In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Language in the Recovery of Ourselves | 329 Inspiration Not, in the saying of you, are you said. BafÑed and like a root stopped by a stone you turn back questioning the tree you feed. But what the leaves hear is not what the roots ask. – Martin Carter1 ... the West has not been calm enough and objective enough to teach us our history correctly, without crude falsiÐcations ... Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization . The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt. – Cheikh Anta Diop2 16.1 The Scramble and its Effects: The General Situation as We Meet The Afrikan world continues to suffer the effects of a twin catastrophe which began to unfold among its people about a millennium and a half ago: the Arab invasion and destruction, and the European invasion and destruction. The combined effects of this Afrikan Holocaust are termed the Maafa, a Kiswahili term which translates as ‘great destruction’. It is the greatest crime in history. The greatest destruction and horror caused by this terror was not the physical bondage that Western scholarship tends to focus upon. It is the deep spiritual, psychological and cultural devastation consequent upon the destruction of our spiritual system, our separation from our narratives of ourselves, the interrupted intergenerational conversation among us involving those who were here, those who are here, and those who are yet to come here, the deleted memories, the altered and distorted identities which condemn so many of us to mental enslavement, underachievement and impoverishment. Some Afrikans have studied the effects of this crime from various perspectives and there are an increasing number of programmes within Afrikan communities to combat the effects of this massive catastrophe. But there has never been any comprehensive intervention to treat the resultant acute stress disorder syndrome Language in the Recovery of Ourselves: The Medew Netjer (Hieroglyphics) in the Construction of Pan-Afrikan Unity Kimani S Nehusi 16 Chapter 330 | The Africana World: From Fragmentation to Unity and Renaissance which has consumed many of Afrika’s children in the past and continues to do so to this day. One aspect of this invisible bomb that exploded in the consciousness of the Afrikan world and keeps reproducing itself, like a self-sustaining nuclear fission in the mind of every generation since the initial blast, is the disconnection from our history and therefore the disconnection from ourselves, from our sense of wholeness . Today we continue to be Balkanised, divided, weak, oppressed and exploited because we have accepted and come to live a vision of ourselves as fundamentally different from each other, instead of different branches of the same tree; never understanding that we are but different flowers borne by different stems from a single tree fed by roots anchored deep in the rich soil of our common Afrikan past. Amidst the continuing scramble for our resources in old and new forms, from old and new agencies, the basic task facing Afrikans has always been, and remains, the challenge to regain possession of ourselves in our own image, on our own Afrikan terms. Our history shows that we cannot compromise on this fundamental, for everything else depends upon getting this right. For if we do not know who we are, we cannot know for certain what our real interests are. And if we do not know what our real interests are, how can we defend and advance them? While others scramble for our resources, we must scramble for the repossession of that most important resource of them all: our minds. For if we do not repossess our minds we will never repossess our continent and the vilest contradictions will continue to blight our lives each day. We will continue to have the richest continent but be the poorest people; live on the second largest land mass on earth but exist in the weakest and most dismembered states, designed and implemented by our oppressors; have the distinction of organising the first civilisations but benefiting the least from our ancestors’ creations and therefore our common inheritance; possess the longest and richest history but the shortest memory, and learn little or nothing from the great lessons it offers. 16.2 Some Parameters It has been said that the answers to the challenges confronting the Afrikan people lie in our past. That is true: our afflictions are clearly rooted in our past. But it is true for...

Share