I am American-African.

             

              In the later portion of the 20th century, a very controversial publication of ‘The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave’ sprang forth and has since stirred much discourse about the issue of slavery in America. Though the origins of the letter have some controversy in matters of credibility, I posit that its contents include an exceptionally valid school of thought to be considered. In the speech given by Willie Lynch, the slave-owner shares methods he has predicated for the successful enslavement of African peoples. Within his sermon-like speech, he outlines specific ways to gain willful subservience:

Keep the body, take the mind! …[and] for further severance from their original beginning, we must completely annihilate the mother tongue of both the new nigger and the new mule, and institute a new language that involves the life’s work of both. You know a language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people.¹

Severance from the beginning essentially defines the principle Peter J. Paris sets out to disprove in his work The Spirituality of African Peoples. Though the African Diaspora and subsequent enslavement of its patrons in America mounted a vehement vehicle for the loss of cultural identity, Paris engages the truth that all African culture was not vanquished within the realization of chattel transaction. Instead of the termination of a people, African culture, traditions, and spirituality were transferred into a new tongue and translated to fit into the confines of a new place. In the face of monstrous adversity, the African spiritual truth ‘I am because we are’ abounds and transcends the oppression meant to strip its people of their cultural identity.

                In my line of work, we use transmitters to relay a signal that makes sense to a person operating some piece of machinery. For tanks, we use level transmitters to display how full or empty the tank is. For pipes, we use flow transmitters to gauge the amount of flow going into or out of a vessel. And so on for any process application needing surveillance. Transmitters, all have the basic tenant of functionality conducting their purpose – to read a process signal and output it in a way that is understandable to the context of its use. Therefore, if an operator does not easily understand a tank level in terms of inches of Mercury (which is a standard in some places), the display can be configured to feet.  Just because the units of measure of the level in the tank are changed, doesn’t mean that the actual level in the tank is any different. What’s more is that if you take the contents of that vessel and pour it into a different container, without spilling any drops, the same amount of media is still in the new tank. Though a different level may be reflected due to the differing dimensions of the original vessel versus the second vessel, neither the contents nor its quantity has been altered. Conceptually, this is the stance Paris goes to great lengths to appropriate as it relates to African culture. African spirituality was not totally changed or annihilated, rather it was just re-captured and transmitted in a different way with much of its inherent identity and original substance intact.

                What is consciously significant to me about The Spirituality of African Peoples is that the author goes to great lengths to propose a foundational commonality between ancient African traditions and contemporary African American culture. I believe this deliberation envelopes an effort to embrace an Africanized viewpoint as a genesis for philosophical existence. There is undoubtedly the harsh reality that the subjugation Africans and Africans in the Diaspora faced subsequent to slave-trade caused such a violent upheaval of African culture which intended to sever the people from their identity. Yet, even in the throes of this systematic oppression and isolation, a sense of cultural resilience was successfully sustained. Rather than the complete termination of the culture indigenous to the African people, an “enculturation” occurred allowing an amalgamation of African culture to essentially be retrofitted with Westernized civilization; thus, creating a uniquely new yet congruent way of life for Africans. If this be so, then Westernized progression of thought must be sidelined and an investigation of African ideas of culture and religion must be put to work.

While I normally identify myself as Black, the absence of the word African should have no bearing on the effect of African traditions in my life. As I consider this knowledge, I realize how much it is not necessarily a revelation for the things that comprise my idea of identity, morality, spirituality, and community. Rather, it is a reminder. Ways of being, thinking, and acting, as a Black person in America, cannot simply be explained away by such dismissive statements like ‘this is just the way I am’ or ‘it’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ Instead, there is an intrinsic reason that I am the way that I am. There is an unspokenness to how I view family and community. And, both of these things are circularly related. Their interconnectedness is seamless and natural. While it is easy to know that my personhood is a reflection of my roots, there must be an intentional introspection and appropriation for why my lens is shaped and colored the way that it is – and this introspection must discard any and every negative view of an African or Black identity that has been indoctrinated by a European society. This must be done individually and corporately as Black persons in America post-Diaspora. Rather than rejecting our Afrocentric foundations, whether it is done intentionally or unintentionally, there must be a willingness to analyze our modality outside of a solely American context. There must be a reconciliation of what it means to be Black inclusive of our rich heritage through African ties and exclusive of the social construct of the Black race as proscribed by society.

Paris does an excellent job in the exegesis of African spiritual ideologies in relation to a Christian belief held by African-Americans during and after the Diaspora. Instead of a separation from their African spiritual understanding, the result of slavery justified a new appropriation of spiritual meaning for their new environment:

Hence… the acculturation of the Africans to their new environment did not result in a total loss of their religious and moral understandings. On the contrary, Africans in the diaspora were able to preserve the structural dimensions of their spirituality.²

In further examination of Paris’ work, the profound sense of community and family was of paramount importance in the African perspective. Working in conjunction with a Supreme Deity, Africans venerated their ancestral legacies as a part of their responsibility in life. This value system in which communal good and familial honor was the ultimate goal can still be seen in today’s historically Black churches. According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 2007, Black people comprise a significant amount of those affiliated with a religion. Where 83% of all Americans associate themselves with some religious belief, the survey found that a startling 87% of Blacks align themselves with a religious affiliation.³ Blacks continue to place high value on a sense of community and family as found within a church membership.

                Personally, in reading The Spirituality of African Peoples, I have to admit that I was swiftly convicted by my somewhat elementary notions of African tradition. Though I always linked my affinity for movement and soulful music in my church experience with my African heritage, I diminished the possibility that how I view a Christian God had anything to do with that heritage. As easily as the American society tried to strip all Blacks of their true African identity, there was also an effort to coerce Blacks into associating all things African with negativity or uncivility. Within the vein of dismantling the pride in African customs, it became commonplace for me to wrongly pre-suppose that anything having to do with African spirituality was automatically going to be paganistic. There was an unfair assumption that the Christianity I knew and practiced was only related to my African identity in certain modes of worship, dance, or song. While an African beat can be seen in the pulse of this portion of Christianity, it is important that the blood line of our Christian faith can be attributed to the substance of African spiritual understanding of God as our Creator.

                As I’ve come to understand and appreciate the premise of African spirituality and its direct effect on my own Christian theology, I wonder more about the current spirituality of Africa. Accepting the effect of the African identity on western Christianity, how is Christianity now effecting Africa? Where has Christianity not become available in Africa? What indigenous modes of religion mimic our ideal of Christianity and could Christianity be easily introduced?

References:

1.)    ‘Willie Lynch,’ The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave (African Tree Press, 2011).

2.)    Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Source for a Common Moral Discourse (Fortress Press, 1995), 35.

3.)    The Black Church, http://blackdemographics.com/culture/religion/ (The Leonard T. Greenburg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life).