on Black women in 2015, is that one. And he appears to be the only one. He’s serving 263 years in prison. Of course, his attorneys are appealing.
African
identity denial and dismissal is so deeply ingrained in tens of millions of African Americans and Africans
throughout the Diaspora that, when
referencing African-born Africans, many can be heard saying, “Those Africans” with a note of disdain. This punitive speech is heard often in Black sitcoms, an example being one of
the characters in the discordant sitcom, Carmichaels. Conversely, with
the success of colonization’s divide-and-conquer schemes, a contemptuous tone
can also be heard from some Africans born on the Continent when referring to
Africans Americans and Africans in the Diaspora.
Some African Americans, and possibly around the globe, never “let go of that African thang” and proudly labeled their institutions “African” (e.g., The Free African Society, African Methodist Episcopal and African Baptist churches). Renown journalist, Lerone Bennett, Jr. said that according to surviving documents, the first generation of Africans born in the “new world,” referred to themselves as “blacks,” “blackes” and Africans.”
Current descendants of Africans who escaped bondage and joined forces against their common European enemy, and, in many cases, intermarried with Native Americans in North America, including Canada, and Indigenous people throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, struggle with calling themselves “African.” Black/African heritage denial and dismissal effects hundreds of thousands of descendants of East Africans whose women were raped by invading and colonizing Arabs, thus, calling themselves Arab, instead of African, despite being born on and having eons of pre-Arabian lineage in Africa. Africans born on the Motherland, but raised in the U.S., like 2018 Olympic speed skater, Maame Biney, who was born in Ghana, but raised in Washington, DC, could choose to call themselves African and African American.
One
of the youths I worked with in discussing Black History once asked why I call
myself “African” when I’ve not been to and wasn’t born in Africa. Sadly, this is a common question. I shared that identifying myself as African
(even with carrying some Blackfeet and Seminole Native American genes) honors
my ancestors, acknowledges and demonstrates dignity and pride
(DAP) in and love for my heritage/ roots and celebrates my Identity. I asked the teen if she thought about the
fact that, Chinese people born in the United
States who have never been to China and don’t speak the language
or dialect, identify themselves as “Chinese” and “Chinese American.” The same applies to other ethnic groups
including Koreans, Japanese, Indians (from India), Italians, Germans, Irish,
Jews, Poles, Vietnamese and others. Of course, as stated
earlier, their language is a key to their ownership of their identity.
A
Common Language
Worldwide, 70,000 languages are spoken, yet, European
languages - English, Spanish, Portuguese, French - are spoken by nearly all people in places
where Europeans planted their seeds of hate, aggression, greed and
colonization, as described in
Michael Anderson Bradley’s The
Iceman Inheritance –
Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexism and aggression.
However,
Kiswahili, a common language (lingua
franca) unique to Africans in the African
Great Lakes region, has emerged, especially for world travelers, as a “must
speak” language. Spoken by some 30 million Africans,
Kiswahili serves as a second language that facilitates communication among
Africans who speak different languages from different societies; similar to the
creation of the Gullah language in the U.S.
and Patois or Patwa among the African hostages in Jamaica.
Kiswahili is a central part of the
primary education curriculum in Tanzania
and a subject of study in higher education. In Kenya,
it’s a compulsory school subject in primary and secondary education and is
expanding in the education systems in Uganda,
Rwanda and Burundi. The language is
becoming global, with immigration and increased travel by
Kiswahili-speaking people to different parts of the world. Some 100 universities in different parts of
the world teach Kiswahili. Despite its
global movement, as of this post, only one HBCU - Howard University
- offers courses in Kiswahili. Howard’s expansive list also includes Wolof, Zulu, and
Yoruba. Generally, colleges and universities that
host an African Center, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Africa
Center, offer classes in African languages. Unlike Spanish and Chinese languages, those who embody
inveterate and implicit racism ignore Kiswahili. For example, while students
can apply for a scholarship at The National Security Language Initiative for
Youth (NSLI-Y)
program, Kiswahili is absent from the designated languages. It’s not mentioned or referenced,
much less taught, in U.S.
public and charter schools, including language-immersive primary and secondary
schools.
This intentional omission ensures children, and especially Black children worldwide, remain ignorant of languages unique to their African ancestry. The outcome is that English (or Spanish) continue to dictate and dominate their identity. It could be argued that the bus operator chose a Spanish identity simply because Spanish is the dominant language in the Dominican Republic. But, what remains is the thorny, complicated and bloody history of how European language dominance came to be.
As I listened to two brothas, in a
popular coffee shop, cheerfully conversing with one another in an African
language in deep, rich tones; their vocal cords “runneth over” with melanin, I
pondered. “Wolof,” the taller of the two answered in response to my
query. Maybe my Ancestors helped me
write this essay to confirm that my kidnapped Ancestors DID speak Wolof.
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