MANY RIVERS TO CROSS IN SOUTH AMERICA Okello Oculi

Urges Africa to do more for the persecuted blacks in the Americas

As the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024 as ‘’The International Decade for the Rights of Peoples of African Descent’’, member states of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) should have taken deep breaths as they heard Jimmy Cliff’s song ‘’MANY RIVERS TO CROSS’’. For four centuries after 1500 their region was looted of its vigorous youths to either perish in non-voluntary human cargo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean or survive and be often worked to death in growing sugar cane, tobacco, coffee and mining diamond, gold or copper across South America and the Caribbean islands. With a total of about five million imported Africans, Brazil wore the crown of this notorious robbery in human bodies and talents.

It is, therefore, fitting that in this month a crude and urgent reminder of this burden of responsibility for ECOWAS states was on November 9, 2017 dramatised by the international media in Brazil. A class of agrobusiness tycoons are set on violating Article 68 of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution to enable them rob Africans who had rebelled from inhuman labour conditions; fled into mountainous areas and militarily defeated repeated attempts to recapture them, and sustained their communities. They are known as ‘’Qilombo’’.

These secessionists periodically attacked plantations; seized livestock; killed Spanish landowners and increased their numbers by freeing their labourers. The 1988 Constitution had guaranteed the ownership of land by ‘’Qilombo’’ communities. Their robbery today would be a grave injustice to historic carriers of the right to freedom, human dignity and self-determination.

Brazil has made token gestures of honouring the heroes of this struggle for freedom. The statue Zumbi, one of them, proudly wears sunlight and rain in Brasilia, the country’s capital. November 20 is ‘’observed as Dia da Consciencia NEGRA / Black Awareness Day’’ in the states of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. Paradoxically the big land grabbers pushing government to change the law are also mainly from these two states. Fortunately they are also grabbing land in Namibia and Ghana as well as promoting cotton production in Benin, Burkina Faso, Core d’Ivoire, and Mali. These states can, therefore, wave these economic bats for the defence of their endangered descendants in Brazil.

Mexico also hosts a distinguished record of African fighters for independence, human dignity and justice. The hero of Veracruz state, Gaspar YANGA, defended his ‘’Qilombo’’ followers against invasion by Spanish troops for 40 years - beginning from 1608 - until a truce ‘’created the first FREE State’’ for Africans in the Americas. ‘’San Lorenzo de Los Negros’’ is today called YANGA State. Three states have populations of Afro-Mexicans ranging from four to eight per cent of their total population, namely: Guerrero with 8% (268,880), Oaxaca with 6% (233,708), Veracruz with 4% (330, 178). Every state has had imported African inhabi tants for over three centuries plus new arrivals with one of the latest being Hollywood star Lupita Nyongó. She a citizen of Mexico by the

MEXICO SUFFERS FROM ENTRENCHED VIRUS OF A FIXATION OF FEAR OF AFRICAN PEOPLES WHICH IS EXPRESSED IN DENYING AFROMEXICANS QUALITY EDUCATION, LEAVING THEM TRAPPED IN PERMANENT POVERTY AND LOW SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS

merit of being born in Mexico when her father fled political persecution in Kenya and taught in a university in Mexico City.

Since the last two decades of the 20th Century, ECOWAS has become a significant market for television soap operas produced in Mexico. This allows the region an economic push to, at the least, denounce the absence of BLACK actors in the medium. Mexico also suffers from entrenched virus of a fixation of fear of African peoples which is expressed in denying Afro-Mexicans quality education, leaving them trapped in permanent poverty and low socio-economic status. Its soap operas are insidious weapons for perpetuating this war by seeking to make Africa’s youth find heroes only in white Mexicans; while making black and mulato Afro-Mexicans culturally invisible. Diplomats from ECOWAS states will be honouring the United Nations’ Decade for defending the rights and dignity of peoples of African Descent in Mexico by pushing for their economic empowerment, access to high quality education and inclusion as honourable stars in her soap operas.

In 2016 descendants of Jamaica’s Maroon legend, Nanny Acompong, travelled to Ghana to dip their roots among the Akan people. Nigerian owes descendants of about 300 Ibibio men and women who in 1675 survived a shipwreck and climbed on land on the island of today’s St. Vincent. The local Taino population promptly gave men wives. The new community fought battles with Spanish invaders. Following their defeat of Spain, Britain terminated the warrior tradition of the community by deporting them to the South American mainland.

They adopted the Ibibio food technology of peeling, washing and grating raw cassava roots before squeezing starch and cyanide out of the chaff and making ‘’EBA’’ as a main food. The amalgamated people became known as ‘’GARIFUNA’’ probably derived from the word ‘’gari’’. They spread into today’s countries of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Many have migrated into the United States, notably New York and Los Angeles. For economic diplomacy operatives in Nigeria, there is a market here waiting for supplies of fresh cassava and ‘’gari’’ to reunite with its ancient Ibibio ancestry in the Americas.

ECOWAS countries owe Puerto Rico massive post-hurricane support for rebuilding lives of its African descendants. Like St Vincent, Africans with DNA identical to that of current Mandingo, Wolof and Fulani peoples intermarried with the local Taino people and militarily defended their communities in mountain areas of south western areas of the island.

As Jimmy Cliff sang, there are many rivers of bloodlines waiting to be crossed by African diplomacy. Both Portugal and Spain have since the decade of African struggles for independence hid behind a history of nurtured violence. The urgent burden on African diplomacy must be that of demanding and achieving a dredging of putrid swamps of vicious fear of African peoples. This fear was engineered into geographies of barbaric exploitation of skin-colours.