by Sheila S. Walker, Ph.D., Director
African and African American Studies Center
University of Texas at Austin"Africa is like Osiris. It has been torn into pieces and scattered over the earth. It is our responsibility to put it back together again," said Joseph Ky-Zervo, internationally known historian from Burkina Faso.
Osiris, the King of Eternity and the Ruler of Everlastingness, had been a beneficent ruler of ancient Egypt. He became one of the most important Egyptian gods, bringing under his influence other deities. One of them, the evil Seth, wished to remove Osiris and seize his kingdom. Seth lured Osiris to lie in a beautifully carved chest, which he sealed and sent floating over the seas. The goddess Isis, Osiris' consort, located the chest and brought it back to Egypt. Seth, finding it, then tore Osiris' body to pieces and scattered it over the land. Isis found each of Osiris' scattered remains, and buried them in the places where she found them. Soon afterwards, with the aid of Isis' magical powers, Osiris returned from the Other World to encourage his son Horus to avenge him. The dying and reviving of Osiris were manifest in nature by the annual ebbing and flooding of the Nile River that fertilized the valley that was the center of one of the world's most important classical civilization.
The god Osiris is an appropriate symbol for the African continent, the mother of human civilization whose children were tom from it and scattered across the seas by the European slave trade, and whose body was cut into pieces by European colonization. The Osiris legend also remains a revelatory analogy for the present day nations of Africa, still divided by the results of European conquest, as well as for us, descendants of Africa in the Americas, who have been taught to be ignorant of our historical and cultural links with Africa and with other people of African origin in the world.
It is now our collective responsibility, especially for those of us in the United States who have so many advantages, to, like Isis remember Osiris/Africa both literally and figuratively to put the pieces of ourselves back together, and to help resurrect the continent in the image of its past glory by reclaiming our history for the sake of our present and future. It is our responsibility to work to reassemble the children of Africa for the redemption of the continent for both Africans and African Americans.
It is time for us to become the subjects of our own history rather than the objects of someone else's history as we inevitably have been when others have told our story as a footnote to theirs, in their own way and for their own purposes. It is time for us to center ourselves in our own self definition rather than allowing ourselves to be defined by others whose self interest is different from, and often diametrically opposed to our own. And we must choose to define ourselves within a global context rather than only within the narrow confines of our scattered nationalities.
Doing so requires neither imagination nor myth making, as our detractors would contend. It only requires an accurate knowledge of our history, and an awareness of the natural ties we maintain, in spite of efforts to destroy them and whether we choose to be conscious of them or not with Africa and with other people of African descent. We need to be aware of our history as a people whose ancestors contributed to the creation of world civilization, and who, like other people, have suffered the vicissitudes of conquering and being conquered. After having been torn apart and scattered like Osiris, we are now in a position to turn that temporary defeat into an advantage as we assume the inherently international role that scattering across the earth has given us.
A major issue here is one of self definition' W.E.B. DuBois characterized the twentieth century as the century of the color line. It certainly has been that for African Americans. When the twentieth century began, African American were only two generations from slavery, during which time we were defined as property rather than as human beings. We had to struggle to become first human beings, then citizens of the country to the development of which we had so significantly contributed. Once citizens, we had to fight to be accorded the civil rights and the freedom to participate fully in all institutions of the society that we insisted applied to all Americans. Although we still suffer from problems that are a logical result of a history of oppression, and although we still have to fight against those who would like to turn back the clock of history, we have obviously made great stride. We have proven our ability to not only participate in, but also to become outstanding leaders in many areas of American society.
It would, however, be retrogressive to go into the twenty first century with a twentieth Century worldview, concerned only with being citizens of the United States. And it would be dysfunctional for us to continue seeing ourselves as only an American "minority" that is not a part of the "mainstream." In doing so we would be continuing to be defined by others and to define ourselves with respect to others, rather than with respect to our reality. For the twenty first century we must be concerned with defining ourselves in the most global manner possible in keeping with the current trends of world civilization. We must assume the logical place to which our own, not someone else's history clearly leads us as citizens of the planet.
It was strategic for our predecessors at the end of the nineteenth century to de-emphasize the links with Africa with which they had previously identified in order to assert their right to the full benefits of being Americans, to assert their right to benefit from all they and the generations that had gone before them had worked to build for the benefit of others. That battle having essentially been won, we no longer need to try to deny or submerge a major part of our identity. Nor, however, should we resort to simplistic, superficial, and merely symbolic maneuvers to assert a romantic identification with a mythic Africa.
