THE word Maafa is a Kiswahili term for ‘Disaster’ or ‘Terrible Occurrence’. That word best describes the more than 500 years of suffering of Africans through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion and exploitation.

In October, we commemorate our ancestors who perished in the greatest misery by far ever experienced by any race of people -- that is, the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mr David Granger describes it as the greatest crime of the last millennium. It was the road to hell.

Slavery is a dehumanising process. Those who have researched the history of slavery cannot escape the anger of the damage done to Africa and to Africans. For four centuries, says Granger, four continents - Africa, the Americas and Europe - were involved in this destructive warfare, partition and the haemorrhaging of the fittest Africans from Africa. By Granger’s estimates, 50 million Africans were victims of the trade and fewer than 10 millions survived to be sold to planters. In the holds of the ships, suicides and death often eased the pain of intense suffering. Shipwrecks, the sinking of ships, and hostile action by pirates contributed to the disappearance of the 40 million or so Africans not accounted for.

Dr Kimani Nehusi says in his estimation, over 100 million Africans died directly through the actions of Arabs and Europeans. To quote his exact words, to that 100 million, “we must add those indirectly affected, including almost every African born since the institutionalisation of European domination.” The harmful impact has affected every single African who is alive today.

This tragedy was driven by the greed of the Europeans who built their economies on the backs of slaves. As Granger points out, globalisation is not new. “The global economy really got going five and a half centuries ago with the systematic capture of Africans and their transportation and enslavement in the Americas by Europeans in the pursuit of profits through the cultivation of an Asian agricultural crop -- sugar-cane.”

“The slave trade helped to make the world’s commercial and economic powerhouse”.

Our Holocaust has burnt slowly from 750 AD to now - more than a thousand years. It is still burning. According to Dr Kimani’s assessment, “Africans continue to inhabit the mental prisons of psychological enslavement and manifest the terrible post trauma syndrome of low self-esteem, no self-love, disunity, a presence in the prisons and mental institutions, and expulsions from schools far out of proportion to their presence in the general population.”

Despite the disadvantages of this slow Holocaust, we must reclaim ourselves as a distinct people, building slowly in our communities and rejecting the inferiority/superiority notions that Europeans and others have used to destroy us. If we recapture those essentials of our past, we will make the best of our achievements. It is when we seek to reject that past we bring about destruction.

In closing ACDA (the African Cultural and Development Association) maintains that Africans in Guyana are delinquent in their responsibility in respecting the preservation of the memories of our ancestral kith and kin. And this delinquency will persist until a suitable memorial is established, to commemorate the slaughter at the crossing, and the sanctity of the wet graveyards, now the resting places of millions of our people, our family, who were sacrificed on the golden cross of European expansion and supremacy.

Finally, a lot of responsibility falls on the more fortunate among us to take off our white masks, reach back into our communities and help our people to redeem their self-esteem.