Comm-unity

The concept of community has come more boldly into frame now I am making a life in Meritah*.

In Meritah, community is everything. One of my best friends, now transitioned, said; “In Afrika we don’t have money but we have each other.”

It is a sad reality that in the West, we are more likely to rather rely on money to get us through challenges than ask for help from our own family or a neighbour. Truth.

It’s not necessarily a matter of self-reliance; more individualistic socialisation, or a sentiment of being an encumbrance on another, and or the thought that if they help me, I will have to help them at some time in the future.

This individualistic way we are brought up appears selfish, ignorant, shallow, even stupid. Why wouldn’t we ask for and accept the support of our family or those around us? This feeling of separation from those we are connected to (we are connected to all beings) will in turn push nature itself away. And if you truly, deeply know what nature is, our actions amount to a spiritual death.

When you don’t know, you don’t know. When you know – there is no excuse.

During Covid times, there had been a glimpse of Westerners pulling together. Neighbours living on the same road became a little more connected, more friendly and lend a helping hand more than normal; but soon enough – once the nationwide clapping for the hospital/health service workers was over – we returned to the practise of ignoring each other.

I remember my spiritual guide from West Africa, observed that in Britain people don’t acknowledge each other, but their dogs sure do. This is how many of us have been socialised into behaving.

Community; what does this concept mean to you?

Common definition is; a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common, or; the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

Family of course is the first community we come to know. When I hear the word family, my mind immediately goes to a nuclear unit of mother, father and siblings. This is how I grew, and this is what I knew.

It is within the family that we learn our cultural values and principles. Without the understanding of our own values we are left open to being moulded by those values upheld by the wider society.

And that is exactly what happens to us, when we start to spend most of our time in those institutions called schools.

I am of course speaking as someone who was born and socialised into the western model of a community or society.

This life differs greatly from the traditional ways that would have been mine to know much earlier in this life had my Ancestors not been removed from their lands and enslaved by greedy, manipulative ignorants.

After the Africans were captured, the first thing the slavers did was to separate families. The father would be sent east, the mother west (or vice versa) and the children would be given to another plantation.

This is the power of the family.

If you are familiar with my website and my writings past and present, you will know that I have spent most of my adult life striving to return to the way of my Ancestors; first to discover and investigate how far back I could go to directly experience my original culture; and then to dig deep into what that is.

Books, Black/Afrikan history courses (although, often quite politicised), travel, primary research – assisted me greatly. Guyana, my parents’ land became a place of investigation. My mother is directly from the Arawak peoples of that land, so there was something to hold onto that led to an Ancient tradition. But my heart had always been in Meritah, knowing that everything had started there, and seeing myself in the people.

How the Ancients lived community

Sobonfu Somé’s book, Welcoming Spirit Home, is a wonderful empirical account/workbook of Community at work in a traditional Afrikan context. All her work in fact is dedicated to exemplifying the importance of community and how to cultivate it into a Western context.

Her often comical telling of her family of many (in the extended sense) without understanding of the idea of possessions. That even your underwear doesn’t belong to you. If your sister finds a need or use for it, permission need not be sought. Everything belongs to the community.

With time and wisdom, we can see how freeing and humbling this is, and how unimportant things really are.

To move to Meritah, I released many possessions and it was freeing for the most part. But it was also hard to cast off many items that had emotional connection, and even those that thoughts of “I may need someday” tricked the mind into holding them dear. They all were eventually released.

After being chained, stripped of his and her family and shipped as cargo, the enslaved African was placed on plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean among Africans from different families, tribes, clans than their own. The consequence of this was calamitous; limited communication as no one spoke each other’s language. Over time, you would forget your own language. And if you didn’t forget it, you were whipped until you did. Family, language, daily practices, your spirituality, these are some elements that make up a culture, and they ebbed away from the enslaved African.

We grew under the same small roof in a three-up, two-down compact house but we weren’t close. I spent so much time alone; and I think my sisters did too. I remember some closeness but no real bond or feeling of connection with these other people around my age.

Christmas was a time I felt that we came close to being a family unit. We never had anyone but the five of us in the house at Christmas time and we never left the house on Christmas day. It felt so cosy and dependable. We all sat around the fake tree at some point during the day and watched as each one of us took it in turns to unwrap a gift. Special times. And probably there were other close times, such as holidaying as a family.

But of course, this wasn’t our culture. We were assimilating into an adopted culture.

Even with awareness, how can a family so far from the root of who they are reclaim it? At best, they can attempt to piece together elements of knowledge to give cultural direction to their children.

In Kemetic tradition, family is everything. It is the backbone of society. Without fully functioning families, there is societal breakdown. The Ancestors have passed down, through the generations, the values and principles of the original Kemetic family. The blueprint, the solution is there.

Kemetic tradition confirms that every member of my extended family has a role to play in my development. It is the blood, not love, that embodies the concept of family. Family is about devotion and responsibility. Mother and father, uncles, aunts, grandparents all carry the same devotion to the goal of the family which is designed for the protection of the descendants. The purpose of family is for the becoming and stability of the children.

From tradition, I learn I have many mothers and fathers, and who I thought was Uncle is not. My mother’s father and brothers are my Uncles, my father’s father and brothers are my fathers, and mother’s sisters are my mothers.

To me this is beautiful. Here is a network with common values and the goal to set me and their offspring on a steady path. Perhaps some of my family members understood this, but we didn’t see them often enough for them to make that difference. My extended family was either in Guyana or had emigrated to America or Canada.

The word for community/society in Kiswahili is jumuia. In Meritah, when you walk down the street, it is abnormal not to greet almost everyone you pass, especially if you live in the same village or town. In fact, you would be identifying yourself as a foreigner if you didn’t. I love the happiness on people’s faces when a hello comes their way. Such joy to simply be acknowledged by someone else. It may say, yes you exist, I see you, I am connected to you, I know you are here now in this time and space.

Somé says the environment we are born into often lacks the very thing we need – so we can eventually go in search of it. And when we find it we can then teach it and communicate why it’s necessary to the world.

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*Meritah/TaMeri = The traditional name for the land of Afrika.

Thanks to the Ancestors and to the Earth Center – www.theearthcenteruk.com or www.theearthcenter.org for the guidance to my original culture and spirituality.

Sobonfu Somé is celebrated at this years’ Nne Agwu Storytelling Family Retreat.