If you are Black, never allow your genetic material to be sequenced. If you are African, never allow your DNA to be sequenced. If you are an African Government, never allow European-American companies to swoop in and sequence the genetic materials of any individuals or groups of individuals for any reason—not even for their fake research projects. In fact, if you are an African Government—that is made up of thinking and sane men and women—make it a heinous crime of humanity for any person’s DNA to be sequenced within your national borders. The punishment of which must come by the electric chair. If you are Black and you live in a white supremacist nation like in the United States of America or Brazil, protest, dispute, and avoid companies that lure you, and other people of African descent to sequence their DNA.
The reason is simple. This is something you cannot dispute. There’s no benefit to Black people or to Africans for allowing strangers to know who and what they really are. It is not necessary. Indeed, it is to your detriment to have or allow your genetic material to be sequenced by white supremacist institutions. (Although they do not proclaim that they are. Why would they?) But our history as people of African descent serves us several examples, the prominent one of which is the narrative of what happened to the Ancient Mali Empire after Mansa Musa partook in a pilgrimage to Mecca. It is said that Mansa Musa performed so much philanthropy on his way to Mecca, and in Mecca in particular that all others, all peoples of other nations, rather than appreciate the King of Mali’s generosity, rather decided to hate him; they decided that rather than love him, they would hate Malians and hate Ancient Mali. Consequently, the other Muslims, beneficiaries of Mali’s good will, decided to invade, loot, destroy and burn the Mali Empire to the ground.
The lesson: Your African philanthropy begets only violence from others.
Take for another ensuing example. Look at what has happened to modern Ghana in the last four hundred or so years. It took a few kings of the present day Ghana to acquiesce to the so-called benefits to English civilization. As it turned out, the English did not drop to Ghana for the sake of civilization at all. They had swooped in from England, stooped in English barbarism, proper, but cloaked in sheep’s skin and were ready to dismantle yet again a peaceful, benevolent, and generous nation in West Africa. Although several of Ghana’s elites, like Nana Yeboah, were critical of the acquiescence of African kings, and amply warned their kings against the Pecksniffian European missionaries, our kings refused to listen. What ensued remains for posterity to judge. From out of today’s Ghana came through more than 90 percent of kidnapped Africans brought into the Americas in what atrocity to humanity we now call the American Chattel Slavery (or Kunyowu, “Death Is Better”). Ghana, as a result, suffered many centuries of terrorism and plunder under various European kings. The story of Ghana is no different from other African nations. And the story of Blacks in Africa is not different from that of Africans in the diaspora.
Today, the new missionaries from Europe-America, who call themselves “Scientists,” again swoop into our midst with yet again their own scientific mission. And what must we do? Acquiesce? Show them yet again our African benevolence? Accept them as humans?
Absolutely not. Today, European-American scientists gallivant the continent of Africa, buoyed forth by the stolen wealth, the loot, of their capitalist pigs in Monsanto, the US Federal Government, the Merinda-Bill Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, and the Obama Foundation, and entreat us to sell our birth-rights to their genetically modified crops (GMOs). In essence, what they require from us is to sell our future and eat our own children as a prerequisite to becoming acceptable to their English barbarism. What they require of us is nothing but to sell our human rights to grow our own food, and to sell our human rights to be able to feed ourselves—when we can, what we can, how much we can, and wherever we can—to their violent capitalists. What they require of us is to borrow money from their dirty, blood-stained, blood-thirsty hands, called Banks (IMF, Word Bank, NGOs, etc.), in order for us to live like human beings. What the American-European missionaries of today, the Scientists, are selling to the African elite, to our leaders, yet again is the noose for our total enslavement.
But nothing is complete without the voluntary actions (without the revolution) of the individuals themselves—even the ongoing lynching. African leaders may sell the continent to Europeans and their American cousins, but even that will not be complete without our individual voluntary surrender of our human rights and our dignity to the white supremacists. And that is the crux of the issue of DNA sequencing.
Who owns the DNA material that makes a human being after it has been sequenced? The answer, the company. Who owns the genetic material that you pass on to your children after you’ve allowed the Caucasian American and European companies to sequence it? Now, the answer is simply the European-American company, the white supremacist lab. To be precise, the elite capitalists of European descent own all DNA materials sequenced. As you walk into a laboratory to have your DNA sequenced by Europeans or Americans, what you are truly engaging in is a sale. A sale of yourself. Not only that. Worse, you engage in the sale of your children, your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren. You sell your own future, precisely the ability to make your future how you deem fit.
