• More Excerpts from Spirit Talk: The Wisdom of Stone Revisited
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually who are we not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people
won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And when we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson, “Our Deepest Fear”, A Return to Life
Years spent in the corridors of academia…brought me into contact with thinkers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, who had deconstructed a frightening pathology that led to self cancellation in my fellow Africans:
…white racist lies were reinforced by religion, Christianity especially,
which saw God, Christ, angels, in terms of whiteness, while sin and the
devil, Satan, were black and heaven was depicted as the place where rejects
of the white God would burn to charcoal blackness…So the African Christian
desirous of a place among the band of the saved sang to his maker: ‘Wash me
Redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow.’ If God was slow to respond, there
were always hot combs and lipsticks…and ambi to help the spiritual journey to
whiteness and black death.
… Someone once said, “They had to fool me to rule me.” Sadly, today, there are many among us who are content to be fooled. They find joy in being misled and openly embrace the process of being fooled. They say that if we had never been fooled then we would have been nothing but fools in the first place.
…The Maxim gun might have brought us to our knees… [But] our stories, voices and spirit of struggle were not annihilated. Our memories might have been driven into exile but they did not die. Of course, slavery and colonialism were forms of economic and political control that sought to achieve such annihilation in order to succeed in their goals. As Ngugi points out:
… to make economic and political control more complete, the colonising power tries
to control the cultural environment: education, religion, language, literature, songs
forms of dances, every form of expression, hoping in this way to control a people’s
values and ultimately their world outlook, their image and definition of self. They
would like to have a slave who not only accepts that he is a slave, but that he is a
slave because he is fated to be nothing but a slave. Thus he must love and be
grateful to the master for his magnanimity in enslaving him to a higher and nobler
civilisation.
When bigotry wears the apparel of civilisation, education, and sophistication, its venom can be quite deadly…
The desire to alter Africans and recreate them in the image of Europeans was one of the prime characteristics of Europe’s relations with a continent from which it has benefited immensely for centuries on end. This stemmed from a deeply ingrained contempt for Africans which had arisen as a means of justifying the hugely profitable slave trade, and was … useful in the colonial enterprise. It led them to dismissively assert that: “In their lack of veneration of God, unbelief in the immortality of the soul and lack of all virtues, they are just as we have described the Tonga. They know only that men are born to die, but understand nothing about his future life or his duties in this life.”
[ But Ngwabi] Bhebhe tells us that “Lobengula gave a legitimate reason for the existence of traditional religion and, by implication, argued for the oneness of Mwari and the Christian God.” He said that, “he believed in God, he believed God had made all people and that he had made every country and tribe just as he wished them to remain, he believed God made the Amandeble as he
wished them to be and it was wrong to seek to alter them…”
Around 1000AD the descendants of Chaminuka and Mushavatu crossed the Zambezi and entered Dzimbahwe. Legend has it that the then spirit medium of Ambuya Nehanda (the original historical and living Nehanda having died, her royal spirit (gombwe) returned to lead the children offering guidance and counsel back then as she was to do during the First Chimurenga) used her royal ceremonial tsvimbo (staff) to part the waters so that the people would cross into the Newfoundland where they would construct a lasting monument in stone.
Dr. Yosef ben- Jochanan in his paper, “The Nile Valley Civilisation and the Spread of African Culture”, states that: “Arab and European slavery made the African migrate from one part of the African world to the other; that is why you can see in Akan culture…the people with the same haircut, and same beads and jewellery system as Queen Nefertari (the wife of Pharoah Rameses II in the 19thth Dynasty), and Queen Nefertiti (the wife of Pharoah Akhnaton in the 18th Dynasty)”
Thus, not surprisingly, “when you talk about Zimbabwe, don’t think about the nation alone. Zimbabwe also means a metropolis of buildings equal in design to the pyramids’ cone shape. When the sunlight coming in strike the altar, the altar shines because of the sunlight.”
…to talk of Great Zimbabwe and Egypt in one breath is not as far fetched as it might seem at first glance. After all, Africa’s history is about narratives of migration…
(Knowledge is power, none but ourselves can free our minds…more next time)