The African Ancestors

The blessings of the ancestors are greater than those of living human beings. It's important to remember that as you do for your ancestors, your children will do for you. Slavery created countless forgotten family memories for the African Americans whose families had been pulled apart, with family members scattered by the wind. The end of slavery in the United States did very little to mend the African American family. 

 

Families could still be separated by circumstance because newly freed slaves hand nothing. The Freedmen's Bureau was set up to assist the ex-slaves but it did not work. Most slaves ended up returning to their former masters as laborers and sharecroppers in an agreement that almost guaranteed their ability not to prosper. The system former slave owners set up meant most sharecroppers could work the entire year and still end up owing most if not all of their money to the former slave owner.

 

When I think about the African ancestors, I end up feeling that in spite of the fact they were no longer amongst the living they were the lucky ones. Those who chose to be drowned rather than be carried away from home and into the unknown, and all of the drowned slaves, who through no choice of their own, were purposefully drowned because of sickness or to prevent a slave ship captain from being caught with slaves on board his vessel during a surprise boarding by the British or American governments, tasked with maintaining a blockade to prevent new slaves from being shipped to America. 

 

African and African American ancestor's souls, that had long since found their way back to the motherland were spared the days of slavery in the U.S., and even though we do not speak the language of our ancestors, hundreds of years later African Americans today can still feel the unwelcome heat of racism the ancestors learned to live with. Everything that made our African ancestors unique in their clothing, their language, their religion, and their families were taken from them upon arrival in the United States.

 

Out of that social and cultural deprivation for colored people associated with slavery in the United States came today’s modern-day Americans of African descent, like me, that honor our ancestors with events like the Juneteenth Celebration. In the African world and cosmological view of life, the ancestors are forever alive. It is said that the ancestors do things like connect Africans to their beloved ones, bless their fertility, even intervene when there is a spiritual blockage or polluting elements that threaten happiness, order, health, and life.

Our African slave ancestors came from a continent that consisted of a mixture of countries and various tribes that each possessed their own unique characteristics which in my opinion, is not only worth celebrating but worth studying as well. While I have not yet gone to African Ancestry and submitted any DNA to be traced back to the continent of Africa I have for a long time been able to trace my family roots back to the state of Texas, the birthplace of the Juneteenth Celebration and the home of many of the ancestors I celebrate.