Anything Black, White Kills

 OPINION

By Odimegwu Onwumere

Writers and musicians share things in common. Either music is written before it is sang, or it’s sang before it is written. To a large extend, musicians are great people who use lyrics to battle the ills and depression of the society. Music makes some people feel indestructible

Some people use music to lure the attention of persons to themselves. Music is even a form of torture. Some people blare loud music to induce people. Even a child that is crying is singing, but since it is not in artistic form, it is a wasted effort.

When I saw the theme, “The Future Weapon”, as it relates to music, two things came into my head:

1. Music as future weapon could help fight against injustices and help people in difficulties to end their plights.

2. Music as future weapon has brought untold wars and rancour in the world. For example, there came a period in the United States of America when musicians were alleged to have formed direful or dreadful cult and occult gangs that were pummelling their rivals to the soil. I think the dastardly act saw the likes of Tu Pac and BIG to the grave.

The above mentioned scenario still persists among musicians and music till date. We have heard of musicians raging wars with their music against their colleagues and using music to promote wars and other vices that the moralists in the society loathe with shame. We have heard about musicians been labelled with rape cases and violent crimes and other asunder and their music promoting what they preach.

Like it is said in Nigeria: anything Nigerian, Nigeria kills. I stand corrected to say that anything Black, White kills, instead of the obverse.

Because the people of Black Africa have experienced and are still experiencing all forms of intimidation from the whites, as a result, protest writings emerged cumulating to different songs during slave trade and colonialism.

These protest songs, pierce the soul for a re-think, than causing madness to the cerebrum, as we have today seen in the Rap and Hip-Hop songs, which emergence was aimed at bastardizing the altruistic foundation that these Black musicians had laid, without many people knowing or understanding, and the world is giving accolades to the radiant rubbishes.

Many of the foundational Black musicians were unselfish, and were bent on their messages through their music, to bettering mankind. Some of them were not taken seriously by their families and loved ones. They were called prostitutes, nothing-good could come from, and every other unprintable name.

But they were diehards to what they believed in – change. They believed that what they could not achieve with munitions as was introduced by the whites oppressors, they could achieve with lyrics. They believed that man needed peace in the natural world turned violent world by the white people, who forcefully voyaged them through the atlantics and spilled their kiths and kin blood on the pacific oceans, with the aid of their brainwashed Black people, who aided the whites, buy them. Black musicians did that to keep body and soul together from their perceived oppressors who not only bought them, but left the shores of the west, to the African Continent, to colonize them.

I think it was when music and musicians were much touted with credence, called celebrities, that the introduction of violence into music came and is celebrated, as a way of life, with America promoting any forms of inhumane act, as human rights or democratic norms. As a result, people were given rights to mundane and mind sore behaviours. I think, “It is my life to live” that is leading the world today, to the abyss.

As a poet, I have come to realise that poets are musicians, even though that many of us are not pronounced musicians. I have come to realise that there are two sides of the coin to music and musicians – positive and negative music and musicians.

Positive musicians are those who look at injustice on the face and implore justice to reign through their music, because going to the court could be a waste of time, because 75% injustices in the world emanate from the government imbalance of the society. And it is the government that owns the court, the police and the soldiers – all orchestrated to humiliate the populace, instead of instituting them to checkmate crimes of the society and keep law.

The negative musicians are those who promote the ills and injustices of the society in their music for the society’s assumption, thereby helping the government in the misbalancing of the society. But in all, there is no painstaking saying that the Black Africans are “Walking around, brainwashed”.

Imagine that the whites made the Christian and Muslim gods as something that the rest of Black Africa would either travel to Jerusalem to encounter, in the case of Christians, or travel to Saudi Arabia in the case of Muslims. But god is everywhere in Africa, before we were brainwashed and sold to the god made in Jerusalem or Saudi Arabia.

On the subject of god, the Ameer Spiritual leader, and Pan-African Movement leader, Writer/Poet Naiwu Osahon, in his masterpiece titled “Bible Calls God Satan”,  wrote that “the Bible is made up of the Old and New Testaments, and is the canon of the three branches of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Greek and other orthodox sects, and the Protestant groups. Judaism and Islam put premium on the Old Testament, which came from a wide range of ancient manuscripts written in archaic Hebrew, Aramaic, and Chaldean languages, with their problems of modern interpretations. Some of the books misquoted, distorted or misinterpreted to assemble the bible included: The Book of the Dead (African), which the British Museum gave their own title of (The book of the Coming Forth by Day and Night), in 1895; the book of Divines (African); the Book of Judgement (African); the Heart of Judgement and such other works. Also included in the list of documents, of course, was the Jewish Old Testament. Two of the most important documents the church fathers distorted and suppressed while putting the Christian religion together namely: The Coptic Scrolls, sometimes called the Nag Hammadi, were found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, while the Dead Sea Scrolls (supposed to have been produced around the 9th or 10th Century, were dug out of a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert in the 1950s”.

