Theme Statement 2002

From Dispersal to Dynamism: Movement of the People

The theme for emancipation 2002 expresses the idea of Africans globally turning our dispersal to our advantage. When millions of Africans were forcefully uprooted and scattered across the Western Hemisphere during the centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the dispersal in itself became a part of our problem. Distances between us, adaptation to different languages, physical and cultural environments, and the psychological attack on our sense of African identity turned us into strangers to each other.

Ironically the process that was meant to dehumanize us and destroy our African identities laid the basis for a larger collective identity. Most of us lost our identities as Yoruba, or Ashanti, or Wolof etc and were reborn as Africans. The post-slavery period has seen cycles of rise and fall and rise of a positive African consciousness. The greater international mobility of some Africans (particularly from the West), repatriation movements, more access to contemporary and historical information about Africa, struggles around major issues affecting Africans, have all contributed to the periods of rising positive consciousness. The down sides of the cycle emanate from the psychological effects of racist oppression, the lingering traumas of chattel slavery and the unceasing battles for the mind, waged with mis-information and negative images, that essentially aim to make us ashamed of our roots and our inner Being.

In the contemporary period, the Pan African movement which reached its apogee under Marcus Garvey, is feeding into the struggle for reparations. We are seeing the current rise in the cycle of African consciousness in the mobilization against HIV/AIDS which is decimating African populations, and we are seeing the rise in the cycle in the increasing observances of emancipation in the Caribbean, the United States, Central and South America and in Africa itself.

With the growth of African consciousness a new dynamism is developing, gaining strength from the very dispersal. Preparations for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism indicated the breadth and depth of this movement. We are beginning once more to see ourselves as one people despite physical separation and a vast array of cultural adaptations, and we are beginning to realize the potential of networking between hundreds of millions of people, dispersed in many parts of the world, as a force for development in the modern era. With huge populations in Central and South America, North America, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to Africa, with major economic and strategic resources in the lands where we live, as a dynamic self-knowing, self-assertive African people we can transform ourselves, make major contributions to the societies in which we live and significantly change our status in, and contribution to the world.

Our theme this year pays tribute to the growing movements of consciousness awakening that dynamic potential. In effect it is both recognizing and stimulating our emergence from dispersal (as a problem, a barrier) to dynamism (activating our networks and our powerful development potential as a global people). It is about the continuing movement of a people from oppression to freedom.