RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

WE ARE THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX We who are Africans and diaspora Africans must study everything, everyday, to be able to learn what is true, and what is false about history. We have been lied to about ourselves. We have been reconfigured, historically reconstructed by successive waves foreign conquerors, invaders, traders, priests, philosophers, archaeologists, for over 2500 years , dating all the way back to before Rome, to back before Alexander of Macedonia , to back before Cambyses of Persia, back, way back. We did not know that we were “black”. We did not see our color as substantively meaningful. They did. They do. More than colors, though, they saw our fabulous arts, science, medicine, jewelry, foodstuffs, navigation, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, schools, temples, monuments, writings, mathematics, beauty, ancient mastery as simply irresistible. Our history was so ancient it merged with prehistory. So much, even surviving elders, priests, learned people, had forgotten too much of it. Two million years is a very long time. We desiccated like a dry bone in a desert. We ossified! We were members of nations, of tribes. It is quite a terrible thing even to be able to be lied to about oneself! Don’t you know yourself? To be ignorant of oneself , of one’s history, of genealogy, of cosmology. That bespoke ignorance of oneself! Ignorance of self-awareness allows one to view oneself as unnecessary as unnatural; as unworthy, basically inhuman. That such ignorance might befall woebegone Africans who were sold by their naive and stupid tribesmen for centuries to Christians and Muslims, is more easily understood , than that native, remaining Africans did not know any better than this! Forgive me, please, Dearest Reader, for venting, bewailing our fate as African Americans. Yet, but for our fate, sad as it was, I would not be here. Nor would you! It was necessarily the foreordained case, indeed, divinely, cosmologically the case, that we Africans need to have experienced what came before, so that we may thus become, what we must now become, in order to extricate ourselves from our privileged state of despondency! “Privileged?” Privileged yes! Fact is that in 2020, despite the Covid19, despite Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies , despite their white supremacy, white terrorists, and black terrorism & credulity; despite it all, and whatever! We are still here! We are naturally privileged to speak the ever-expanding English language, ‘lingua francs’ of earth.We are alive! We are Americans. We reside in the richest, most militarily, financially, scholastically, culturally, powerful nation on earth, that we have and still do materially contribute to! And we are still climbing, still rising to our divine destiny! We are a riddle of the Sphinx! Amen!