There Was A God, And Its Name was Terror

The dawn had broken through the clouds in its battle with night when my plane lightly stepped on the concrete tarmac of the Philadelphia International Airport. It was a cold February day, I can still remember. We meandered our way like sleepwalking automatons through immigration and customs control. Most of us were still battling with night to break into the day of wakefulness. I made my way to the arrival hall while scanning the crowds for her. Finally I found her and she found me. Mamakai flew into my arms and began to squeal with delight. The last time I had seen her was ten years earlier. She had visited me in Moscow where I was studying theoretical physics as a graduate student.

I looked at her, she had not changed at all. We went way back to our school days in secondary school in Ghana and at the University. Our relationship was an interesting one. She was to me like a sister but more than a sister but yet less than one with whom one shares intimacy. It had been like that for many years now and it will remain so. So we hovered in this realm of deep filial but quasi-intimate friendship. As I looked at her, I remarked to myself how beautiful she was. She had always been. Her long braided African hair, her big brown eyes, her face like that of a Kemet goddess. I always called her Nefertiti, my divine adoratrix. I could not tell or even remember why and when, whether I loved her for her mind or for her beauty. Maybe for both. I myself could not tell.

We drove through the streets of Philadelphia which was slowly waking up to life and on the highway to the suburbs where Mamakai lived with her husband. She was a neurosurgeon now. She had always been the smart one. Her husband was a software engineer. They lived on a quite tree lined street in a picturesque house at the end of the street tucked into a corner. The snow still covered mother earth with its soft fluffy snow sheets like bed sheets covering a warm mattress. The trees looked forlorn shorn of their beards of leaves and waiting impatiently for the joy of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. I jokingly said to Mamakai, if these trees lived in our southern cone, they would not be naked as they were now but will still have their beards of leaves. She laughed and her eyes flashed a twinkle. Our eyes both laughed at each other and then we went into the house.

Mamakai took me to see the city a few days after I arrived. We walked around the City Hall with its statue of William Penn the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, although the Native Americans lived here before him, but he founded it, so said the rulers of the land. We walked until we got to the LOVE sculpture standing in loving guard over a fountain. It stood on a truncated pyramid with a wide base. The V and E like soulmates stood hand in hand on the base of the truncated top. On top of them, the L stood directly above the V with its leg pushed into the O which rolled on top of the E but leaning away from the ever lustful embrace of the L. They wore colors of red with shades of blue. In the close distance ringing the outer perimeter of the LOVE sculpture park stood melancholic trees waxing poetic for the sweet embrace of spring. There were young couples, many among them European American couples sitting with their kids around the sculpture of LOVE. Some were taking pictures, others were huddled close to each other and talking. It was a cold day. The sun shone in its brilliance but it still could not win its battle with the cold heart of winter. Still it was a clear day. Cars wound slowly around the streets of City Hall like metal beasts defying the bitter February cold.

We found a secluded bench at the very far end of the little concrete park surrounding the sculpture. We drank our coffee and began to talk. We talked about my work at the university in Accra where I was now an assistant professor of Theoretical Physics. I talked excitedly about starting a new graduate program to begin to train a generation of theoretical physicists in Africa who would carry the burning torch of African science to the ends of the world. I went on telling Mamakai about deep connections between the laws of physics and Maat that I was just beginning to explore. Mamakai looked at me and laughed. She said “you are always so poetic when you begin to dream of your next big ideas…”

That was when I saw him. He looked stooped, a bent old man, carrying what looked like a backpack. He had a greying beard and a crown of thick hair also greying. His clothes looked soiled and unhappy, they seemed to be begging to be let go, for they had served faithfully for far too long. He was holding in his hand a book and muttering to himself. He was one of our own, a descendant of those who the cruel twist of fate had carried across the seven seas from their mother Africa to the belly of the white beast which had ground them into the stupor of despair, the bottomless pit of inhumane violence.

He came straight to us and sat beside me. Mamakai moved slightly to make room for him. He looked at me and said, “Hey young man! Can’t you give an old brother some coffee, don’t you see I am freezing cold?” I quickly gave him my coffee and he quickly gulped it down and then with a satisfied look turned to me and Mamakai and said, “Happy to see you my long lost brothers and sisters from the motherland”. We both smiled.

His name was Herman Black. He had been born in Georgia three score and ten years before his sorry present. He was now 70 years old. Herman began to talk. He said he was homeless not by any fault of his own but it was the System, the Machine which had designed a program that was still ongoing to break the will and the consciousness of his people. He had once had a job and a wife who had died from cancer. They had sold everything to pay for her treatment. He had fallen back on his mortgage and the bank had taken the house. The interest rate on the mortgage was very high to begin with but as he said, half-laughing “black people don’t choose their mortgage rates, the mortgage rates choose black people”. I could not but laugh at his sharp wit. He went into bankruptcy and had struggled to find a new job at the age of 55. He did not have much education. He had only finished middle school in Georgia. Back then, they had few high schools for Black folks like him in the Deep South. The Machine did not want too many Black people getting too much education. He used to work in a factory but as age crept up and with the loss of everything, he went into a meltdown. Depression had set in. So he began to live on the streets.

