By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
Often times it is those who are more focused that would withstand it all and continue to stand tall. Where there is a will, one has to be willing to exercise patience as they put all energy towards completing the task successfully. Seedlings of a tree are a very good example in teaching humanity perseverance since when planted in the soil you do not reap the fruits immediately, but has to wait for the seed to germinate, grow and flourish before it starts producing the fruits.
To be exceptional, you need to pay attention to details. Every piece of information and the task need to be taken seriously. Just as pennies when put together amounts to a substantial sum of money, minor details and items when part of the scheme should never be ignored. This includes time as every second matters, since its the seconds that make minutes, hours and days and on to the counting in years. Time matters in all endeavours.
The quotes this week are from a book that in keeping with the spirit of the month as a period of recalling the contributions and journeys of African people. It narrates the experience of women in one of the regions where emancipation became an important word. I am sure the selected few quotations listed below will enlighten you to one or two life lessons, read and enjoy:
THE WOMEN OF RENDEZVOUS by Jenny Shaw
“On Rendezvous, Hester encountered only a handful of European servants and scores of enslaved Africans. These were the women, men, and children who weeded, manured, and harvested the sugar growing in the fields. They were the workers who put the canes through the sugar mills, squeezing the robust, thick stalks to release the sweet juices that would run into the hot and suffocating boiling house. These were the laborers who skimmed impurities from the tops of the boiling cauldrons of liquid, waiting for the precise moment at which to begin the cooling process and shape the soft brown crystals into cones to be sold as muscovado sugar back in England.”
“The many claims made by her enslavers required Susannah to be alert and on guard at all times, not least with John, whose demands were often sexual in nature. Elite white men seized women’s bodies with impunity and enslaved women were especially vulnerable. Because of racist beliefs that women of African descent possessed voracious sexual appetites and willingly used their sexuality to bend enslavers to their will, white men’s sexual coercion of enslaved women was an extension of their belief that all serving women were willing and accessible prey.”
“English observers assumed that enslaved women, whether laboring in sugar fields, or performing domestic work, like Susannah and Elizabeth, needed no recovery from childbirth. Ideas about Black women’s bodily strength had a long history among European observers, who often commented on the supposed lack of pain that African or indigenous American women experienced when birthing children. Most European men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not witness childbirth by their own wives, mothers, and sisters, let alone attending when African or indigenous American women gave birth. Nonetheless, their racist presumptions about the innate strength of non-white women’s bodies informed their ideas about these women’s ability to recover quickly from labor.”
“Whether taken prisoner in war or snatched from their places of birth by local traders, women, men, and children were matched in coffles to the coast. Many did not survive the journey. Ripped from their places of birth and often separated from family, kin, and friends, most found themselves shackled to a stranger with whom they may or may not have been able to communicate, only to eventually be corralled into one of the sixty or so slave castles that dotted the shores of the West African coast. Venture remembered how ‘all of us were put in a castle and kept for market.'”
