Without culture, how can a people survive? We have been divested of our culture by one of the most atrocious events in the history of human kind, the capture of Africans and the transport of them away from their homelands, making them slaves, along with the total and complete devaluation of their family, their values, their very humanism. Those Africans, our forbearers, were a proud people and a diverse people. They came from many tribes and had many languages and religions. They were brought to the coast from all over the continent. They were sold into the state of slavery by their own. Families were destroyed by these acts on both sides of the ocean. Only some members of a family might be taken, with husbands separated from wives and parents from children. If family members were taken together then, the majority of the time, they were promptly sold to separate people. Every effort was made to have members of the same tribe separated. This was a well-thought out plan to destroy all that was precious to a people, strip them of their identity, remove their culture, and give birth to a new breed of subhumans who would provide the strength and the stamina to build someone else’s nation. They could be bred as animals to bear the finest specimens who could then be sold. The absence of the family structure was thought to reduce their ever coming together, make impossible the unity of the people. Without ties to each other, without tribal ties, without a common language, without the love of wives and children, why would these people bond, why would they see themselves as one people?

Over the period of four hundred years, we were mutated to the people we are today. Tribes were blended, families were blended, and, as if to add insult to injury, the masters used our women and sired children by them. In order to understand the master and to attempt to communicate with our peers, the language of the masters had to be learned. But even that was taught and learned in the haphazard way of picking up snippets heard and garnered meanings, never knowing the rules of speech, mixing words of their own creation, which has been brought down through the generations. We were not allowed to have a formal education, for to teach us was a crime. Only a few, those chosen for reasons which would for years set us apart from each other, were taught. The civilization of the ages, the knowledge of a once great people, the lore of a culture was not among those things which were taught. These things were to be stamped out at any cost.

The father was the head of our households in our homeland. They decided what was best for the family, who made up the family, provided the security of the family, and it was their duty to protect the integrity of the family and ensure the continuation of the line and thus the culture. He was looked up to and unquestioned in his absolute power. He was a Man, proud and humbled only before his God. He strode across his land and all that he surveyed belonged to him or to men like him. He taught his sons their duties, the legends of the family and the tribe, and he was his own master and the master of those of his abode. In order to destroy the culture, you must destroy the culture bearer, change his role, take away his mystique, create disdain for him, and strip him of his power. This was understood by the slave masters. So they systematically made a mockery of the Black Man in the eyes of those to whom he had once stood proud and courageous.

He could not protect his wife or his children. He could not control his own fate. He was stripped of all honor and was made to assume the demeanor of the slave, to toil in the fields, to breed children he would never have the chance to be a father to, and to defile the women he held in high esteem, creating life without the sanctity of the marriage rites and without being able to call her his own. He had to watch her passed from man to man in order to beget the strongest, the biggest, the ones’ most capable of the hardest of manual labor. He was put out to stud like the champion that he was and because he was a champion, this treatment caused his self respect to be trampled in the dust, along with the respect of his women and children. And the fears he elicited from those who would control him, made them have the overwhelming need to bring him down, to make him a mere shadow of his former self. Four hundred years of this type of treatment is apparent in our men today.

The mother was the glue of the household. She raised the children according to the wishes of the father, steeped in the traditions of the culture. She raised her daughters to be the wives of these strong men, to bear their children. She looked up to the man and held him in high esteem. She depended on him to do the jobs of men and to always provide for them all. She knew her own power and knew that the high place she held in the home and community was due to the femininity of her line and what that very femininity meant to their day to day lives. She knew that she held the fate of the culture in her hands and she was up to that vast responsibility. She stood proud before her man and revered him above all other men. In slavery, she had everything which she held dear taken from her, her children, her husband, and her dignity.

She was made to serve the master and not her own kin and community. She was made to lie with all manners of men, including being at the beck and call of the whim of her master or any other white man he would offer her to. Often, as time evolved in this madness, it was the woman who had to be depended on in a manner not ever known to these people. She was, by virtue of the fact that she cooked the food, able to bring these morsels to her man and their children, she was most able to be given money, trinkets, and clothes which she could share with others. She was feared for her proudness and desired for her beauty and her exotic stance. It was important for the slave masters to break her spirit, demoralize her before her people, and have her at the disposal of his carnal desires. The high regard of the Black Man for his woman had to be destroyed and the way she worshiped the Black Man had to be stifled. This, too, manifests itself in the lives of Black people today.

The children are the hope of the future for a people. They are taught their responsibility to the household and the community, their place in that structure, and shielded from the things which are not the things of childhood. They were ever kept safe, yet all along knowing they were being prepared to take their place in the adult world and to forevermore put aside the ways of a child. They were wrenched from their mothers arms and pulled away from a father who was powerless to protect them. They were separated from brother and sister, never to know if the woman or man they were forced to couple with as adults were of their families, could have been a sister or a brother, an aunt or an uncle. They were raised, never seeing those they loved again. And they were never again to feel the warmth of the family and their childhood was stolen from them, never to be completed.

These children were reared seeing the degradation of the women and the men who surrounded them and were most like them. They saw the roles of these men and women, as they knew them, reversed and then, in turn, they were degraded. This degradation went on for generations. They never learned the nature of the man or the woman, they never learned to parent, the culture of their birth had to be ground out of their memory and consciousness lest they remember it as an adult and pass it on. They were not taught to be husbands or wives, and what their lives had become became their own warped view of childhood. They worked hard and long, their days ran one into the other. They learned only what was meant for them to know. Their role models changed and they had to fashion other ideas of the rules. They had to learn to fend for themselves and they were set against those very adults for their own survival, those very adults to whom they once looked upon with high regard. They were taught the skills and the values of the slave masters and the culture died with them, for it was not able to be brought to mind. And now we have the children of the children, of the children, and their children, four hundred years and several generations hence.

The family was the center of the universe, the core of their world. All that was good about them could be traced back to hundreds of people and generations of those who spoke like them, worshiped like them, looked like them. It was the constant, the grounding force of all. There were the immediate family and the extended family, the larger community, links of like families, bound together with the common bonds of community. All that was to be learned about life was of, and came, from the family. It was the safe and secure resting place of all of its members. The relationships of the members of the family were circumscribed by what place they held in the family.

Children learned how to be children, men learned how to be men, and women learned how to be women. The way you were to relate to your parents, to the elders, to the opposite gender, all of this was taught in the structure of the family. How to be a wife and how to be a husband, the respect that was due all, all these things came from the family. This was the culture. This was the thing which came down through the ages, which defined for each and every person who they were and what they were to become. This mighty culture was laid to rest, was ground into the dust of four hundred years of humiliation and distress and, unlike the Phoenix, could not rise and make its mark indelibly upon a people again. It was forever in the ashes. They would have to recreate themselves and in order to once again become mighty, they would have to search the annals of time to see themselves as kings and queens, and they would have to reach deep inside themselves to find that core, that sense of who they are as a people, who they came from, where they can go, and how to get there. It is a task of monumental proportions, a task which is worthy of a strong and whole people, a task which we must complete in order to ever come into our own.