Four Hundred Years of Resilience and Resistance to Anonymity
by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante
Africans who were taken from the coasts of Africa did not arrive in the Americas without history or without culture; nevertheless from the arrival of the first 20 Africans from Angola in August 1619 to the present time the African American people (we would become citizens after the Civil War) have overcome, in many cases, bitter rejection of our humanity. It has been four hundred years since Africans landed in the English colony of Virginia. Nineteen years later in 1638 there is evidence that Africans were in what was to become the Pennsylvania colony.
The enslavement of people has an ancient history, yet it captures our modern imagination because of its relentless and peculiar form of human bondage in the United States. Examples of oppressive modern labor practices are often called slavery as when a Saudi Arabian businessman holds a Filipino against her will or an American who employs a Mexican and works him for endless hours without relief knowing that the Mexican without legal immigration papers will not report abuses for fear of deportation. In these cases, of course, we often have individuals who have been lured into horrible situations because they were willing to “sell” their labor for food and shelter. In such cases people are taken advantage of and their liberties are curtailed but these cases are not comparable either in scale or abuse to chattel slavery that uprooted millions of Africans. To be chattel is to be considered the property of another person, hence, the African people during the enslavement were not considered human but were chattel.
So vast an operation was the European Slave Trade that it ravaged towns and villages along the West African coast and in the interior for three centuries of dogged destruction of the African homeland to build a white homeland in the land of another people. Languages were lost, histories were obliterated, customs and traditions distorted, and beautiful and peaceful places turned into bloody patches of the most horrible deeds known to humans. Names like Loango, Ouidah, Elmina, Badagry, Calabar, Goree, and a thousand others were written in the book of infamy during the slave trade. Africans, young and old, but mostly pre-teens and teens, were captured and sent into bondage in the Caribbean, South America, and the North American English colonies.
These were not nameless humans. These were people who were neither without history nor potential; they were, each of them, treasure chests of possibilities. When Phillis Wheatley was kidnapped in Senegal in l761 she was barely seven years old. She had been born in l754 in a literate society of Muslim teachers where she was familiar with daily study, reading the Koran, and listening to instructions. In addition, her Peul and Wolof ancestors had expanded the Cayor Empire far into the interior of the continent and Phillis Wheatley who may have been named Binta or Koumba had participated in the same rituals, songs, games, and festivals dedicated to the fishermen that went out for days on the ocean.
Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston and sold to John Wheatley as a servant for his wife. Wheatley learned English quickly and soon read the Christian Bible to the amazement of her captors. Speaking and reading with fluency few whites had mastered the young Wheatley was soon writing her ideas on paper. Always in poor health because of the lack of warmth in the Boston winters and perhaps because of intense mental loneliness because of the loss of her own family, Phillis Wheatley suffered illnesses at an early age. John and Susannah Wheatley found her to be a poor domestic and eventually resolved to let her study Latin and Greek classics. At fifteen years of age Wheatley published her first poem, and six years later in 1773, her book, Poems on Various Subjects, was published with the assistance of the Wheatleys.19 Thus, Wheatley was the first enslaved African to publish a book and only the third woman to publish a book of poems in the English colonies. After the publication of her book, John Wheatley emancipated Phillis Wheatley. She achieved international fame for her ability to write poems largely because so many whites believed falsely and ignorantly that it was impossible for an African to write English. Wheatley was for many whites an oddity, an exotic being, someone who could do something that was nearly impossible to imagine. A black woman who writes books, imagine that!
Meanwhile in America Phillis Wheatley was an object of equal curiosity and was received by the political and social leaders of the day, including George Washington, to whom she wrote a poem. Voltaire, known for his racist views, quite surprised at Wheatley’s command of English, referred to her “very good English verse.” Nevertheless, fame and attention did not bring Wheatley wealth or a decent life and she lived in poverty after marriage in 1778 to John Peters, a free Bostonian African. She tried to find a publisher for her second book of poetry, which has never been found, but apparently never secured a publisher for the work. Her death in 1784 came in the midst of colonial political turmoil that would lead to the establishment of a new nation but not freedom for Africans.
Wheatley would be followed by millions to the extent that now four hundred years after the fateful steps ashore at Point Comfort, Virginia, the African population is nearly 40 million who bear much of the indignity and the grace that the years have turned into a narrative of nobility.
Dr. Molefi Kete Asante has published 77 books, among the most recent are The Dramatic Genius of Charles Fuller, African American Traditions, Facing South to Africa, As I Run Toward Africa, and Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait. He also created the first Ph.D. program in African American Studies and currently serves as the Chair and a professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. Dr. Asante is also a poet, novelist, dramatist, painter, and activist.
The Molefi Kete Asante Institute, located at 5533 Germantown Ave., is a non-profit, non-partisan, educational, and cultural organization with a mission is to “develop a framework and practice for intellectual and cultural capital within the African world community.” It serves as a think tank to stimulate local and global change through research, instruction, advocacy, and professional development, and is a home for African education and understanding for interested learners of all ages.
To learn more about Dr. Asante, please visit http://www.asante.net/biography/.