The erudite writer/poet Osahon went further, stating that “the Scrolls incorporate ideas from very ancient Pagan times in Egypt, and The Dead Sea Scrolls include Isaiah’s materials dating back to the second century BCE. These were all doctored while being translated into European languages. For instance, the Jews while translating the Hebrew religion into Greek text fraudulently spelt one of their deities or idols, with the capital letter ‘G’ for ‘God’ while spelling the idols of other nations with the small letter ‘g’ for ‘god’. Seventy Jewish scholars gathered in Alexandra, Egypt, around 200 BCE to perpetrate the fraud. They found that although Judaism was preaching monotheism, they were in reality serving several deities or gods of the Canaanites”.

Osahon reiterated that, what the world today refers to as the ‘Most High God’ was the Canaanite God “El”. He said: “The Canaanites deity was El (or El Elyon), whose subordinates or sons were spelt with small letters as in: el, eloah and elohiym. None of these deities, not even El, was considered the Supreme or Universal Being. They were all deities with El as their superior of Father or the only God that could be spelt with the capital letter ‘G’. These deities were actually super human beings who had at one time or the other lived on earth and are now ancestors who took charge of several individual nations. El Elyon (Black, Father or God of all gods), allocated the nations of the world to the deities”.

One Ben Noah, a European, also talked about such books, and he wrote: “Books such as: The Egyptian Book of the Dead (originally titled The Book of Coming Forth by Day and by Night) by E. A. Wallis Budge; The Coffin Text and The Pyramid Text; The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves; and Christianity Before Christ by John G. Jackson, among others, have recorded these various stories and all you have to do is read them to see this evidence for yourself. Some Egyptologists feel that the triad of deities: Amon, Mut and Khonsu, at the temple in Karnak, were copied by the early Christians to form the present Holy Trinity. I kid you not when I say that "all roads lead to Egypt and not Rome". Rome has just lied about it.... As a side note, according to most Christian scriptures, Jesus was said to have been born in Bethlehem, or Nazareth. In the Coptic writings, where the oldest Christians called Copts still reside (Kemet and Ethiopia), and according to Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan, a Kemetologist, born in Ethiopia, Jesus was said to have been born in Kemet (Egypt). In Matthew 2:15, it still says, "Out of Egypt shall I call my son!" Contrary to written sources, Kemet (Egypt) is where Christianity was born, while Ethiopia built the first Christian Church and was the world’s first and oldest Christian nation. Christianity was originally an African religion, as was the Hebrew African religion called Judaism”.

I have posited in an article before that it is saddening that before anything African could be heralded, Africans have to run to the western world, thereby making the West proud to be the volcanic point for the socio-eco-political existence of the Black race. But was this not the West that structured the entire Christian Bible after the ancient Egyptian mythologies of the Pharaohnic Sun worshippers? Was the entire scripture not stolen from Africa?

But I think that we are not to be blamed much, because we are “walking around, brainwashed”. This could be why Professor Molefi Kete Asante in his article titled “The Future Of African Gods: The Clash of Civilization” (July 10, 1998) wrote that “those who speak to us of Christian and Islamic morals have often been the very ones who have defiled our ancestors memories and called our sacred rites paganism. Malcolm X once said that the world pushes the African around because we give the impression that we are chumps, but chumps, weaklings, falling over ourselves to follow other people rather than our own traditions”. In the words of Asante, “this is what the Chinese and Indians have fought to keep at bay. While we have often embraced our enemies’ gods they have found those gods to be anathema to their interests. Show me the gods we Africans worship and I will show you the extent of our moral and ethical decay”.

However, music does not entertain any boundary, but many Black Africans have been indoctrinated with farted policies by the whites that many of us are carried away by any slight breeze that blows.

Odimegwu Onwumere, Poet/Author, Media/Writing Consultant and Motivator, is the Founder of Poet Against Child Abuse (PACA). He writes from Oyigbo, Rivers State.