By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
The world is still in the process of change, renewal and revitalisation as life goes on. Just like there have been people before and we have those living now, there will be other people in future. The only difference is that each generation have their own world view mostly informed by what they see around and that is perceived possible in their eyes and thoughts.
In olden days as cities became bigger, it led to an increase in burglary and generally immoral behaviour. Space started to be scarce, each corner of land mattered and the ground became harder as it became heavier from the thousands of feet passing over it. Noticeably, in most regions it led to a sharp increase in migration of people from rural areas to the cities suburbs leaving massive lands behind unattended. Paradoxically, in addition leading to abandonment of old relations and developments of new human relationships.
In modern times as cities become bigger, most of them that are progressive, are having to express their growth through getting to the roots of mother earth. Unlike before, the growth leads to an increase in natural vegetation and awareness by people of environmental issues. Most are now recalling that humans were commanded at the first creation to look after all things in the world. Perhaps we have now found the truth looking at the massive number of trees being planted in modern cities.
The quotes this week are a final extraction from a book that in keeping with the spirit of the African Day month, May as a period of recalling the contributions and journeys of African people, 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 from the book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons, read and enjoy:
THE WOMEN OF RENDEZVOUS by Jenny Shaw
“Londoners who herd either woman speak would have their suspicions of their otherness confirmed. In the 1720 novel The Jamaica Lady, which recounts the experiences of several women who traveled to Restoration England from Jamaica, the mixed-race protagonist. Holmesia, is described as especially unbecoming because of how she sounds. When she spoke, according to the narrator, ‘her language was a sort of Jargon, being a Dialect peculiar to the Natives of that Island, it being partly English, and partly Negroish, so that unless a Man had been some time in the Country, he could not well understand their Meaning,’ This suggestion that she mixed ‘English’ and ‘Negroish’ into a form of speech that was allegedly unintelligible to white island visitors signaled Holmesia’s racial ambiguity as well as her depravity……. “
“As the daughters and sons of a prominent landowner, enslaver, and Barbados politician, John’s children with Hester and Frances never questioned whether they would be considered legitimate in the eyes of the English state: their father’s marriages to their mothers made it so. John drew on his status as patriarch to set the children up in life, and to provide for them after his death. Hester’s daughter and sons were around twenty-three, twenty, eighteen, and twelve when their father died. Frances’s daughters were orphans by the time they were seven, five, and four respectively.”
“The very public tearing down of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in June 2020 centered on his leadership of the Royal African Company and the wealth he built by trading in human beings. The profits Colston returned to England are a key part of that story, of course, but the ways that fortune was amassed is still viewed as something that happened ‘over there,’ not in England itself. Thus, England became one of the wealthiest and most dominant empires the world has ever seen through the labor of women, men, and children from Africa, and yet there is virtually no acknowledgment at the state level that some of those women, men, and children were enslaved in England itself.”
“This is why the women at the heart of this story matter, and the enslaved women especially so. When they came to England their very existence remained precarious precisely because even if they believed themselves to be free, the chance of being returned to a life in bondage was always present. Their children also walked that thin line. The Yorke-Talbot ruling of 1729 was clear that enslaved Africans brought from the West Indies to Britain did not become free by virtue of being on British soil. ……….”
