Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 11

Regrettably, among the 10 Points of the CARICOM’s Reparatory Justice Program (CRJP), the least practically realizable and/or achievable is that which deals with the possibility of the “Repatriation” opportunities for all Diaspora African descendants of former Chattel-Enslaved Continental Africans desirous of being returned or repatriated to the various societies, nations and communities from which they were forcibly uprooted and savagely and brutishly transplanted into the present-day Americas. This project or program is practically unfathomable and unrealizable for an uncountable number of reasons, which we intend to systematically and meticulously explain in the following paragraphs and throughout this series of articles.

Among the Akan People of Modern-Day Ghana, we have a saying that closely approximates the age-old English or, perhaps, universal dictum that: “One Cannot Step Into The Same River Twice.” The gist of it all is that time and tide are constantly in flux or interminably fluxional. Put neatly and briefly in the jaded, old cliche, “Change Is The One And The Only Thing Constant In Life.” The Akan have an even more powerful way of putting the foregoing maxim, which runs as follows: “Yekoko Yen Anim, Ennye Yen Akyi”; which roughly translates as: “We Fight Forward, Not Backward.”

In sum, the complexity that the practical realization of the demand for the repatriation of all Afro-Caribbean nationals and citizens desirous of being returned or repatriated back to their putative Motherland has first and foremost to do with the already adumbrated fact that over the course of the last half-millennium, or 400-500 years, the locations and the societies from which these descendants of the former chattel-enslaved Africans were forcibly and radically uprooted and stripped, literally, butt-naked and spoon-fashion, from the so-called Gulf of Guinea, for most of us, across the Atlantic Ocean, both North and South, have not remained frozen in time and space, just as surefire certain as the societies and the environments in which the criminally captured and subsequently bestially and brutally chattel-enslaved indigenous Africans were resettled. To be equally certain, an undeterminable number of these hitherto stable and relatively flourishing societies and communities both immediately prior to the genocidally cataclysmic onslaught that came to singularly or uniquely define the daily lives and the existence of Indigenous Continental Africans, in particular West Africans, and shortly thereafter was literally and effectively destroyed over the course of the aforesaid half-millennial duration of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which, as extensively detailed by a countless number of authoritative historical narratives in the preceding segments of this series and well beyond.

Now, what the foregoing observation means is that the very communities and societies to which some of our cousins and kinsfolk from the CARICOM group of nations may avidly desire to be returned to may no longer exist and may have, in fact, not existed for quite a great expanse of time. In short, we may still look or appear strikingly alike or phenotypically and even genetically indistinguishable from one another in nearly all respects, but the unignorable fact still remains that our mindsets and cultural habits have been operating pretty independently for at least two to three centuries, during which existentially traumatic period we have evolved divergently in significant ways and manners than our natural sense of emotional and moral idealism might permit us to think and believe.

And then, of course, we need to factor into the equation, as it were, the fact that the foregoing processes or processes have not occurred in a complete or total vacuum. And then, of course, it also goes without saying that this process of evolutionary change has occurred fairly equally on both sides of the Atlantic, as the perennially destabilization of the West African Subregion during the entire period of the Transatlantic European Slave Trade in African Humanity had been as equally turbulent and traumatic as the totality of the experiences of those of our brothers and sisters nightmarishly ferried across the Atlantic into the decidedly unknown and uncertain and unspeakably excruciating.

Both sides have also radically and traumatically mixed up and interacted with other discretely and divergently evolved people and vice-versa but, of course to a relatively much lesser degree in the Homeland, as it were. And in this process of the radical resetting of the clock of our National Evolution, we have developed even far more complex and significantly nuanced identities than had been the case before under a more stable evolutionary regime. But what both sides of this most significant and unignorable Dialogue of Reconciliation, Reunification and Reintegration on both the Continental African and the CARICOM sides, as neatly opposed and/or differentiated from the erstwhile Euro-Slavocratic Community of Nations, has also much to do with the logistics of the magnitude of “rehabilitative”capital investment required to effectively achieve this most massive and multifaceted project of mental and psychological and emotional self-rebirth.

In short, much more massive work of capital investment needs to be acquired and made readily available before even the most basic aspects of this admittedly salutary and indispensable existential project can be remarkably undertaken. There is absolutely no room for the sort of ideologically naive and amateurish blindness that have been dogging our leaders and intelligentsias across both Atlantic Divides for at least two or three generations presently. The incontrovertible fact of the matter is that there are absolutely no winners here, a fact that, thankfully, both sides of the Transatlantic Holocaust fully recognize, thus the present most progressive decision to collaboratively attack and definitively resolve this seemingly intractable and nightmarish dilemma.

As the South African Human Rights Activist and Genius Thinker, Stephen “Steve” Biko once poignantly observed: The very first and most significant and cognitively most progressive step towards a successful liberation struggle is for Global Africans to come to a sobering realization that: “We Are An Unarguably And An Unspeakably Defeated And An Undeservedly Humiliated People,” and then we will also come to the equally sobering realization as Americans - I suppose African Americans - are wont to say, that “Our Work Has Been Cut Out for Us.’

In the latter instance, there is absolutely no need and chance of literally jumping or fleeing from the proverbial skillet or frying pan into the white-hot fire. We have already bitterly witnessed what the acidic fruits of what another grossly misguided “Repatriation” or “Back to Africa” Exodus, undertaken hastily and desperately, could look like. We already have the indelible examples of Sierra Leone and Liberia as our guide, so we need not facilely and cavalierly revisit the realm of the disconsolately dejected among the catastrophically displaced. Which is also not to naively and/or quixotically deny the fact that even in the best of worlds and times, displacement as a veritable ingredient of Natural Disasters may be inevitable, even if such deliberately engineered or strategically manufactured disasters of the kind of the densely primitive MAGA breed blindly predicated on sheer greed and wanton acquisitiveness that unarguably inspired the Transatlantic European Slave Trade in Continental African Humanity were to be reprised in our age and time.

At least we can make the maximum best of our Transatlantic Holocaust of Displacement by owning the CARICOM lands and territories into which our ancestors and their latter-day descendants were forcibly pushed, wantonly abused and genocidally exploited. In short, as a people perennially besieged and unspeakably denied the fundamental rights of global humanity, we have uncontestably earned our keep; and like the Ayatollahs of Modern Persia, we are obligated to put our genocidal detractors faraway into the Deep, Blue where they belong with the Obama-slain and castrated Osama-Bin-Lade in perpetuity.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]