We sympathized with his predicament. We all sat in silence for ten long minutes. I kept on thinking, the different colors of fate. Here I was sitting with Mamakai, we both had good jobs. We had been sheltered in the pride and dignity of our homeland, cocooned by our African culture we had achieved academic success. But here was Mr. Herman Black. America had done everything to break his spirit even before he was born, he had been born into a cultural vacuum, a pit of contempt and calculated methodical evil to break his spirit and the spirit of his people. He did not have the luxury of the pride and dignity of being that African culture would have fed him. No loving grandmother in the village who would have taught him the ancient ancestral songs. The sweet smell of native land and hearth where one’s pride and dignity was nourished by mother Africa, our dear mother Kemet. Yes, fate certainly has different colors.

Herman suddenly turned to me, a deep reflective look on his face and said, “You know, the Machine is designed to encourage white terrorism, yes you know it is white terrorism!” I looked at him in confusion, he then said I will tell you why I think that; He began, and it sounded like a sermon. It was the sermon of Herman Black:

There are many among the white people in America who worship a god called the god of whiteness. This god demands only the hatred of other people of his worshippers. All its worshippers must only love white and hate others. The god does not accept any mixtures. The god does not accept color – only white. It punishes miscegenation that is, the mixing of people who consider themselves white with other races with unbridled violence. This god has its own set of commandments, the first and most important being, “Thou shall not treat others of a different skin color the same as thou cherishes yourself”. This god has always been around but only in the last 500 years did it gain many followers. This god has its own priests, its own theologians, its various sects, reform and counter reform movements. Its theologians are academics, journalists, writers, judges, politicians. Its armed wing are the police forces who enforce the tenets of the religion of whiteness.

It has its radicals and extremists. Some of its extremists have names like Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK and others. These extremists believe in what they call the White Crusade, the crusade to destroy all other races or dominate all other races. There are many who worship the god of whiteness who do not belong to these radical groups but still subscribe to the idea of the white crusade. The great white crusade for us Black folks is just nothing but simply white terrorism.

I will tell you a story about my grandfather who was born in Georgia like me. He was lynched by white people worshipping the god of whiteness and burned to death. Hundreds of them with their children stood watching and laughing as my grandfather and his screams were consumed by the fire that they had lit under his badly beaten body. They had accused him of looking at a white woman lustfully. For this their god had demanded his body as a human sacrifice. This vengeful god of whiteness demands human sacrifices before it would bless and shine its approval on its worshippers. It demanded only colored people but especially the human sacrifices of Black people to it met its greatest approval. It said its people were the chosen and the exceptional ones, as long as they sacrificed the bodies of Black people on its altar, it would continue to bless them, for it had chosen them from among the races to make a special name for itself.

Thus was created the machine, the system to feed this god of whiteness with its black victims, as long as this blood thirsty god had its black victims whose burning flesh was so sweet to its nostrils, they, the worshippers of the god of whiteness would continue to prosper. So they fed this god with our suffering, our broken bodies, and our dignity. They threw us into their prisons, they lynched us, for them, we were the barbecue meat that had to be roasted to their god. They shot us, they sent us to die in their wars of conquest, they ground us with the pestle of slavery, discrimination and contempt. They destroyed our communities with drugs and cheap alcohol shops. That is what white terrorism has done to our people, that is what it has done to me. I grew up in a segregated America. I was beaten one time very badly for not giving up my seat to a white woman in a bus in Alabama. Now we are not physically segregated because the machine has found more novel ways to perpetuate white terrorism.

Herman suddenly stopped and then said “Not every white person worships the god of whiteness but many do and out of that many, many pursue white terrorism reaping Black victims for their rapacious god”. He then got up, looked at the four letters of LOVE, he seemed to be laughing at LOVE. I also looked at LOVE and began to laugh at it too. He then silently nodded to us in thanks. I and Mamakai sat stunned at the cadence of his sermon, the power of his expressions. We watched him slowly dissolve into the river of pedestrians filling the wide spaces around City Hall. I looked up at the statue of William Penn perched on his imperious perch atop City Hall, I looked again at the four letters of LOVE also perched on their truncated pyramid. About a hundred miles north of the four letters LOVE stood their Statue of Liberty. I wondered what that lonely lady of the statue thought of white terrorism. I and Mamakai got up to leave, in our minds was that last image of Herman Black dissolving into the crowds, a broken man, clinging to the last shreds of his dignity, yet another victim to the terror god, the god of whiteness in the land of the lonely lady of the Statue of Liberty.

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