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They experimented on the mental states of our women, it is our duty as men to gain knowledge of our creator and self, so we can restore them.
“The slave maker knew that he couldn’t make these people slaves until he first made them DUMB. And one of the best ways to make a man DUMB is to take his tongue, take his language. A man who can’t talk, what do they call him? A DUMMY. Once your language is gone, you are a DUMMY. You can’t communicate with people who are your relatives, you can never have access to information from your family—you just can’t communicate.
Also, if you’ll notice, the natural tongue that one speaks is referred to as one’s MOTHER TONGUE—MOTHER TONGUE. And the natural intelligence that a person has before he goes to school is called mother wit. Not father wit—it’s called MOTHER wit because everything a child knows before it gets to school, it learns from its MOTHER, not its father. And if it never goes to school, whatever native intelligence it has, it got it primarily from its MOTHER, not its father; so it’s called mother wit. And the mother is also the one who teaches the child how to speak its language, so that the natural tongue is called the mother tongue. Whenever you find as many people as we who aren’t able to speak any mother tongue, why, that’s evidence right there something was done to our mother. Something had to have happened to her.
They had laws in those days that made it mandatory for a Black child to be taken from its mother as fast as that child was born. The mother never had a chance to rear it. The child would be brought up somewhere else away from the mother, so that the mother couldn’t teach the child what she knew—about itself, about her past, about its heritage. It would have to grow up in complete darkness, knowing nothing about the land where it came from or the people that it came from. Not even about its own mother. There was no relationship between the Black child and its mother; it was against the law. And if the master would ever find any of those children who had any knowledge of its mother tongue, that child was put to death. They had to stamp out the language; they did it scientifically. If they found any one of them that could speak it, off went its head, or they would put it to death, they would kill it, in front of the mother, if necessary. This is history; this is how they took your language. You didn’t lose it, it didn’t evaporate—they took it with a scientific process, because they knew they had to take it to make you dumb, or into the dummy that you and I now are.
I read in some books where it said that some of the slave mothers would try and get tricky. In order to teach their child, who’d be off in another field somewhere, they themselves would be praying and they’d pray in a loud voice, and in their own language. The child in the distant field would hear his mother’s voice, and he’d learn how to pray in the same way; and in learning how to pray, he’d pick up on some of the language. And the master found that this was being done, and immediately he stepped up his efforts to kill all the little children that were benefiting from this. And so it became against the law even for the slave to be caught praying in his tongue, if he knew it. It was against the law. You’ve heard some of the people say they had to pray with their heads in a bucket. Well, they weren’t praying to the Jesus that they’re praying to now. The white man will let you call on that Jesus all day long; in fact he’ll make it possible for you to call on him. If you were calling on somebody else, then he’d have more fear of it. Your calling on that somebody else in that other language—that causes him a bit of fear, a bit of fright.[…]
For three hundred years we stayed at that level. Finally we got to where we had no language, no history, no name. The white man named us after himself—Jones, Smith, Johnson, Bunche, and names like those. [Laughter] We couldn’t speak our own language; we had none. And he then began to teach us that we came from a jungle, where the people had no language. This was the crime that was committed—he convinced us that our people back home were savages and animals in the jungle, and the reason we couldn’t talk was because we never had a language. And we grew up thinking that we never had one.”
Æmôwálé, Malcolm X
2Pac Gives His Opinion On African and Slave Names (Interview) {youtube}5AzIT779b4c&sns{/youble}
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