I AM AFRICAN: Baffour Ankomah
We are continuing with the topic we started two weeks ago – “the importance of history to life on earth” – but first let’s deal with the little matter of the load shedding schedule announced by ZESA. According to reports quoting ZESA’s spokesman Fullard Gwazira, the load shedding will be effective during the morning and evening peak period of 5am to 10am and 5pm to 10pm.
Gwazira is quoted as having said: “We have very little in terms of rainfall influence into [Lake Kariba] and we have reached a point whereby the power generation has scaled down, if we do not scale down we may have to shut down the entire situation around October because we won’t be having water. Kariba is a hydro station and requires water, so up until there are significant inflows into the lake the current generation pattern will subsist.”
It is therefore a long-term problem, considering that winter rains are scarce in Zimbabwe and the next rainfall season starts in November. Which leaves one to wonder why the great and good of ZESA would want to give electricity to the suffering masses of Zimbabwe when they don’t need it – between 10pm and 5am, when they will be sleeping and will not need electricity anyway.
Unless there is some special reason, would it not be proper for ZESA to cut the electricity for the whole nation for the entire 7 hours between 10pm and 5am, and give people electricity during the day? What is the logic behind depriving people of electricity when they most need it, and giving it back to them when they don’t need it? I can’t get it. Maybe ZESA can, and they should explain it properly to the people.
How God sees history
Now back to our main topic. Two weeks ago, we finished off where God was teaching history to the Israelite nation. I, and those who know the value of history, insist that history is essential to life as oxygen. It is as important to life as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. As we die physically without oxygen, so do we die metaphysically without history. I define history as “anything that happened one hour ago and beyond the years behind us”. How best we use the information that history provides determines how well we do on earth.
It is why the Akan people of Ghana, from which this writer hails, have a proverb that says: “Ntikuma does not sit and doze under the tree whose fruit fell and killed his father Ananse.”
Ananse is the superhero (sometimes super villain) of Akan folk stories. His first son is Ntikuma. If Ananse is killed by the fruit of a tree behind their house that fell on his bald head, Ntikuma should use the information provided by the history of his father’s death to guide his life, and for all he does, he must not go and sit under the same tree and doze (on top of it).
The white man calls it philosophy – which he defines as “a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behavior”. We call it wisdom – which we define as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement”. And it is given to us free of charge by God, the creator of the universe, who wants human beings to dominate and enjoy the world and not to be killed by it. But if we refuse to use the wisdom that history brings, we will be killed by the world, and we can’t blame God for it.
God knows that no serious decision can be taken by men and women without proper thought – and thought dwells on the information provided by our past, that is history (defined by me as “anything that happened one hour ago and beyond the years behind us”).
Two weeks ago (in my first instalment), we saw God instructing Aaron (the brother of Moses, in the Bible) to bear the “means of making decisions and judgements” over his “heart”, which was God’s way of linking history to thoughtful and proper decision-making.
This is made abundantly clear at Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” The Amplified version of the Bible adds more: “Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flows the springs of life.” The King James version is even more direct: “Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life.”
In the first instalment, I took readers to the Oxford English Dictionary where there are four main definitions for “heart”. Definition One has four sub-definitions, of which Sub-Definition One says: “The HEART is regarded as the centre of a person’s thoughts and emotions, especially love or compassion.”
This definition is critical because people misconstrue “heart”, as used in the Bible, for the physical heart. It is not. “Heart” as used in the Bible means “the centre of a person’s thoughts and emotions”. It is not the physical heart that pumps blood as pastors and Bible scholars have incorrectly made people to believe. You can’t keep anything, let alone “the issues of life”, in your physical heart. You would die if you did so.
What is true is that “the issues of life” cannot be properly dealt with without thoughtful decisions that come from “the heart”, the centre of your thoughts. It is metaphysical.
Therefore, when God instructs Moses at Exodus 28:29-30 that, “whenever Aaron enters the Holy Place, he will bear the names of the sons of Israel over his heart on the breastpiece of decision as a continuing memorial”, he is in effect telling the Israelites never to forget their history. A “continuing memorial” is simply history in physical form.
To God, therefore, to be able to make proper decisions, a person, a king, a president, or a people must bear in mind their history. That is what the 12 stones bearing the names of the 12 tribes of Israel encased in the “breastpiece of decision” were meant for. It was to teach history to the nation of Israel and its future generations.
But the African does not value history, not even his own history. In fact, he is encouraged not to know it. He is to study everything but history! So that, as the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah puts it, the African would forever be “helpless chaff in the hurricanes of global history”, the “leaf that does not know that it is part of a tree”.
Wandering leaf
Imagine a leaf that does not know that it is part of a tree – and what fate awaits such a leaf. That is us Africans. Is it any wonder that we have become rudderless and the wanderers of the earth, neither here nor there? It is because we have simply refused to use the information history provides to guide and guard our lives. We are a leaf that does not know that it is part of a tree.
