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.