Mirror of Truth

Mirror Mirror on the Wall.

A mirror is a good thing to have. In front of a mirror, one gets to see his own self reflected. Faults in the form of blemishes, dirt, lack of symmetry, etc., are easily spotted and corrected if this is possible. Without this reference point, a person's only way of knowing that his appearance is perfect, lies in the eyes of others. Because we are happy with what we have, a culture without mirrors will settle for the use of other people's external and internal eyes as a replacement for a reflection, though these are prone to faulty feedbacks. It would be wrong, however, to say that there is no replacement for a mirror, because the process has also got its own flaws.

Basing ones idea of ones appearance entirely on the reflection one sees in a mirror can lead to a faulty knowledge of how one really looks since judgments about looks are based on individual preferences. With both systems of reference, the mirror on the wall, and the eyes of all those we meet and communicate with, we are much better off.

Apart from external, visible factors that need constant attention and are well managed with the help of mirrors in the form of reflecting objects, and other, seeing individuals, are internal, invisible factors which also need constant attention and correcting if perceived as flawed, which, like the visible, physical factors, can only be seen with the help of mirrors in the form of the internal eyes of the concerned person (the mind), and of the internal eyes of others(other minds). Here again, we need both processes to get a better view of the whole.

It has been argued that a man is what he is because he is not alone. He is what he is because he can compare the knowledge he has of himself to that which others have of him, and what these others are compared to the knowledge he has gained of others and of himself. This interaction with others makes man what he is. It gives him his identity. True knowledge of the self gained by this method is only limited by the nature of the apparatus used for this analysis; the mental capacities and temperaments of the actors themselves. Here we have the subjective factor hovering above every judgment made about the other. Humans are not omniscient. To say that exact knowledge of the self is possible is to have a god complex.

In the haste to make this conclusion we should not forget the functional nature of such judgments. Beauty, for example, is an abstract. The Darwinian law of natural selection has made this household knowledge. When we see beauty in another, we are usually expressing deeper, subconscious knowledge of fertility, of strength, of potency, etc. Judgments between members of the same species made this way find validity by this standard.

Let us look closely at this equation: A person gains knowledge of what he is by what others say of him. He doesn't take what he hears and sees for granted of course. He instinctively knows that human beings are fallible creatures. He therefore knows that he needs to verify the information himself. He cross examines this information with other information from other sources, and crosschecks the results with what his own working mind says he is, and those others are. In the long run, he will run into the limiting factor, the limited minds of everyone in the equation, and discover that his identity will have to be constructed in this abyss of doubt. Ultimately, these others can not be the determining factor of the identity. They can only offer the mirror by which a person can see his own self reflected. The identity is formed when the various perceptions are compared and assessed. The process of correcting faults, eliminating faulty information is done by all parties. One cannot be a product of one's own mental actions. Some decisions we make ourselves, while others are made for us by other people.

To stay a balanced individual, one needs to walk a tightrope, and literally find the balance that will become a part of the coping strategy of the individual.

Knowing and correcting perceived faults solely by what others say can be very misleading, especially if those others have their own interests at heart, or are simply basing their judgments on faulty measurements, be this vanity, mental deficit or deference. In such instances, the faulty description they give of one will become the description that the person lives and dies by. This is how a person's identity can be lost.

Living entirely according to what others say can have disastrous consequences for a person. The same is true of whole communities, and particularly true of a group of people who have been conquered and colonized by another group. In order to control the colonized, many methods are used. One is force. Force alone is not enough to control a conquered group and ensure that they do not break the chains of oppression. In fact, force only strengthens the resolve of the conquered people. It keeps the need to be free alive. This need has its base in memory. The people still see themselves reflected in their memory of who they were when they were free. They compare this with who they are at the moment of slavery and know that things are at their worst.

To kill the need to be free, this identity that the conquered group has, the knowledge of who they were before they were conquered which helps them know themselves when they are conquered, has to be erased. Rubbing out an identity entirely leaves a vacuum which will leave in the concerned group a hunger that they will constantly want to satiate. Left without an identity, the conquered are volatile. They can go which ever way they choose. The only way to ensure they do not become a walking bomb is to fill this vacuum with a new identity.

He who controls the past controls the future.