But let’s stay with God for a while. At Joshua 4:2-8, God tells Joshua, who has recently taken command of the Israelite nation after the death of Moses, to lead them across the Jordan River to take possession of the land he had promised to their ancestors.
Here again, God parts the waters of the Jordan as he did to the Red Sea and makes the Israelites walk on dry land across the riverbed. He then tells Joshua: “Choose 12 men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up 12 stones from the middle of the Jordan from right where the priests stood and to carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.
“So Joshua called together the 12 men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them: ‘Go over before the Ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of Israel, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, what do these stones mean, tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the Ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.’ So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them.”
Here, we see how important history is to God. He did not want the Israelites to forget the remarkable experience of the Jordan crossing. So he instructs Joshua to erect a memorial for “the generations to come” at the spot where they were camping for the night after the crossing.
You may want to ask, what was the purpose of the “memorial”. The Bible says, so that “in the future, when your children ask you, what do these stones mean, tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the Ark of the covenant of the Lord … These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
Can you see why, as George Orwell says, “the most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The African is destroyed because our own understanding of our history has been denied and obliterated by foreigners who call themselves white people, but who actually are pink people in reality.
If you were asked to buy a bottle of medicine from a man whose skin colour is pink but who insists that you must see his pink colour as white, I can bet my bottom dollar that you would not buy the medicine from him because you would take him as a quack. Sadly for Africa, we believed, and still believe, these “quacks” from beyond the seas who denied and obliterated our own understanding of our history, and in the process destroyed us.
As such, today, we cannot even see the business side of history and therefore cannot fully benefit from the business side of history. Yet, each year, billions and billions of dollars are exchanged via tourism by people and nations like Egypt and Greece who understand the business side of history – who have harnessed their historical sites and made them appealing to tourists who pay good money to fly in aeroplanes, sleep in hotels, ride in taxis, buy food while abroad, and purchase artefacts to take home, and in the process leave good forex behind to oil the economies of the host countries whose historical sites keep beckoning more and more tourists and swell the coffers of their nations.
How well Zimbabwe can do with some of this forex! But what is our own understanding of Zimbabwean and African history? Nil? May God forgive us, because we have believed as we have been told by the “quacks beyond the seas”, and we even teach it to our children and their children, that a vast majority of black Africans, the so-called Bantus (which Zimbabweans are said to be part of) migrated from somewhere in modern Cameroon to populate Central, Eastern and Southern Africa.
But in believing the quacks, we never stopped to ask where the so-called Bantus came from, before they migrated from Cameroon? Know your history, Africans! Take control of it. It will help your businesses.
Great ancestors, poor descendants
Because we don’t know our history, we cannot control our past. And because we don’t control our past, we can’t control our future and therefore we can’t control our present, as George Orwell says. But we have an illustrious past as Africans. Our history says we had great ancestors: in Ancient Egypt, in Kush (or Nubia), in Sheba, in Put – in all those lands the Bible sometimes refers to as Ethiopia or Cush. And if our ancestors were that good and built great and massive civilisations and empires, why are we so (sorry to say) useless today? Where did the DNA go? Did we inherit any DNA from our ancestors in the first place?
You may ask: How do we know that we had great ancestors in Ancient Egypt and that they were black? Let’s get back to the Bible. At Ezekiel 29:13-14, God says (New International Version): “Yet this is what the Sovereign Lord says: At the end of 40 years I will gather the Egyptians from the nations where they were scattered. I will bring them back from captivity and return them to Upper Egypt, the land of their ancestry…”
God knows geography, in fact he created geography, and therefore if he says Upper Egypt is where the Egyptians come from, he knows what he is talking about. Upper Egypt covered the southern parts of modern Egypt, south of the Nile Delta. That is not the land of the ancestry of the Arabs who conquered Ancient Egypt in 641 AD and whose descendants still occupy Egypt today, despite the many later conquests of Egypt by other nations that followed the Arab conquest.
The Amplified and King James versions of the Bible call Upper Egypt, “the land of Pathros, which is the Hebrew word for what the Greeks called Pathores. It is mentioned in Jeremiah 44:1 and 15; Isaiah 11:11; Ezekiel 29:14, 30:14, and Genesis 10:14. The ATS Bible Dictionary confirms that Pathros was “the original abode of the Egyptians; as indeed Ethiopia and Upper Egypt really were.”
These were the ancestors of black Africans. We are not Bantus. Our ancestry goes beyond the so-called Bantu migration. We are the descendants of the original Egyptians who lost their glorious empire and civilisation and migrated south. Next week, I shall take readers deeper into this history and show them why we need history to improve our businesses and personal lives.
