Have We Really Lost Anything? Do We Know What We Have Lost? Can Our Losses Be Regained? (Part 1)

Our esteemed Meritah Ancestor, Hilliard-III (2000), a brilliant mind, known in the modern world as an exceptional psychologist, fought for his people and in very plain expression illustrated our struggles, losses, and the first steps we must take to begin the journey for our identity, healing, liberation, freedom, and self-mastery. He made a clear list of what has befallen us as a collective of Meritah people both at home and in the diaspora; over five hundred years of disorientation, slavery, and colonization, facilitated through the eurasian educational and religious system and other societal institutions. To this, he shared the following that succinctly describes what has happened to us. He encourages us to carefully consider the things which account for our overall lack of a sense of unity and direction in these ten points quoted below:

1. We let our names go. The first step towards disorientation is to surrender your name.
2. We have surrendered our way of life (culture). We have stopped speaking the language we knew, and we have stopped behaving as African people behave. We have lost our way of doing things and we have adopted they ways of people unlike ourselves.
3. We have lost our appetite because we have lost our names and our culture. Even when those among us recreate our culture and present it to us, we no longer have an appetite for it. We have a greater appetite for the culture of people other than ourselves.
4. We have a general loss of memory. Few of us can tell the story of our people without beginning it with the MAAFA (slavery). It is as if the MAAFA was the only thing that happened to African people.
5. We have created false memories. Not only have we lost the true memory of African people, we now have a host of other memories which are totally removed from the truth. Not only are our memories of African people untruthful, but the memories we have of Europeans are also untruthful, and the memories we have about the rest of the world are untruthful as well.
6. We lost our land. It now seems as if we no longer have an appetite for land. We lost our land in African, and Africans in the Diaspora are losing what little land they once held. Anytime you lose your mooring on the land, you lose your capacity to protect your possessions.
7. We have lost our independent production capacity. We have become consumers rather than producers. It is a shame that we don’t even produce something as simple as a “natural comb”. We have to purchase combs that are made as far away as Korea. Almost anybody should be able to make something as simple as a little piece of plastic.
8. We have lost independent control of ourselves. We have little or no control of our educational process, our economic situation, our communications, or our politics.
9. We have lost sensitivity. We have lost the ability to perceive when people are doing things to us which are detrimental. We accept inaccurate perceptions without criticism.
10. As a cumulative result of all of these things, we have lost our solidarity…our unity. When we lost our unity, we lost our political advantage, economical advantage, and even our mental orientation. We lost a clear sense of wholeness, continuity, and purpose. (Hilliard-III, 2000, p. vii-viii)

Even as I write this article today, I still reflect on this matter as stated in the above quote. I also encourage us as readers to reflect on the quote in these ten points and make out what it means to us without my interference with the analysis of it. In the succeeding submissions, we shall address the third part of the article’s question: “Can Our Losses Be Regained?”

As for now, I leave you with this mental food for thought.

---