ALTERNATIVE By Reno Omokri
One of the greatest acts of mass brainwashing is that performed on colonised African people by European colonialists, and I was shockingly reminded of this by the Meghan and Harry Interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Watching that interview and the reaction (not response) of many people, I could not but conclude that it is perhaps too easy to manipulate people using the media.
Sadly, the herd mentality is so powerful, and perhaps too overwhelming to resist to most people, such that they wait for already primed and prepared ‘influencers’ to tell them what to think, and they allow these manufactured narratives determine their outlook, to the point where anyone who holds a contrary opinion is labelled and demonised.
Elsewhere, this type of psychological programming has been called the Problem Reaction Solution method. And almost nowhere has it worked better than in Africa.
I would not say our culture is not strong, seeing as it influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What I would say is that the inability of Africans to capture their own history in written form has left them vulnerable to revisionism, and a people who do not write their own history will end up being written out of history.
I remember once when someone asked me why I do not have a ‘Christian’ name, and why, despite my jet-set lifestyle, do all my children have African names.
I responded to this person that the day the White man starts bearing African names is the day I will start bearing European names, and this person, a Northern Muslim, said ‘that will never happen’.
I told him that, that means I would never bear a non-African name and in my lifetime, none of my seed will bear such a name.
And then it happened. This fellow said, ‘At least we in the North kept our culture. We never bear foreign names.’
So deep is the cultural domination of Muslim Africa that many African Muslims erroneously think that Islam is their culture. I had to educate this fellow that Northern Nigeria, and other African Islamic enclaves have had their culture almost totally eviscerated.
Before Islam, there was Hausa culture in Northern Nigeria. There are Hausa names. There are Hausa traditions. And it is not just in Northern Nigeria. It affects almost all colonised people to a higher or lower degree.
I once had a conversation with a Mexican who insisted that Mexico would once again reclaim California that was stolen from them by the Gringo (White European), and they would get rid of English and bring back Spanish.
I looked at him in bewilderment, and asked him why he would want to do that. And he said that is their native language. I looked at him in amazement. This guy has typical Mayan features. I asked him what about the Mayan language, and he was like, ‘huh! What is that?’
You can imagine a Mexican fighting to replace one European language with another.
The Maya had a culture and language that is probably older than any culture and language in Europe. It predates Christ by 2000 years. It was a culture that ran simultaneously with ancient Egyptian culture.
However, because of colonialism, the descendants of the Mayan people now self-identify with Spanish and the Latino ethnic identity.
And this is what we saw with the Meghan and Harry interview. Rather than focus on the veracity of the claims that were made, many people allowed themselves to be emotionally manipulated based on whether they were White or Black.
Words like ‘their truth’ and ‘her truth’ became more important than the truth. And that is how someone as supposedly exposed as Oprah Winfrey allowed herself to be hoodwinked by obviously false claims.
You see, that is the power of the media. The media is so powerful, that if you do not have your own culture to stabilise you, it will destabilise and make you think that stable people are the ones who are destabilised.
This was brought close to home when Laurie Idahosa, a White woman married to a Nigerian minister, Faith Idahosa, accused the mother of Nollywood legend, Pete Edochie of being “a victim of rape and a child bride”, because she married his 40-year-old father at the age of 15.
Using today’s standards to judge events in more innocent times is not always wise. A girl marrying at below 18 may seem like statutory rape today, but it may surprise my readers to note that Mary, the mother of Christ, is believed to have married at 14–15.
In Jewish culture, a boy becomes an adult at age 13, at his bar mitzvah, while a girl rescues adulthood at age 12 at her bat mitzvah. At those ages, they are legally allowed to marry on their own decision.
The same was true in many pre-Independent Nigerian and African communities. And this is not barbaric.
Africans must not condemn our African culture and celebrate Western culture blindly. Western culture is not always right. It is inferiority complex that makes Africans think masquerades and polygamy are barbaric, but Santa Claus and gay marriage are civilised.