Some would say that this reading is too harshly painted, that what happens in those labs with those toolkit is not exactly that. I say that it is. What exactly happens is that a company which now owns your DNA can decide what they want to do with that information and biological material. They can decide to make three more people like you. Or when you die, they can decide to terrorize your children and your loved ones with a carbon copy of you. They can also decide to have your children using this copy as their father. They can decide to enslave those children (since the children will also belong to the company as property) and they can decide to kill them. Those children will become their property. This is Chattel slavery all over again.
What I understand is this. I understand that for Africans in the diaspora—whose original narratives of which African nations they belong to have been violently stripped off by their European kidnappers and enslavers—there’s the desire to know where one’s ancestors originated from inside Africa. I empathize with the sentiment and the existential need to know what information may be available in the DNA material about one’s origins in Africa. But the act of knowing itself, on one side is a blessing, and on the other side it may be the final curse. The curse here is that once your DNA is sequenced by that White Supremacist Company, which is what American-European scientists and their science and technology companies truly are, you can no longer have control of how your genetic material can be used, propagated, and owned. You will have no human rights over your own offspring, and you will not have the ability to tell your children—made in your image, inside a lab—who they really are, or where they come from. Your DNA ceases to be African. It becomes the property of Caucasians. It becomes the property of white supremacists. This must trouble any Black person, this must disturb any African who previously had thought about sequencing their DNA material in a white supremacist lab or with a white supremacist toolkit.
Knowing that you a person of African descent is more than enough, if the alternative is that you must sell your biological material, through DNA sequencing schemes, to people who partly hate and partly despise you for being African!
If you are Black, never allow your genetic material to be sequenced. If you are African, never allow your DNA to be sequenced, not today, not tomorrow, or ever. Never allow your crops to be sequenced. Never allow your food to be sequenced. Never allow your water to be owned by foreigners. Never trust Europeans. The past five hundred years of Africa’s relationship with Europe and Europeans is there for everyone to behold. Again, I stress that if you are of African descent, never allow your DNA to be sequenced, no matter what! For the final curse—of never owning your food, and never having the right to remain the pure ancestor of the generations after you—may be your lot. I hope you will remain the final barrier to the continued propagation of European barbarism throughout the world and beyond.
aptly put. We are too trusting of our oppressors. To add a few lines to what you have written, to allow it to be sequenced which they have already done anyway, is to give them the final weapon for our demise. Beyond the cloning, they can now tailor made biological weapons against us. Read ‘a Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare’. They done it severally before, with lesser degree of success, and so what prevents them to do so again. Poverty is the tool at their disposal
Troubling
Should we get our blood groups checked?
Should we embrace medicine from Europe?
Should we quit Facebook where our minds are sequenced?
Should we quit all other human civilisations and live as recluses?
This is extreme extremism.
Yes, evil exists. Racism is real. Supremacists roam every part of our worlds, including black Africa.
Wise engagement is better than total disengagement. To overcome something one must indulge it.
Hate is not a race. Hate is Men and Women everywhere you go.
I am talking about DNA sequencing. I advise that you stay away from it. I speak only of staying away from white supremacist projects. What you call “wise engagement” is actual total acquiescence to white supremacism. What I advice is rather engaging where it matters and refusing engagement where there are concerns. That is wise. Anything else is foolish.
But I digress. Alas, get your DNA materials sequenced. Lose your rights over your own DNA materials. And proceed with that argument for anything that according to Locke, the white man mixes his labor with. Soon… you will not exist.
As for your earlier argument about embracing “medicine” from Europe or that or this, I feel you are thoroughly and immaculately disillusioned. If I carried your argument further to its excess, Africa wouldn’t have shared paper (papyrus) and writing itself with the rest of the barbaric world. Plus, one does not have to engage with Europe to advance, whatever that advancement is. Even North Korea has advanced without the west. No one African nation can boast about advancement for the past five hundred years of its dalliance with the west. Sorry. African engagement with Europe has been altogether devastating for Africa and beneficial to the west. Nothing more. So you can sing and dance about your engagement with Europe all you want. It comes to nothing. Zero.
