PART 1
FOR THE PEOPLE - FREE YOUR MIND - RETURN TO THE SOURCE:
AFRICAN ORIGINS OF CIVILISATION
Who is this Negro, who is this African. This is the question that will be explored in this thirteen (13) part series, in which we will see what role archaeologists, anthropologists and the general intellectual community played in the attempt to destroy the African image. We will also see how various media - newspapers, movies, television and radio were used to try to create a new personality - The Negro.We will examine what happened to the white mind in its attempt to rearrange reality and history to suit the political, economic and psychological needs of the time. Most of us have heard the term Pharaoh, but how many of us would know one if we saw one. In this series, we will show you Egyptian pharaohs and Egyptian Kings that Hollywood would never let you see. This series is appropriately titled "Free your mind, Return to the Source: African Origins of civilisation".
"What does it mean to be Black from a psycho-historical perspective?"
You have to realise that slavery had two components, one was the physical component and the other was mental. The physical slavery always had to be backed up with mental slavery, and mental slavery was achieved by the slave masters by deliberately calculating to do several things;
- One was, destroy the memory of the people to be enslaved or else physical slavery would not stick.
- The other was to destroy the sense of group identity or else unity was possible and slavery would be more difficult to achieve.
- Another was to destroy the ability of people to practise their cultural forms, because cultural forms, when practised together, are another way of producing identity, and this produces unity, which produces resistance.
- Another is to control the socialization process; the process of education, control the media, control religion, control education, so that the input into the slave brain would be determined by that slave master.
- Another is to control resources, monetary resources, fiscal resources, because with resources you could correct all these other deficiencies.
- Another factor was segregation.
These are specific rules that are typical of all systems of oppression, and you will notice that the first three rules mentioned are basically psychological, that the business of memory, identity, and cultural practices are tied to psychological processes.
When you say memory, are you just talking about personal memory?
I am talking about group history. If a person loses their memory you would call them amnesiac, an amnesiac has problems in negotiating the culture, and so it is with a people. When a people lose its memory, it would have the same type of difficulties that an amnesiac has which is a mental process. Those controlling processes by masters over slaves have psychological components, in other words, the result, the outcome of doing all of that to a slave and also to a master is what can be termed a set of psycho-dynamics of oppression. This means that you begin to see perceptual distortion which is a psychological process; you begin to see denial of reality which is a psychological process when someone sees the truth but won’t accept the fact that it’s there. That’s a psychological, neurotic symptom, the projection of blame or blaming the victim for things that are perpetrated by the aggressor. Delusions of grandeur - that means the projection of oneself as a superior, the superman, the white supremacists - those would be delusions of grandeur, because people are not superior but they feel superior, so that’s a delusion, and fear of differences or phobia for differences. Those are psychological components of a system of oppression, so to answer the question regarding how psychology and history fuse together to help explain human experience, that would be an example, in fact, it is impossible to explain human experience merely on a historical basis, you must be attentive to the psychological aspects of it as well.
How successful were Euro-Americans in creating the kind of Black person, the kind of African that they wanted?
They were very successful in distorting the experiences and images, and to a large extent in changing the way African people acted. They were not completely successful in uprooting the ‘African-ness’ from African people, because a large part of the African behaviour of African people remains. Many African-Americans act very African, for example, in the traditional churches when you see the songs and dance movement in church, that's very African but most of us don’t think of it as African, we think of it as African-American or Black or Negro or coloured, but in fact we exhibit African behaviours but are not able to recognize what used to be African. So the behaviours themselves were not completely destroyed but were disrupted and severely distorted so that you do not see a one for one comparison between what used to be African cultural forms and what now are African-American cultural forms.
Do you think that Black people realize the extent to which we have been de-Africanized?
