Breaking Out of Racial Mental Bondage is a Radical Perspective. Why is it that from the continent of Africa to North and South America, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia, people of dark or black skin or of African heritage are regarded as being inferior? How did this racist attitude, hostility and assumption toward dark skinned people develop in people all over the world? Such that in America we need the Black History month to remind everyone else that black people are not just humans but important humans in history too?

First, the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly uprooted to the Americas and enslaved under brutal conditions for atleast two centuries, perhaps did the greatest damage. In order to rationalize slavery, Europeans created a powerful ideology that spread all over the world which said Africans were barbarians, uncivilized, subhuman, inferior, and wild animals. Enslaving them was therefore a great favor that constituted taming brutes or otherwise civilizing wild creatures. The dark color of their skin and characteristic physical features since then have been deeply associated with inferiority. This mentality started from Europe and penetrated the psyche and racial attitude of the entire world. If the repercussions had ended after the first few generation of slaves in the New World, Africans and all people of African heritage would rebound and easily reclaim their human equal status. But what Europeans created has even worse, more serious, and more enduring repercussions. The European English lexicon created an intellectual bondage, emotional, and attitudinal straight jacket; a kind of emotional prison. 

When four centuries ago Europeans called all Africans "Negroes" on account of their black skin and physical features, they created a mental jail. At that time and perhaps to a lesser degree to day, Africans never regarded themselves as belonging to a "race". Africans on the continent lived in thousands and hundreds of different ethnic groups with different languages, empires, villages, tribes, clans, kingdoms, and small bands of hunters and gatherers. Most of these Africans were not necessarily friendly to one another but competing and skirmishing neighbors who often fought wars. This is why many of these Africans greedily and ignorantly sold each other as the battles to capture slaves escalated. They had no idea that they were fuelling European greed and expansion of capitalism. The African slave traders had no idea that they were also helping create the racist ideology later to harm Africans themselves and people of African heritage all over the world for centuries to come. 

When Europeans enslaved Africans in West Africa and Arabs enslaved those in East Africa they regarded all of them simply as "inferior subhuman negroes". Africans were essentially stripped of their identities. All the differences, strong group, and individual identities were eliminated. In the minds of Europeans and others in the world, Africans were identified as "just blacks or Negroes" with no culture, language, technology, or religion. This process of stripping was dramatized very vividly in the classic movie, "Roots" in a scene in which the new slave "Kunta Kinte" is almost lashed to death with repeated blows to force him to say his new English name given by his European plantation master and forget his West African name. The mental racial enslavement was established and to day deeply entrenched and still maintained in different ways. The repercussions are mind boggling. 

First, most of the popular international news about Africa and Africans is often negative; genocide in Rwanda, famine and starvation in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sahel region. These images are accompanied by skinny moaning children with flies in their eyes and carrying extended bellies. There are bloody military coups, civil wars, the HIV and AIDS epidemic, the deadly Ebola virus, and other exotic diseases, overpopulation, lack of economic progress, poverty, poor education. When all of these are the only popular or main stream staple TV and other news about Africans, all Africans and people of African descent must feel either defensive or if ignorant of the truth, may believe they are inferior. Other observers who are also feeding on this news must believe Africans and all Africans in the Diaspora have to be inferior. "After all, just look at their wretched homeland?" This limits Africans from creating different new identities as many of them experience positive change. As long as these powerful bad images are the only dominant popular news about Africa and Africans, people of Africa and the African Diaspora will never escape the racial enslavement or straight jacket. Any black person who has carved a prosperous life style anywhere has only to be shown the bad images of inferiority from Africa, and they are either made to feel lucky, or put in their racially inferior position and put on the defensive. 

The majority of the people in Africa and the rest of the world forget that this position of apparent inferiority was carved a few centuries ago during the Atlantic slave trade by Europeans and maintained by Europeans and the West since. In the light of all the negative images about Africa, any African-American or person of African heritage, deep down, would be ashamed and not want to be associated with a people whom the only popular images you have portrays them as bad, poor, perpetually poverty stricken, and inferior to everyone else in the world. Starting with the Atlantic slave trade, through European colonialism in Africa, apartheid in South Africa, up to the present day, Westerners couldn't have designed a stronger form of mental bondage; more than six hundred and eighty million Africans of different ethnic groups and millions more in North America, and the Caribbean; all lumped together as simply "black" or "Negro". 

If Africans and all people of African heritage where ever they are try to break free to liberate themselves, they and the world just have to be shown the bad images and news from Africa and voila, the blacks are made to feel humiliated, put on their defensive and their place. What is the possible solution to this problem? I and a few colleagues a few years ago founded an organization called the Zambia Knowledge Bank (ZANOBA) whose aim is to document and validate African culture and technology in all its diversity. The acronym ZANOBA stands for Zambia Knowledge Bank: Organization for Documentation and Validation of Culture and Technology. It is such a simple idea that it is radical. We thought we would start with our home African country of Zambia. If we can begin to document African culture and technology, may be after a few generations and centuries, racism directed at Africa and Africans will be eliminated. This combined with economic prosperity, then all dark skinned people all over the world will be truly be liberated and will achieve equal human status with everyone else in the world.

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
Associate Professor of Sociology
(ZANOBA web address: www.Bridgewater.edu/ZANOBA )