What is Africa to Me?
by Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds, Journalist
What is Africa to me? It is a sacred memory. A spiritual connection. A liberating force that helped free me to help free others. A drumbeat that urges going forward, learning from the past and working to ensure that the sins are not repeated.
It took a while to come to that realization. It came during a visit to Gorée Island, Senegal recently with Rev. Leon Sullivan and about 100 other black leaders. I watched my fellow African Americans disembark from the dank dungeons, the hellholes where black slaves were chained until they were crammed sardine-like on the slave ships. Some were visibly angry, others shaken and some wept, like Nelson Mandela, who made this site one of his first stops after being freed from 27 years of prison. Still others talked of feeling the tortured spirits of their ancestors. I felt none of that.
For nearly three centuries Gorée was one of the world's most horrible chapters of inhumanity, a major stop on the slave route for millions of black slaves passing through on their way to the Americas.
Earlier among the crowds of colorfully-robed women in the marketplace, I looked for clues, a reflection of myself, a kindred spirit, something to help answer where did I come from and what is Africa to me. None of us can select the occasion or the circumstance of our birth. What if I had been plucked from my village, raped, chained and thrown into a putrid, cramped ship unfit for animal habitation? Would I have jumped overboard as did millions of others? Not even the comfort of family was even allowed because the slavers deliberately broke up the families by sending a brother to Haiti, the mother to the West Indies and the father to a plantation in Brazil.
Inside the slave huts I felt the anger but not the strong attachment with "the ancestors" as did many of the others as I had hoped. I had not been one to kiss the ground of the mother country no more than I kiss the lawn of my nice rambler-styled home in the environs of Washington. Most of the time I feel neither African nor American, but blended, more like a hybrid, not fully at home either place. I wear the name African American well.
Still the lure of the dungeons pulled me further in until I reached the end, the Door of No Return. This is the opening that some six million walked, dragged or were pushed through. Countless numbers died at sea, either from suicide or disease as a result of the squalor on the slave ships.
I walked through the door and there playing on the rocks was a chubby-faced boy tossing stones into the sea. Instead of my mind reeling backwards in an attempt to relive the terrible tragedies that happened here, I smiled at the child and thought of the future.
Then a tremendous sadness came upon me. Those black slaves, my ancestors had no choice but to get on the slave ships. But today thousands of African Americans are still in bondage chained by crack, alcohol, and domestic abuse. They are still slaves shackled and bound against their will. My sadness was personal because I, too, was not free to follow what was in my spirit, what I knew I had been called to do. Here I was a seminary graduate, but would not ask to be ordained because of an addiction to alcohol.
Even though I was unconvinced that Africa had no special meaning to me, something happened to change that. On those rocks where barefoot slaves had no doubt touched freedom for the last time, I asked God to set me free of my own addictions. And there at the root of my existence, the chains ripped loose, I felt a release, a spiritual breakthrough. I knew I was not going back to America carrying the burden I had brought with me.
Shortly afterwards I became an ordained minister at Greater Mt. Calvary Holy Church in Washington, went on to get my doctorate in ministry specializing in addictions and now lead a city-wide anti-drug program called Harriet's Children with the vision of building a healing center for women.
Healing. Freedom. Rebirth.
That is what Africa means to me.
