What does Emancipation of the broken mind mean to you?

Jul 31, 2022 News

The Creators’ Coven

By Zena Henry

Kaieteur News – Since I started this column a few weeks ago, I have concentrated mainly on the ongoing problems being faced globally, with a direct focus on the challenges in-country, and ways to accommodate our unfavourable high cost of living situation. In one of the columns, I underscored the importance of being determined to survive the hardships and the fact that it takes the willingness and determination of the individual to tackle and overcome whatever issues they come up against. That submission remains but this week I divert a bit to highlight a different topic, the upcoming Emancipation Day observance against bondage, control and all forms of degradation meted out to Africans and their descendants within the harrowing period of European-led bondage.

When I highlighted an individual’s willingness to do more and to be more for the betterment of themselves and family, I was referring at the time to an innate desire to thrive in a financially challenging period. As I address the issues of slavery and reflect on a period that will forever be etched in the history of the world, I allude also to the very innate desire to thrive in life, regardless of the threats it poses. Many argue today that slavery is over, that it happened a long time ago and that the African People should move on. I may confuse some people when I say I agree and disagree with these statements; simply put, I believe that what we think and how we think it significantly influences how we experience reality and so for me, that means how we as Africans choose to remember slavery or not, has an impact on how we view and understand the societies we live in, in any part of the world. But most times these statements are made, it is usually within the context of ‘Black people should stop complaining and work harder for an equal space’. I do not wish to go into the actions of the Oppressors who aggressively stymied a genuine African renaissance.

I, however, wish to speak to the mental damage that enslavement has caused, and its residual effects aided by subtler forms of domination up to this day. It has bored through the generations that have directly and indirectly felt the lashes of this unjust and dehumanising period hence the fitting question of what the emancipation of the broken mind means. Let’s just understand right off the bat that an action or an experience faced especially over a period of time has the potential to greatly impress on one’s belief about themselves and reality. In fact, the 28-day rule states that it generally takes anywhere between 21 and 28 days to create a new habit. Meaning that the first three to four weeks of performing a new task is often the hardest. With this in mind, imagine being enslaved and dehumanised. As a race, it happened for centuries, and with every generation, parents transmitted their fears, their misunderstandings, miseducation, misconceptions, pain, poverty, sorrow, distress and so much more to their offspring. They even became the ones to groom them for the tasks that were dictated for the dominated.

Fast-forward today, long after emancipation, a significant portion of the Black World remains impoverished, and without a meaningful say in world affairs regardless of how much they are affected by global policies. Just refer to the continent of Africa, regardless of its overwhelming wealth of natural resources and other valuable assets, Africa is widely seen as poor with dishonest politicians who get wealthier from big foreign, particularly European companies and their governments that reap the wealth of these countries. Here in the West, former colonies/ Third World countries are offered assistance that never really seem to bring countries closer to the financial independence and stability that entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been offering for decades.

I nonetheless believe that the world will do what it must; humans will do as they please and life will occur regardless. I have accepted that life is too vast to be burdened by any one issue regardless of how grave it is, but rather, to find the strength to observe every situation in the right context and to respond accordingly for my best outcome. Believe me, it is not as easy as I just explained it, but because I recognise and believe I have some idea of how the mind works and accept that the mind could be made, or it could be broken. The conditions of slavery, and its post activities, have broken the Black mind, and the damage is still evident today. But we are now seeing a wider effort to impinge and entrap not just Africans, as modernity challenges archaic discriminatory and destructive beliefs and policies that were later used against other races. And I ask again, what does the emancipation of the broken mind mean to you?

Dr. Frances Cress-Welsing (March 18, 1935 – January 2, 2016) was the first Afro-centric psychiatrist I came across in my African studies “to find my African self”, who spoke of slavery and its development as a tool of mental enslavement and destruction. I had heard of the Willie Lynch syndrome and read about its dealings as a divide and rule mechanism where slaves were set against each other. Of course, to turn people against each other means to mentally change the way they see each other, but what Dr. Welsing came with I was not prepared for. She spoke to actions of the “Oppressors” in the mighty United States for instance; to create policies that negatively impacted Black individuals and their families. She pointed to Planned Parenthood schemes in the US that encouraged single mother homes where the government provided financial support to women, but she must have no man in the home. They were encouraged to be “strong independent” women fighting for women’s rights but did not receive the same benefits as white women. The system, she highlighted, encouraged the emasculation of Black males by encouraging homosexuality and providing laws to protect the now effeminate, “harmless males”. These are just a few off-the-top areas worth their salt, but deeper research has shown worst interventions that prove even more detrimental and guess what, they all play on the mental; reconstructing the way people think and see themselves, or they are guided toward certain acceptances. In other words, I guess I am trying to explain something I call “the great manipulation”.

I have recognised that having a better mental idea about the system and I dare say “The New World” made me internalise that slavery and everything it encompassed, the broader manipulation is mainly driven by economics, all of it was and is being done for money and power; hate, discrimination and everything else came after. The power, the dominance, the control; some men crave it, demand it while some of us are simply taken along for the ride as ignorant and unwilling participants.

Happy Emancipation!