And this is why I encourage every black woman to reassess her definition of beauty. The modern media feed black women’s insecurities by promoting beauty standards which make them want to alter their natural hair, skin colour and other physical attributes to look like White European women. Do not fall for that.
Wise King Solomon had 1000 beauties in his harem. There were women from all over the Mediterranean there. But the only erotic love song written in Scripture and by King Solomon, was written in praise of the beauty of a black woman he had fallen in love with.
In Songs of Solomon 1:5, Solomon writing in the first person said “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon”.
Today, when you use the word ‘fair’ it denotes someone of a pale or light complexion. But that has not always been the case. King Solomon wrote thus of his black love “thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes”.
The original meaning of ‘fair’ was something beautiful or attractive.
Black is beautiful. Do not take it from me. Take it from the wisest mortal man that ever lived besides Yeshu’a (Jesus).
From the top of her head to the tip of her toe, the black woman is beautiful beyond measure.
Where Helen of Troy moved Prince Paris’ heart, it took a black woman to move King Solomon’s heart. What does that mean? It means black women are for Kings and should be in palaces.
And those who think that King Solomon’s attraction to a black woman was a fluke may want to consider his relationship with the Queen of Sheba whose visit to him was recorded in 1 Kings Chapter 10.
Though it is not specifically stated in The Bible, the people of modern-day Ethiopia believe that when 1 Kings 10:13 says “King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for, besides what he had given her out of his royal bounty. Then she left and returned with her retinue to her own country”, this included a conception of a royal child between King Solomon and Sheba.
In fact, the last proper King of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I, was acknowledged to be of the Solomonic dynasty, as a descendant of Makeda (the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon) and King Solomon.
Ras Tafari Makonnen’s (AKAHaile Selassie) official title as Emperor of Ethiopia was “The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia, Elect of God”.
Up to that point, every emperor of Ethiopia had to be able to trace their lineage to Menelik I, who according to Ethiopian tradition was the child of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Whether or not this apocrypha legend common in Ethiopia and the Middle East is true, the fact remains that the only such visit which the Bible chooses to record for Solomon is the visit of a Black African Queen from Ethiopia.
From the foregoing, it is clear that not only does Scripture record Black women as beautiful and attractive, it is also obvious that the Torahh records them as being important.
Black women must hold that truthful image of themselves in their mind’s eye and not let it slip from their consciousness.
In doing so, black women will be able to resist and overturn the subliminal messages from the media which make them feel that they have to remake themselves into the image of beauty served up to them on a regular basis in order to be truly beautiful.
And it is not just King Solomon that appreciated the beauty of the black woman.
The greatest Law Giver this world has ever known was enamored by a black woman.
In Hebrew he is known as Moshe, in Arabic he is known as Musa and in English he is called Moses.
What many people do not know is that Moses’ wife was black. Yes!
Moses was a Prince of Egypt. He had taste. He had class. He would not just go for any woman. He went for the best! This is not something to psyche black women up. This is fact.
Numbers 12:1 reads “Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman”.
When the Old Testament of the King James Version uses the term Ethiopia or Ethiopian, it is actually talking about Black Africa.
When the Old Testament of the King James Version wants to refer to the nation known today as Ethiopia, it uses the term ‘Sheba’.
In fact, other translations, such as the NIV and the NLT use the word Cush or Cushite in place of Ethiopia or Ethiopian. For those who do not know, Cush is the original name for Black Africa.
In fact, the word Cush means black in Hebrew.
The New International Version (NIV) renders Numbers 12:1 thus “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite”.
And so that you would understand that the term Ethiopian in the Old Testament means a black person the prophet Jeremiah wrote in Jeremiah 13:23 thus “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?”
The point of bringing out this information from the Old Testament is because both Christianity and Islam hold the Old Testament as a sacred Scripture from God.
Most of the world’s black women are either Christians or Muslims.
So, if a book which most of our women hold as sacred tells them they are beautiful, who is that person or media that will tell them otherwise?
The Bible says you are beautiful. You can take that to the bank. In fact you can take that to heaven!
