CONCEPT OF A DEITY

By John Henrik Clarke

To hold a people in oppression, you must convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed. When the European comes to your country, the first thing he does is laugh at your God and your God concept. And the next thing is to make you laugh at your own God concept. Then he won’t have to build no jails because he has created more binding in your mind than iron can do. Anytime you turn to your own concept of God, you’re no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body because the chains are on your minds. Every time someone says your God is ugly, you release your God and take on theirs. There is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of “Deity.”

And that’s how we, (Africans), are trapped. We have been educating in believing someone else’s deity and someone else’s standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity and your understanding. And once you do that, you don’t apologize. Nothing the European mind has ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate European control over the world. Anything you get from Europe that you’re going to use for yourself, remake it to suit yourself.

Where did we go wrong educationally? After the civil war was a period called reconstruction, a period of pseudo democracy. We began to have our own institutions, our own school. We had no role for a school, our role model, so we began to imitate white schools. Our church was an initiation of the white church. All we did was to modify the old trap. We didn’t change the images. We became more comfortable with in their trap. We only changed some of the concepts of the images, but the images remained the same so the misconception that gave us a slave mentality have been altered but remained basically the same.