Wednesday, February 28, 2018

IDENTITY & Language ~ Part 2

by W. E. Littlejohn


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
 When our Ancestors were tortured and tormented into abandoning their language, a wealth of knowledge was lost.  Greg Anderson, on LivingTongues.org, noted that “…indigenous communities [African, Asian, Indian, Aboriginal, Polynesians, and so on.] have in their native tongues vast repositories of knowledge about medicinal herbs; information that could provide clues to modern cures.”  But in the enslavers’ demonic quest to dominate, they discarded valuable knowledge even if it meant that they, themselves and their own children suffered, since invaluable medicinal knowledge that could have cured illnesses, was destroyed.  This level of selfishness and greed seems to come from a special place of green and hate.

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, OkRosewood, 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. 

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. 

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 strategizesThose 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 XStill, 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 bluesragtime 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 redskinThe 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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