What Blacks must do now

Those were the two issues we treated in our immediate last two submissions lamenting how we blacks are often despised by the rest of the world without any serious repercussions falling on the culprits. The Jews, for instance, do not allow any injury, no matter how slight, to their persons or race. Today, we are […]

Those were the two issues we treated in our immediate last two submissions lamenting how we blacks are often despised by the rest of the world without any serious repercussions falling on the culprits. The Jews, for instance, do not allow any injury, no matter how slight, to their persons or race. Today, we are suggesting the thing we need to do now to show the world we will now develop a ‘’zero tolerance’’ for any effort to deny our humanity.
A motivational thinker and speaker once said that the world does not give you what you deserve. Rather, it gives you what you demand. Given the low esteem in which we are held, the time has come for black people to insistently demand for respect for our persons and our values. No one who insults us, no matter how minor the insult, should be allowed to get away lightly with it. We also are children of God. We may indeed have underachieved in terms of what the modern world holds as success stories but that does not mean we deserve to be treated like the scum of the earth. We deserve respect even if we only contribute to the success of the world as consumers of the creative ingenuities of other races.
Respect or recognition of our humanity is very crucial or critical in the psychological well -being of black skinned people who for millennia have been treated as less than human. Without self-confidence and self-belief there is no way we can ever achieve. I have in some of my articles on the plight of the black race told with pathetic humour the story of late soul music maestro James Brown whose number one heart-felt demand in life was that he should be addressed as ‘Mister’. No one, except a slave or the son of a slave, can understand that heart-felt cry for recognition. He came from a background where all through the life of his parents and fore-parents, a father was always called ‘boy’ even if he was seventy years old or lived to be as old as the Biblical Methuselah.
As I said earlier, we have a responsibility to demand respect from others.  And our immediate step in the goal for Afro-respect is to take a critical look at the behaviour of our so-called Arab or Maghreb brothers living with us here on the continent. Arab Africans still call the Blacks in their population and elsewhere slaves and look down on them in spite of the fact that slavery was abolished several centuries ago.
In Mauritania, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan and Algeria, a good number of citizens of black colour are usually shy, timid, uneducated and unassertive people on the fringes of the society. For me, this is an affront. How can this be happening right here in a continent that is meant for Black people! It is the place of the AU to vigorously champion the emancipation of those people from their Arab masters. Why do we celebrate individual African countries’ independence when people, who have the same skin colour as us, are being treated as fifth class citizens right here in a continent that is meant for black people?
When I look back I see how we have been mistreated by the children of Seth (The Caucasians) and the children of Shem (the Arabs). They formed raiding bands among our people and proceeded to hunt us down like a hunter hunts games. They killed us, they maimed us in a manner that left permanent physical and psychological scars on us and they enslaved many of us. Millions perished in the Trans-Saharan slave trade and millions more perished in the Trans-Atlantic slave ships. Some were fed to hungry sharps and crocodiles.
I am particularly pained about the Arabs who also happen to be Muslims. Islam, like Christianity and other world religions, is supposed to be a platform for the expression and practice of universal brotherhood. But my Muslim friends who go on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina often complain about how the Arabs, who are supposed to be at the fountain of the religion, clearly despise Black pil-grims. In the former Sudan, Arab Sudanese clearly dis-criminated against their fellow Black Sudanese in Darfur and elsewhere. That helped the split of the erstwhile biggest country in Africa.
In light of the ignoble behaviour of even those with whom we share the Christian or Islamic faith, the time has come for us to redefine our relationship with many persons in the world today. And the core principle of our foreign policy or the rule of our engagement with others should be to reclaim our dignity and personhood. Those who do not have a healthy respect for us, we must disregard no matter what they have to give to us as aid. After all, much of the so-called aid that is given to us is in actual fact excess or exploitative profit which many of these people make off us because of our foolishness and stupidity.
We should not only demand respect from others, we should, much more importantly, begin to do things that will earn the respect of others in the world. We must begin to think, plan and produce goods and services to add to the stock of commodities and services available in the world. We must plan and organise our societies to be better. Even if we have been cursed, has the curse not run its course it? I am the first to agree that we have greatly under achieved and have rightly earned the scorn and disdain of others. But we must not continue to receive insults from the likes of Morocco or anybody else and keep quiet about it.