Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 14

The CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program/Project (CRJP) significantly recognizes the imperative need for the establishment of Cultural Institutions whose signal role and function in the Caribbean Community of Nations is to both instill and reinforce the Collective Memory of the Afro-Caribbean, as well as the Indigenous Caribbean, People about both aspects of the glorious and the inglorious past. “The 10-Point Reparatory Justice Program” proposal does not specifically make mention of the Billions and the Trillions of Dollars, Pounds Sterling and Deutsche Marks invested into the establishment of Jewish Holocaust Museums all over much of the Western World as a means of ensuring not only that the kind of morally unspeakable acts of barbarism and savagery wantonly unleashed against European Jewry for at least a dozen years by Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s “democratically elected” Nazi Regime in Germany, and much of Western and Central Europe, is not repeated in the foreseeable future but, even more significantly, to remind our entire global community of the indescribable capacity of humans for acts of unimaginable depravity.

Now, what makes the Diaspora African Experience (DAE), as it is sometimes called in academic circles, even more urgent, vis-a-vis the establishment of major cultural and educational institutions, both in the Western World and throughout the Caribbean Community of Nations and the African Continent as well, of course, inheres in the fact of the 400-Plus-Year-Span of the Transatlantic Trade in African Humanity and the Chattel Enslavement of the latter’s having absolutely no rival in both magnitude and the depth of depravity over the past ONE-THOUSAND YEARS!

In his literary classic titled “Two-Thousand Seasons,” the Harvard and the Columbia Universities-educated Ghanaian-born novelist, sociologist, essayist and thinker, Professor Ayi Kwei Armah, eloquently and masterfully details the apocalyptic horrors visited upon the integrity, destiny and the existence and the civilization of Indigenous Continental African People by foreign invaders, largely Arabs, and Asiatic Europeans and Proto-Europeans, to be certain, for at least Two Millennia and, especially, how this prolonged period of total destruction is primarily to blame for the present sorry state in which Africans, both in the putative Primeval Continent and in the Diaspora, find themselves.

As well, as already briefly referenced and highlighted elsewhere in this very series of commentaries or monological conversations on the Global African Reparations Movement (GARM), the late Guyanese-born historian, scholar and thinker, Professor Walter Rodney, in his cognitively path-paving historiographical epic titled “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” equally eloquently documents in a more characteristically scientific and objective manner the indelibly deleterious impact of wantonly predatory European governments and people on the lives and the existence of Indigenous Africans over the past half millennium.

And then, of course, there is also the seminal work of the immortalized Senegalese polymathic scholar-scientist, namely, Professor Chiekh Anta Diop, titled “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality,” which offers compelling forensic evidence vis-a-vis the Indigenous African Creation of the Cultures and the Civilizations of Ancient Egypt, which for quite a temporally while was deliberately and falsely and criminally attributed to Non-African People, primarily Europeans, with absolutely no forensically significant evidentiary proof to back up such whole cloths of fabrications, as it were. And then, there is the even more significant, comprehensive and authoritative Diopian magnum opus titled “Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology,” which is actually a massive compendium that brings together the totality of the life’s work of Professor Diop on the unignorable primacy of the nonesuch or the rarefied Genius of Indigenous Continental Africans in Global History and Civilization.

Pursuant to the foregoing, it is the critical and the forensically unarguable contention of the authors and the leadership of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Commission that the crux of the present global marginalization and the near-total disregard of the proverbial African Personality has been largely due to the deliberate and the perennially systematic erasure of the seminal and the phenomenal achievements of the African People, the salutary and the progressive restoration of which could be best and most effectively rectified through a broadcast combination of education and the revival and the comprehensive reconstruction of our social institutions.

The latter process may be aptly designated as “The Axis of Empowerment,” because it is the preceding elements of modern, civilized society that constitute the soul and the engine of what essentially or fundamentally differentiates the Human Organism from the rest of the denizens of the proverbial Animal Kingdom. Now, the most obviously important takeaway here can be tersely summed up in terms of “Cultural Codification” and the continuous evolution of a stable and a relatively well-anchored bank of shared values and intellectual and ideological reference points or topos. But, of course, the clarion call for Reparatory Justice is also about the critical rehabilitation of the psychical integrity of both the individual and the greater society at large.

Which is precisely why it almost comes as perfectly logical that our present discourse on the imperative need for the establishment of cultural institutions should also be immediately followed by a serious discussion on the public health crisis that was the one most cancerous handicap of the erstwhile chattel enslaved and the psychologically colonized and the deliberately, systematically and clinically self-alienated.

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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