Re-story-ation
“Re-story-ation means to return to our stories to the land and to remember how to hear the stories the land tells.” - Prof. Robin Wall Kimmerer , Indigenous Botanist.
As Africans and people of the global diaspora, we often limit our perspective of 'slavery' to the physical aspects of human trafficking. The commodification, ownership and trade of our collective ancestors. Often underestimating the broader scope and pervasive breadth of ongoing colonial capture. The truth is the many arms of coloniality a term, which refers to the matrix of systems, manufactured by agents of imperialism also intentionally ensnared and shackled the minds and consciousness’s of the peoples that were left behind on the continent.
The European settlers over four centuries carved and divided up the land, stationed political dignitaries, missionaries and their armies to subvert and indoctrinate the minds of those they systematically controlled on native soil. They took great lengths to erase, bury, demonise, delegitimise and destroy our cultural systems and ideologies. Including our cultural traditions, our sciences, spirituality, philosophies, belief systems and our models for learning and living. Replacing them with Eurocentric, religious dogmas, hierarchal, patriarchal and supremacist models for living and navigating life.
There was and still is a pervasive effort to delegitimise and suppress the knowledge systems of peoples of the global south particularly that of the African consciousness.
Manufacturing an intentional cultural amnesia is a core component of the colonial playbook, as a predatory tool and mechanism for accelerating western assimilation and ideological conversion. The purpose of which maintains and fortifies their hierarchy of supremacy.
African American psychologist Bobby Write coined a process called ‘Mentacide’ which refers specifically to the intentional suppression of African thought. He stated that "Mentacide was developed to combat the rising level of consciousness and Black nationalism which threaten the process of European world domination." - 1984
A deliberate strategy of the colonial matrix of power is to sever BIPOC from their history, cultural knowledge and intergenerational memory as a strategy for weakening our resistance. We have witnessed first hand over the last 14 months the targeted obliteration of schools, libraries, museums and universities in Gaza.
Colonial powers maintain their dominance by attempting to cripple our consciousness. This process continues through the continued erasure of our narratives and histories, through domination of media, creating a western hegemony via education/academia and policy. We’ve witnessed this historically with the forced assimilation of Indigenous people through conversion schools in Canada, more recently the book bans of African American writers and educators in the USA as well as the historic war on drugs and the current criminalisation of indigenous plant medicines through the West.
For you way-showers reading this, we are the guides for the next generation and as such we have an ethical duty to support cultural memory restoration is to heal and repair the atrocities committed in colonial times through the use of suppression, erasure, indoctrination and assimilation by those who colonised our lands. It is our responsibility as stewards to never to forget.