There is a saying by some psychologists who are into behaviour modification that through a system of rewards and punishment, you control the learning that people or animals do, mostly animals, but they also say that if a person knows that someone is trying to control their behaviour through the behaviour modification process, then it doesn’t work as well. In effect, what has happened to most African-Americans is that we have really not been conscious of the deliberate and calculated ways that people have engaged in so as to control some of these processes. The majority of us are really oblivious to the de-Africanization process and not only oblivious to it but participate in it, assist it, help it along by identifying with the aggressor, where the person on the bottom begins to identify with the person on the top and starts to imitate their behaviour. So here you have many people who are very African but who will participate in a de-Africanization process because they believe that this is the right thing they should be doing, because they are imitating people who are doing those things.
This brings to mind the concept of the cross over music where Black performers, in order to get a bigger share of the white market seem to cross over, that is, to sound less Black, but it’s not the other way around, you don’t hear about a lot of whites crossing over to play Black music?
They will play Black music, but they attempt to rename it or re-define it so that ultimately it becomes white music. For example, Elvis Presley was trained by Black people and that’s how he became one of the number one musical heroes in America - singing Black music, and a lot of other musicians like the Beatles will tell you that they did the same thing also. That’s only one of the ways that Africans get de-Africanized, in other words, by changing your audience when your own people are not the important audience (for money in this case), if the music that was invented to speak to your own people in the church, in the night clubs and so forth sounds good to other people, they will pay for it, and being a bigger audience very soon you are not playing to your own people anymore, and if you watch that music over a period of time, it loses its life.
The same thing happens technically. For example, if you watch how Africans produce music, it is not done by writing it down on paper, neither is it produced separately with the saxophonist going off by himself someplace to practice all day. It is usually a very important group phenomenon, because the audience is a very important part of the performance which has to be there to spur the musicians on.
The technical way that music is produced now is by isolating the performer from the audience, but more than that, the musicians are isolated from each other. One would be put in a booth with earphones on for example, so that now you have no audience once you record in a studio. Therefore the things that musicians were using to create the music cannot be used anymore, and if they continue like that over a long period of time, that would also lose its life. You find that Black or white musicians that do the cross over music and are producing it in this format will ultimately have to go back to the roots when they need life. They either have to go back to The Rastafarians in Jamaica who don’t do it that way, or they have to go back to the Black church for inspiration, or even in the poverty stricken ghettos, because there is where the creativity is.
"Free your mind, Return to the Source, African Origins of civilization". All three parts of this title are important - Free your Mind because of the psycho-historical factors that are based on the assumption that Black and white minds are not free, that we are victims of prepared information which is often totally false, especially with respect to Black people.
Return to the Source has a double meaning. Firstly, in order to correct the picture that has been presented about African-Americans, Africans and Black people in general, it is necessary to go to original source material to get the primary source data wherever possible. The second meaning is for African people - Black people - to return to their roots, as it is necessary to explore the smallest dimension of their rooted-ness in order to have a place to stand, and to participate as an equal in the world.
"African Origins" refer to the fact that primary human existence and civilization began on the African continent. This is an important factor that we need to use in attempting to correct the distorted picture of African people, and this will be illustrated using both pictures and words.
The Defamation of African People:
Most of what will be shown is correct information, but first it will be necessary to illustrate something that was referred to earlier, which is “do we realize what is being done to us?” We do in fact realize it little by little but not in its totality, so what will be demonstrated initially is just a sample of the fact that there has been an intentional, systematic, sophisticated, sustained, pervasive attempt to destroy the image of the African and African-American people. All of those words are important, but that is not what we understand. We understand much of this to be incidental, accidental and occasional when in fact it is systemic.For example, take a look at the underlined section of this clip from the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1910, keeping in mind that these are actually the scholars speaking about the images relating to Africans and Black people. It states that mentally, the Negro is inferior to the white.
It goes on to suggest that as children, Negroes were bright and intelligent, but as they became adults, gradually a change set in and lethargy became typical of Black people. As they got older therefore, Black people and white people were biologically different. 
This is what you pick up, not in the encyclopaedia that you buy at the supermarket for $1.00 a volume, but in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which is the “Mercedes” of encyclopaedias, and sanctioned by the academic establishment.
