The Regional Seminar on Afro-Descendants in the Americas
La Ceiba, Honduras, 21 to 24 March, 2002
There would be no racial discrimination against us if we, the so-called African Americans, had not been dispossessed of our homeland, Africa, taken into slavery for 430 years and stripped of our identity: mother tongue, culture and religion. We descendants, in South America, Central America, North America and throughout the Diaspora, are suffering the lingering effects of slavery.
The taking away of one’s identity has the same effect as does racial discrimination: it places the powerful in rulership over the powerless. Call it what you will, discrimination against us is born out of the loss of identity. Still today the Black man is denied the means of getting up, or reclaiming his lost ties: his identity. When he tries he faces opposition.
For the lack of knowing his original family name, the Black man accepts a family name that fits the region where he resides. You see the difficulty that we have in communicating with each other. We are of the same family, you and I, yet we sit across the table speaking these European languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese. The slave masters forced these languages upon our foreparents. They are not our languages.
Once, long ago, our freedom to think and speak in our own languages was willfully taken. The door to our identity was permanently shut! This door must be opened! During slavery our mother tongue, culture and religion were mercilessly destroyed. Consider the magnitude of the damage that this did to us. Reparations in the form of money alone will not repair this! Complete restoration should be our demand. Let’s give ourselves a name and begin it.
The Durban Conference Against Racial Discrimination has asked the Commission on Human Rights to establish a working group or mechanism in order to deal with the issues of the Afrodescendants’ communities. The door is now open in the United Nations! Come, let’s grasp this opportunity! Lets go there with a name for ourselves, that we have chosen, together, and tell them that we want a place in the UN system, collectively. We are a family. This is our chance to reclaim ourselves, or our identity. Quoting professor Bengoa, the process of reclaiming lost ties is called "ethnogenesis."
Like the Indigenous Peoples, we are many diverse peoples and nations. We do not have to give up our diversity, or our leadership to become as one, politically. The Indigenous Peoples are even more diverse than we, yet they have been able to come together under one name in order to gain human rights protection, reparations and restoration. They have a place in the UN system. We do not. Cannot we do the same as they, or better? We are 250,000,000 strong, approximately. Given a platform, 250 million people have a lot of political power. We need a name. I offer, the name LOST FOUND Peoples, to begin the discussion. There is no question that we were lost, and that Professor Jose Bengoa and the Working Group on Minorities are in the process of trying to help us find a place where we fit.
Silis Muhammad.
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