Since history is often told from the conquerors’ perspective, have you ever wondered what the narrative would look like through the lens of the oppressed? What if the middle passage was intercepted… squashed before ever materializing to the extent that it did? That would mean the absence of inherited psychological trauma that Black people whose ancestors were forced into slavery carry within their DNA.
I have spent much of my adult life obsessing over this — plotting out various scenarios. One thing I am sure about is that our history would be told through our lens — preserved in all its glories, passing from one generation to the next, and my mother and grandmother would not have repeatedly rebuked me during my childhood years over my aversion to attend Christian services… forcing me to embrace a religion that was at the vanguard of enslaving my ancestors beginning in the 16th century. The very religion that is antithetical to the Black consciousness as it promulgates its mascot of White Jesus along with a plethora of saints looking nothing like me.
In my cogitative mode, I skate along the timeline when the ancient Greeks and Romans revered Black people, gliding further when the Twa/Anu people, who were Black, settled many regions of this earth — adopting different names along the way; when the Black Neset Bity, Narmer-Menes displayed his ingenious engineering skills by putting an elbow in the Hapi Valley River, changing the flow and to the wonderment, drained the water revealing a landmass that was given the name, Hiku Ptah, the temple of Ptah… unanimously known today as Egypt.
The depths of African civilization and its prodigious contributions are overshadowed through eurocentric spectacles. Such lenses are myopic…marred with bias and pious ingredients. This narrative is incomplete as it lacks the latitudinous scope delineating the presence and accomplishments of Black Africans as the original architect of civilization, spanning over 300,000 years… long before White Europeans came into existence.
Within my DNA, I carry at least two hundred and fifty thousand generations of ancestral knowledge and wisdom, some of which I have incorporated into the riveting historic fictional series titled Amma’s Divinity.