But this is only the beginning, if you were to take the political posters that were being utilized during the time of the freeing of the slaves that ridiculed and undermined the sympathy and empathy which people had for supporting freed slaves, this would be an example. Notice how the caricature of the Black male is prominent.
On the left side of this poster there is a little white man who is struggling, chopping wood, with the image being projected that he has to support this Black male.
This is interesting because at the present time if you were to ask the question “who was really working and who was doing the sitting down,” the reverse was true. That is perceptual distortion and denial of reality.
Here is another example of the political posters that were developed at the time when Abraham Lincoln was re-elected.
There was an attempt to frighten people with the fear of rampant miscegenation, and if you look at the picture closely you will notice that the Black male is always being “caricatured,” a common highlight back then.
This is always important when one group of people wants to dominate another in order to destroy what they perceive to be the source of power in that group.
In the white mind, physical power resided in the Black male. So you will see over and over, attempts being made to weaken the image of the Black male and undermine any sense of efficacy in the Black male.That was also the most typical cliché in old Hollywood movies and on television. Even up until 1986 you continually saw it if you knew what to look for.
Here is an example from the daily newspapers, The Atlanta Constitution of 1915. Note that we were in the encyclopaedia, political posters and now the daily newspaper. On the left side you will see an advertisement for the movie Birth of a Nation. This was one of the most popular films in America and was even upheld as a great movie. It won an award as one of the most technically excellent movies that was ever developed.
However, one of the things that caused the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) to come into existence fighting, were the manipulations of the Black image through such things as this movie Birth of a Nation (1915). They organised national boycotts of this particular film to have it banned but it was still highly successful at the box office.
What does that say about how Black people in America should see white heroes and heroines, because here you have a situation where the country at large is just lauding such a movie?
What you see the country doing, since it is predominately white, is projecting positive images of itself and it should be understood in that way. The Rambo image for example was a total fabrication because that was not the way the heroic Vietnam veterans were, and they themselves have said so. So you would find Hollywood always upgrading and romanticizing the image of the white male in particular.
By the way, the movie Birth of a Nation was based on a novel by Ivan Dixon called The Klansman which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and talks about how it rescued the south from all these freed slaves that were beginning to destroy what had been and what had gone with the wind.
The fascination people also had with the movie Gone with the Wind was interesting, as with other movies like Out of Africa which was another Gone with the Wind type movies in which the white settlers looked back and talked about how good it used to be in Africa before Africans took over their own country.
In the case of Gone with the Wind, they were talking about how good it was before the slaves were freed. So this movie then helped the south to re-conceive of its images in ways that were positive, especially the role played by the Klan.
So what is the current appreciation for this movie about what some white Americans have learnt?
It feeds a subliminal need to identify with some of those values that are projected in those films, in other words, most people, if you discuss it openly, will say that they admire the technical work done in the film since it was never done before, but not its content Yet it is interesting that in the presentation of the film there was no attack on its content which was racist to the core. It therefore clearly suggests that they may have been interested in the content as well.
If you look on the right side of that same daily newspaper there was an advertisement for membership in the Ku Klux Klan which was the kind of thing that was being promoted.
So from the encyclopaedia, the newspapers and posters we go to the film industry where you will see actors like Stephen Fetchit here.
What is being highlighted is that thousands of images projecting a weak Black male juxtaposed to the image of the strong white male was widespread if you took the time to look and identify them. But you cannot have that taking place over a period of years without it having some sort of an impact on the minds of all viewers regardless of their racial or ethnic background.
Here is the same thing again, that cliché, the stereotype of the weak or negative image of a Black male and the positive image of a white male juxtaposed to each other.
Here it is again. Notice the cool Robert Redford type hero on the left, and sitting right next to him is this frightened and horrified Black male, with pop eyes and all.
© John Moore - Barbados, W.I. (May 2005) ©. All rights reserved
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