Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 12

As already discussed in the previous segment of our series, the idea of “Repatriation” of Diaspora/Diasporan Africans, short of a voluntary decision and choice by those individually or personally resourceful or well-heeled enough to undertake such a quite humongous venture - because, trust me, Dear Reader, a “Veritable Venture” is really what such “Wild-Goose-Chase” is and may arguably or unarguably be envisaged to be. We have already pointed to the not-so-glorious and “romantically dystopian” examples of the Democratic Republics of Sierra Leone and Liberia. What with the still-raging interethnic tensions, rivalries and the raw mutuality of crossethnic and crosscultural resentment between the so-called Uppity Americo-Liberians and their “Indigenous” Continental African hosts and long-separated kinsfolk?

In sum, it is apt to take several more generations and centuries before the existentially cloudy dust of uneasy truces and the necessary adjustments could be adequately and effectively deemed to have become a relic of the past or bygones days or eras, whichever may be the relevant phraseology or terminology. Of course, it also goes without saying that the preceding observation is all a critical and an integral part of the inevitable consequences of the stark reality of the grossly misguided yesteryear’s bizarre and strategically suicidal decisions collaboratively, albeit unequally, struck between some vision-bererft Continental African Leaders of the aforesaid bygone eras and their predatory and genocidal would-be chattel enslavers of Continental African Humanity.

But that this most unfortunate and heavily lopsided agreement and/or arrangement or Faustian Compact had found the Continental African Participants at the proverbial short-end of the stick or equation is a practical fact of existential reality that has already been extensively reckoned with and, therefore, may not need to be further reprised or needlessly rehashed here once more. On an individual and/or personal level, however, it absolutely and definitely bears underscoring the fact that post-slavo-colonial repatriation of Africans in the Diaspora has been going on unceasingly, if not uninterruptedly, for generations now; and not only to such post-slavery or post-emancipation Anglo-American countries as Sierra Leone and Liberia but, in fact, all across the West African Littoral and elsewhere all over and across the African Continent.

Rather, the much better and more politically progressive and strategically meaningful approach is the one that was recently taken or adopted by the Corporate Leadership of the African Union (AU), formerly called the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which came in the form of the historically long-overdue Recognition and Declaration of the CARICOM countries as being constitutive of Africa’s 5th Region, which wisely and strategically takes a practically progressive and constructive cognizance of the fact that the involuntary creation of the African Diaspora and the corollary expansion of the geographical and the geopolitical space of Continental African Occupancy and the Geopolitical Spatial Expansion, as well, has come to mean that the sort of 19th-Century conceived or individually hatched gameplan by European and European-American Post-Slavery Aristocratic Robber Barons to cavalierly dump or despicably and reprehensibly offload their thoroughly dehumanized and wantonly exploited former chattel-enslaved African Human Automatons and then proceed with business-as-usual, as if absolutely nothing had gone amiss or awry in the recent past, is decidedly a morally and a patently untenable political proposition and a flagrant mode of existential justice among the Global Community of Humanity.

In short, just like what presently prevails hereabouts in the United States of America, the longtime and the longstanding presence and existence of Africans in the Caribbean and some significant parts of Latin America, automatically qualify the African-descended species of humanity settled and/or established in these aforementioned territories the bona fide residents and citizens of these territories, presently designated and legitimately recognized as Modern Nation States and Independent Sovereign Polities even under the veritably Quasi-Colonial Territories of a suavely but not in the least bit strategically foresightedly redesigned outpost of moribund British Empire.

Yes, the British Empire Never Really Died; It Only Strategically Morphed Like the Fabled Mythological Phoenix with the fast-changing Temper of Times, Shakespearean parlance. That is the practical and the existential reality with which Global Africans have to contend presently, out of whose indescribably acidic and utterly bitter lemons we are obligated to press and bottle our own custom-fashioned brand of Vintage Lemonade, as African Americans wont to say. In other words, we need to quickly, critically and effectively move away from the bad, old ways of doing things and creatively harness the depthless and the unfathomable expanse of the latest and the most advanced of AI-Technology, in much the same way that the Leadership of the Democratic Islamic Revolutionary Republic of Iran has recently salutarily and salubriously tutored the rest of the Non-Aryan World. Even partially quitting must not be an option.

Rather, we need to roast the full and the whole hog, if we are to zestfully enjoy the maximum sheaves from this harvest of our own sweat and blood. And like the seismically triumphant Ayatollahs of the Holy Cities of Mashhad and Qom, let no barbarian and morally uncircumcised Philistines tell us what we can own, eat and wear or store in our closets and arsenals for maximum protection and spiritual self-defense. You see, in the Postindustrial World of AI- and Cyber-Technology, as well as Virtual Reality, geographical space is no longer a barrier to socioeconomic development and technological advancement. All that primarily and uniquely matters is a unity of purpose and achievement. And on the latter count, no nation or single species of humanity has a monopoly.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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