There are many ways to change a people's identity. Among these, the most used has been the inculcation of the conqueror's identity into the psyche of the conquered. Once they have the conqueror's identity, they cannot rebel against him. They are, finally, after all, one and the same. They speak the same language, sing the same songs, worship the same God, and share the same values.

The beginning process to this brainwashing is the most crucial. At this stage, all connections with the actual identity of the group are destroyed, or renounced, which is one and the same thing. First to go, right after conquest, is the traditional system of rule. To have a liaison who knows the conquered group's ways well, who will give trustworthy reports of their state, new, puppet rulers who, as a condition, have to accept the primacy of the conqueror's interests, are put in the place of the old ones. The old rulers are hunted and destroyed to the last man. Their continued presence in the conquered group is undesirable, to say the least, especially their wisdom, which will make people know where their true leadership is, and see the actual rulers of the land as impostors. Their sons, daughters, and distant relatives are hunted down and destroyed. The conqueror knows that the memory of the ruler can be re-evoked in the group by the presence later of characters who remind the group of their previous glory. A son of the former king who resembles the father is enough to set off this process.

Works of art that tell of tales and lives discontinued will also rouse unwanted curiosity in the group. They have to be destroyed, or vilified. Once their traditional value has been reduced to zero, the connections to a past identity are useless, even if they persist into the present of a brainwashed group. They do not have the respect they had in the past. They have lost attention, and have become little known and understood. The story of what they really are slowly fades away, so too do the connections they have with the past. If this mild form of destruction is not possible, then the cultural relics from the free past are simply destroyed in the initial stages of conquest.

That Africans south of the Sahara do not have their own truth mirror is not a secret. It has for example become standard to hear Africans refer to themselves in terms not their own. It is common to see, or hear an African complain about how, for example, ‘white people think we are like this, or that', when in fact, it would be more proper to think of white people instead. Instead of saying ‘they think we are this', black people should be saying ‘we think they are like this'. This is identity. Here, it should not be forgotten that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is falsehood on the other.

While it is prudent to care, and, for the benefit of the self, to analyze what others think of one, it is unwise to take that version of the truth as ones own too, and give to oneself the formidable task of changing this view in the other if it is perceived as unfair, or wrong, forgetting that the idea is born of convictions that have to do with tribal survival, with a particular mentality, with a coping strategy born of a past and interests that are alien to one's own, whose changing actually calls for the eradication of this other's identity, which is impossible because it is unacceptable meddling with another's knowledge of self.

Africa and its occupants need their own mirror of truth, and have always needed this throughout their history. This is not to say that they have never had such a reference point. Africans have always had, and used their mirror of truth well, at least till the time that the west, in the form of Persians and Assyrians, then Greeks two thousand years ago, and Arabs five hundred years later, who, though considered heroic and advanced, though vociferous about their advanced humanity, forced names and cultures on people who already had these. The epithets barbarians, savages, infidels, though misplaced, seeped into the psyche of the subjugated groups, and, though not always under the threat of a whip, the subjugated took to the new names and religions like birds to the air. This was the beginning of the end for the concerned Africans. Those who escaped direct contact with this evil were to fall down the same path two thousand years later: through the modern media.

I am sure that these northern invaders set off the mass migration of people of colour southwards. The movements are documented to have lasted up till the time when there was the scramble for Africa, and then the complete conquest of the continent. Since then it seems that Africans have seldom seen their true reflection. This truth is seen in for example the fact that Africans do not think much of the start of the mass migration of people of colour two thousand years ago. We know of our origins in the north. The times, and paths of our migration are taught in history lessons in all schools all over continent. Strangely, these lessons are taken as they are presented. They are understood as history lessons and left at that.

It doesn't strike Africans of colour as strange that a large population of a non nomadic people can suddenly start moving westwards, and southwards from the Sahara region, into the unknown jungle, especially, and coincidentally around the time when major influences from the north were felt.

The earlier Assyrian and Persian conquests do not seem to have changed much with regards to this issue. The Macedonians, who, under Alexander the Great, captured Egypt in 332 BC, started the final decline of this culture. They were followed by the Romans who conquered Egypt in 30 BC. The Arabs were to come later after 660 years.

Now isn't this a coincidence?

