ABSTRACT
Sidbury highlights an important development: the imposition of a collective identity of negation on the enslaved. As time progressed, the identityAfrican-began to evoke in the enslaved complex, conflicting and demeaning consciousness. Regardless of the negative images and consciousness of Africa, it was the ancestral homeland, and with time, would become, as well, the source of much of the cultural artifacts and institutions of survival in a hostile and dehumanizing environment. The brutal and inhumane nature of slavery created conditions proslavery establishment and thinkers used to justify their contention and belief that blacks were inherently inferior. They ascribed the alleged inferiority to the African heritage. Consequently, many blacks perceived Africa as an “albatross” whose negative character impacted their existence in profoundly destructive ways. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, ditching this “albatross” had become imperative as blacks tackled the challenges of identity and survival in the aftermath of the betrayal of the revolutionary promise. The realization that although the American Republic was the product of a struggle that proclaimed, “All men are created equal, and endowed by the creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” this “All,” however, did not include blacks-an exclusion that was attributed to the African ancestry. The dominant intellectual discourse characterized blacks as slaves transplanted from “a primitive, barbaric and heathen environment,” and therefore not deserving of equality and classification among humanity. In Western thought, Africa and Africans were associated with animalistic and cannibalistic characteristics.3 To be of African origin fundamentally meant the embodiment of negative attributes reflective of one’s alleged “dark and primitive” heritage. This became compelling consideration against granting blacks all of the rights and privileges of American citizenship, and justification for continued enslavement. In Bernard Magubane’s contention,
[d]uring the 200 years of the triangular trade the degradation of anything black went hand in hand with the depiction of Africa as nothing but a place
of unredeemable savagery. It can be said without a fear of contradiction that ever since the African set foot on the shores of the New World his status as a human being has been, at best, probationary. For a long time he was told that he was enslaved because he was less than human: inherently inferior, mentally primitive and emotionally underdeveloped.4