The Sankofa, a Senufo symbol from Cote d'Ivoire of a bird looking backwards, has caught the imagination of a number of African American groups interested in our African heritage. The meaning of the Sankofa is "looking back to go forward," of understanding that the ancestors can show the way to the future. That symbol is relevant to both Africans and African Americans today, in that it is useful for us to look back to our history as a basis for creating the kind of unity we need to go forward with knowledge and strength into the future.
In being defined in the United States as slaves, as property, African Americans were characterized as having no history and no culture, as having begun our existence with enslavement in the Americas. To transform us from African people into American slaves", all efforts were made to deprive us of the history and culture we, like all human beings, had, and to make us believe we had neither. In many cases this effort to make us believe an impossibility worked because Of the powerfulness of the system, and because of the few resources for resistance and alternative knowledge on the part of most African Americans.
Nor has the trend to deny the reality and validity of our African heritage ceased in the 1990's. This is true in spite of the ironic fact that African American culture has contributed so many unacknowledged elements to the culture of the American "mainstream" of which we are allegedly not a part. The trend to deny and distort our African heritage continues in the most insidious way in the compulsorily educational system designed to train the next generation of Americans. This system continues to compulsorily miseducate African American children to believe they have no African heritage of which they can be proud, and to miseducate EuroAmerican children with a false sense of superiority based on the faulty moral premise that "might makes right."
African Americans have been taught by those who would control us to ignore and deny our African past as a way of isolating us conceptually from the larger historical and current world linkages that have determined our destiny, and to which we have always been important contributors. We now have a choice of continuing to accept this distorted and imposed identity, and of accepting the limiting definition of thirty-five million people, and population larger than many sovereign nations, as merely an "American minority". Or we can, by looking back at the totality of our history, accept the responsibility of defining ourselves in relationship to that totality and of acknowledging our rightful role in the Global Village that has already become a conceptual cliché.
African is the most culturally diverse of the world's continents. Hence, there is no assumption here of any kind of mythical African unity. On the contrary, Africa's richness and the creativity it has contributed to world civilization reside in this very diversity. The assertion that we need to overcome the barriers that divide us makes no assumption of any need for impoverishingly narrow self-definitions. On the contrary, diversity can be used as an advantage rather than as a disadvantage. The plethora of African American organizations that are working in a variety of social, cultural, economic, and political ways for the advancement of us as a people is a wealth like that of the diversity of the African continent.
Myopic allegiances based on an exclusive commitment to smaller group goals however, which obscure the larger vision of the common good, are clearly misguided. Ethnic disputes in Africa were exploited and exacerbated by European conquerors in both the enslavement and the colonization processes. And social, cultural, political, and economic divisions within the African American community continue to be exacerbated and exploited by others to divided us and to obscure our common interest. Then, of course, there are the forces that insist that Africans and African Americans have no basis for common action. Such divisions serve the interests of those who would define our place in the world as narrowly as possible, who would keep us contained in this place they define for us, and who would try to prevent us from exercising our full potential for the future.
There is no reason for us to accept a self-definition designed by others to impoverish us, that defines us as not only less than we are, but even more importantly, that aims to limit us to becoming much less than we have the potential to be. It is important for us to take seriously the designation of ourselves as African Americans because the laws of the land in which we live have historically defined our African ancestors as the only significant determiners of our social and civil identity.
It was because of our African ancestors, not any of those of other origins, acknowledged or not, that we have been defined as second class citizens in the land built by the labor of our foreparents. That is the reality of the social construction of U.S. society, and it has informed the reality of African American life. It is also this definition that has led to our unity as a people, and that provides the basis for our valid reassertion of our links with the larger African world. This reality has also given us the advantage of having not only a pluralistic cultural reference, but also the potential for an international self-definition that makes sense in the world as it is reconfiguring it self for the new millennium.
Hence, for African Americans to collaborate in creating a "constituency of Africa," is in no way an act of self-sacrificing altruism. It is rather an accurate expression of our historical and cultural reality. We are now in a position to define this reality, as we were not in the past. We have fought to be in this position, and it is our responsibility to accept the task of doing so with seriousness.
To be part of a constituency for Africa is to be part of an assertion of our own identity as African Americans, of an assertion of our right and desire to re-appropriate our own history and culture, and by acknowledging our past and present in the world to determine our place in it's future. We have the choice of choosing to go into the future as merely an oppressed minority in the United States; Or we can look back to go forward and see our natural ties with Africa as the basis of our unity as part of a human group that transcends nationality in the interest of a large global identity