Narmer, You mean well but you grossly oversimplify the facts.
The same way you are here sequencing your best brain matter on Facebook and it getting archived on a server for centuries elsewhere you have no idea exists is the same way Sequencing Machines capture data.
You better argue Africans quit the formal healthcare system then.
The DNA data is auto-captured on every single visit to a laboratory.
Caution should mean building our own capacity and Competence, not Disengagement.
Kwaku, I think you presume that all modern structures are the result of the European Miracle. Take for instance this idea, which you have severally repeated, of the so-called “formal medicine.” Is this the sole invention of white people? You mean no other people but Europeans contributed to the standardization of medicine? I think, and this is what I glean from your responses, that you have forgotten that formal medicine itself begun on this same continent. That the father of medicine is actually, and in truthfulness, Imhotep. Not the other guy! The fact that not all ethnic groups had standard structures in place on one aspect of industry does not mean it didn’t begin here or that it didn’t even stay alive here.
Europe did not invent modern medicine. I hate to break it to you. What I agree with is that they have contributed some to modern medicine. But that is like saying the Chinese have contributed to modern medicine. Russians have contributed to modern medicine. Africa contributed to modern medicine. Nothing useful exists in such statements except to write off whole groups of people as damn or not illustrious enough.
This leads me to the prevailing paradigm in Colonial Africa, which presumes to proceed with the argument that all modern structures in Africa are the indirect result of colonialism. That as much as colonialism hurt, it did some “good.” Which is nonsense. Which is ridiculous. Which is the narrative of the European Miracle. You seem to believe it.
Without colonialism, Africa would have been far better off today. In fact, without colonialism, that is, without our so-called engagement with the west even now, all through neo-imperialism, African nations will be much better off. What is certain is that Europe would be nothing without Africa. What is certain is that particularly western Europe would have remained undeveloped without their looting of African resources and the rebranding of such narratives as if the looting was necessary to bringing Africans “modern medicine.” That is racist. It stems from a religious, scientific and cultural argumentation of white superiority. It is racist because it is not even remotely true that they added anything to African advancement. (Hint. Africa is not advanced, not in the economic sense!)
There’s more to the point, but suffice it to say that Africa’s engagement with Europe is a complete and utter disaster. There’s no “good” stuff gained from a bad relationship, especially an abusive one in which the abused is not even aware they are abused. As for your point of comparing facebook dialogue to dna materials, I will disagree. Cloning new animals is not the same as plagiarizing. But you bring up another point. We often forget that much of the materials we read today, as European inventions, are plagiarized materials from Africa, proper. I bet you’d be remiss to find in any literature that the very theory underlying the building of computing algorithms (using 0s and 1s) were a uniquely African mathematical science. Not borrowed, but plagiarized. You will not find that information in European textbooks, or in the ones they force us to study in our colonial schools. African is written out of existence.
Which brings me exactly to the point. Do not allow them to write you off again through another means. All I have said, is at least do not grant people who have shown no other attitude towards Africa, except to plagiarize her works, except to loot her resources, except to colonize and control her people, to sequence your DNA material. This is the height of transferring wealth from Africa to Europe and from Africans to Europeans. This is how the European miracle is constructed and maintained. How this is not a concern for you is what beats me. I am raising the issue of ownership. Perhaps if I wrote about land rights it would make more sense? Your DNA is your property. But you sell it completely to Europeans by allowing them to sequence it. And if your DNA, as you say is “auto-captured on every single visit to a laboratory” you can legally request that they lose it. More, that lab cannot own that material without your consent. It is still yours unless you sign it away in a DNA sequencing laboratory.
The issue about DNA material is a modern heist issue. It is an issue centered on the prevailing and continued looting of African resources. I am saying you should remain the last barrier, the fight, against this historical looting of African resources. If you think I am rather the one doing the hating, then I beg you to look around a second time, especially at Africa’s relationship with the West in the past five hundred years and compare that to nations that decided to disengage, and where they are today (hint: Russia, N Korea, and to a small extent Cuba). They are all better than any African nation. It is that simple. I call Europe, and Europeans, for what they are and for what they have done to Africa and Africans. I do not mince words. I think mincing words is a kind of lying. But that is me. Please tell the truth, it is the one staring you right in the face. It is not that complicated.