The advent of truly Caucasian rule in Northern Africa manifests itself in for example the Ptolemy dynasty's rise to power in Egypt, known more by Queen Cleopatra who happens to have ruled shortly before the final crash of Egyptian creativity, then the holy jihad's rocked the area some six hundred years later. It also doesn't strike people of colour as strange that the calendar we have today, invented by the Romans, starts its count two thousand years ago, at exactly the time that the mass migration of people of colour started. There was a calendar in Egypt which had survived Macedonian arrogance mainly because its usefulness was not recognized by them, a calendar which, though based on epochs, or dynasties, was very accurate, going back thousands of years into the past. The calendar was lunar based, and, still finds it's place among traditional, non westernized African communities.

Here are some facts to help you solve the puzzle:
Egyptians spoke tonal languages, and though our knowledge of Egypt was gained by the Marmer stone's translation from Coptic, Coptic, also a language of the area, isn't tonal. Most, if not all languages spoken by South Saharan Africans are tonal. The pyramids of today are surrounded by groups who speak non tonal languages.

The Romans, who had up till then no calendars, took Egypt in 30 BC. 30 years later, they were to count the first day of their calendar. Thirty years is a generation. Thirty years is the amount of time it took for Jesus to start his mission. It can take about this period to comprehend the usefulness of certain acquired technologies.

The movement of black people away from this region starts, and will last up to the time that the first explorers were discovering America.

Seems like a lot of irrelevant, impertinent nonsense. But then do not forget that Africans are not animals. They move for reasons and not in response to instinct or whim. If Africans need to know who they are today, if we Africans are to know ourselves, to start the long awaited process of regaining our identities, which goes hand in hand with determination of our own destiny, we need to know who we are in relation to other people and cultures. We need to know the developments that have influenced our lives, not only now, but through time. Only if we know this can we know if we will live or die. Only if we know this can we know what we are capable of in a given situation. Only then can we know the true extent of our contribution to the worlds present culture, as opposed to knowing only the physical labour part that this culture has forced on us.

In the course of two thousand years of our history, African peoples have had various truths imposed on them by various conquerors. I am not saying that all the groups in Africa have received like treatment. There are religions in certain parts of Africa that do not exist in others. There are names in parts of Africa that are not found in others. There is a lot of cultural diversity on the continent.

Because all the groups have maintained contact throughout this period, they have had an effect on each other, and besides, only a handful didn't migrate from the north, only a handful were already in the forests when the flood of refugees came streaming from the north, and, ultimately, no African group was spared the ravages of slavery and colonialism.

I will give an example of what the withholding of a truthful mirror can do to a person or people. Consider this: An African slave in seventeenth century North or South America actually thought he could escape and return to his loved ones, wherever that was on the continent of Africa. Looking back, we are firstly forced to admire this phenomena when in was present, and the courage when the deed was tried out. It makes us beat our chest, doesn't it? Commend it as we may, we still can see how futile this ambition was. We know more today. We have access to more information. Firstly, the entire North American continent was occupied by Europeans. At the time, there were no people of colour who had the ships this slave would need to traverse the seas, and none of the knowledge needed to know in which part of the world he was. And yet this slave still harbored this thought, and this was probably the only thought that made his life worth living. He was after all an African; a being who had enjoyed the first true pluralistic social systems in the entire world, the first human to actually ponder the advantages of freedom in all its facets. The need to be free was, and is in his genes. Though we can commend his courage, and even encourage it; for the sake of the indomitable human spirit, we should stick to the truth and see him for what he really was: a poor deluded fool. He hadn't quite got the true picture yet. He hadn't seen his own self reflected in that truthful mirror. There was no escape for him. The path to freedom for him lay in the hands of those who had control over his life. Unfortunately for him, only through this framework could he start his journey to freedom.

His day, and even our day, is unfortunately replete with such examples, but today, unlike the day when Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora were not allowed to become numerate and literate, we can do something to clear the fog. We can see ourselves reflected in the truth mirror, and learn how to shape our societies so that this truth becomes a part of our psyche. We can know where we stand, and subsequently be able to get out of the mess we notice we are wallowing in. I believe that the truth mirror will only be regained if we go back to the place and time when it was lost, when it was forcibly removed from us. From there, we can map out the possible sequence of events all the way to the present. Then we will know who we really are, and nobody will ever put us down again.

Mukazo Mukazo Vunda