Dark ages of Africa

Sailing out

as far as the wind could take them,

European fleets

would venture into the seas.

Some say out of curiosity.

For the purpose

of discovery and exploration.

Soon,

explorers turned out to be conquerors

and discoverers looters

stealing everything of value

to their eyes

and extinguishing entire civilizations.

Our African ancestors

were taken hostage,

loaded on ships

and carried all the way to the other side

of the Atlantic Ocean.

On this map here,

I don’t know if you guys

can see the red dots.

That’s over the years,

the number of ships leaving here,

young people just like you,

hunted like prey stolen by day,

stripped away

in what is probably the longest forced

migration in human history.

The trans-Atlantic towards the West,

and the arabic slave trade towards

the East had a profound impact

on the continent.

Only the strong ones would survive

the cruel conditions of transport.

This created a guarantee to the buyer,

if a slave had survived the voyage,

he would most probably survive

the inhumane working conditions.

Involuntary artificial selection

practiced on humans on a large scale.

Over time,

slavery weakened our kingdoms,

societal structure started to tumble.

And later

it made it easy for European colonizers

to invade the land and subdue

most of the continent.

They would never have been able

to colonize this continent

if we had not been weakened by slavery.

Once Britain had lost

its American colonies,

Africa’s inexhaustible,

free labor force was not needed anymore.

Pushing a pro abolitionist

agenda was an excellent way

to undermine the newly independent

American nations.

With the advent of the industrial

revolution.

Slavery became irrelevant.

This was a new paradigm driven

by technologies such as the steam engine.

Another machine

first conceptualised in Alexandria.

Coal was now the new driving force of energy.

As the European powers

shifted from agricultural

to industrial economies.

Africa had tremendous resources to plunder,

in the form of rubber for the tires

and oil to grease the engines

of the new machines.

During the height of the colonial era,

what happened in Africa

was as exploitative and inhumane

as the transatlantic slave trade.

The Manden Charter

pre-dated the Atlantic slave trade

and the Berlin Conference.

Sadly, it was unable to protect us

and avoid the tragic

exploitation of Africa.

The infamous Berlin Conference

would decide about the fate of Africa.

?

Africa was sliced like a cake, with no regard

for its people

and societal structures.

New border lines were drawn

and the majority of the continent

was divided under the European nations.

These borders drove wedges

between civilisations

living peacefully since the dawn

of humanity and forced

others with major cultural

and linguistic differences to live under

a common white ruler who had everything

to gain from their divisiveness.

The coloniser was on what

they called a civilisational mission.

But the horrific methods they used,

revealed their own lack of civility.

When your history is hidden

under a veil of racial conflicts,

nameless entries in old

slave ship logbooks,

you carry a heavy heritage

full of secrecy and darkness.

I do believe that it should

all be brought back to light.

But what will I see under that light?

There is some kind of amnesia

in my family, in many families actually,

hundreds of years ago,

they made us forget.

And, according to Bantu culture,

our ancestors ceased to exist.

Today, I decided to take this DNA test

so that I can start

talking about them again.

Essentially, I can revive them.

I owe it to those

who came before me

to shine a light on my family tree.

To go down its trunk and unearth,

my roots.

Because to know where you’re going,

look first at where you come from.