African Eyes: What We Saw and How We’re Seeing Differently
Steve Jungkeit
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Text: John 9: 1-9
January 21, 2024
A little more than a week ago, a small group from FCCOL stood in a circle on a beach in Western Africa. It was the end of our journey, and we had covered an enormous amount of intellectual and geographical territory in the previous two weeks. We had visited no less than three slave dungeons on the coast of Ghana. We had visited a stream in which the enslaved were given their final baths before being taken to market. We had visited remote villages that had managed to resist the enslavers, and we journeyed by boat to a watery village built on stilts, situated in the middle of a lake. It was a place of refuge for those fleeing the trade, a Palenque as such sites were known in the Americas. We had experienced some of the wildlife of Africa, monkeys, forest canopies, and yes, as you can see on your bulletin covers, serpents. The heat was intense and the pace was grueling but it had all stirred something powerful within our souls.
And now we were standing together on the shores of Ouidah, on the coast of Benin. Benin had been colonized by the French, and Ouidah was the locale in which the French trafficked and shipped captive Africans. It’s in French speaking parts of the Americas, notably what became Haiti, as well as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and yes, New Orleans, that the culture of Africans from what is now Benin shows up.
In the 18th century, it was the busiest slaving port in all of Western Africa. It’s estimated that half a million people were trafficked from that site alone during that century. To put it in perspective, the most reliable estimates are that, on average, some 65,000 people were kidnapped from those shores every single year. At the peak of the trade, in 1791, it reached a fever pitch. In that year alone, 108,000 human beings were shipped from Ouidah. We were standing on the site, one among many, of the African holocaust.
Meanwhile, a short walk down the beach, at the very site where all those deportations occurred, there was a party going on. It was a festival celebrating the music, dance, artistry, and philosophy of the traditional way of life called “vodun.” There’s nothing spooky or sinister about vodun – unless you were a slave master or a colonizer – they found it terrifying for the agency it afforded captive peoples, not unlike the way Pharaoh was troubled by the God of the enslaved Hebrews. In a move that I believe represents the cultural and moral genius inherent in the African traditions, the celebrants at the festival had taken a site of utter horror, of unspeakable suffering, and they had turned it, revolving it as if it were a carousel, fashioning the space into a site of affirmation, celebration, and African pride. Earlier in the day, I had walked around the grounds of that site, and I’m still a little stunned at the welcome I received. I was one of the few white people there, but it seemed wherever I turned, people went out of their way to say “welcome,” to ask how I was, and sometimes even to take a picture with me. Culturally, spiritually, racially, I could well have represented an intrusion, a descendent of the old colonial regime come back to survey the scene. But that’s not what happened, not there anyway. In Ouidah, at the celebration of that ancient spiritual system called “vodun,” I was treated as an honored guest.
But let me return to that little circle on the beach. Standing there, I asked our group to consider the story from John 9 that we just heard. It’s a curious story about a man who wishes to see, or at any rate, to see more clearly. We are like that man, I told our group. We too, some of us more, some of us less, but all of us together, were those of limited sight, trying to see more clearly. We too, some of us more, and some of us less so, have too often failed to perceive the enormity of the crimes perpetrated upon Africans. We too, some of us more, and some of us less so, but all of us to some degree, have failed to perceive what amounts to a 500-year war on Black people, and Black life. But in equal measure, I think we have too often failed to see the enormous and world changing power of Africans, of African culture, and of their descendants now scattered around the globe. Too often, we have failed to see the sheer beauty and grace, majesty and genius of those cultures. They deserve the same status we would offer to a great English novel, say, or an Italian sculpture, but as often as not, most of us have been trained to see those cultural offerings as “other,” unrelated to our own lives and concerns. Like the man in John 9, we too have failed to see. We too have been like those born blind.
The remedy that Jesus provides the blind man is odd. He spits in the dirt. He makes mud from the earth and his own saliva. Then he mixes it, and he places the mud over the man’s eyes. God only knows what exactly Jesus was doing, but I think it must have had something to do with learning to see through the soil of the earth he walked upon, as if to say, look at the world through this place. And I think it must have had something to do with the life force, the body force, contained in the saliva that Jesus used, as if to say, look at the world through the earth, yes, but see it as well through the lens of her people, through the lens of a human being who came to live, but also to suffer, with us all.
Standing in the circle, I told our travelers that it was my wish that we might all learn to see the world through African soil, through African water, through African mud. If, as we were told, there has been a 500-year war against Black people, against Black lives, against Blackness itself, then surely one of the ways to cease that warfare is to begin to perceive the world from the vantage of those who have suffered the worst consequences of that war. If there has been a 500-year war against Blackness, then surely one of the ways to undo that warfare is to learn how to see all the goodness, all the beauty, all the genius, all the joy, all the spirit, and yes, all the forgiveness that has emerged from that continent. Where many of us have been trained to view Africa as a series of problems without solutions, how revolutionary would it be to perceive Africa, and Africans, and their descendants across the globe, as those possessing the keys to our own health and survival? What would it mean, I asked our group, to begin to see through African eyes?
None of us has a singular vision of what that might mean. But I’ve asked three of our travelers to share a little bit about what this journey meant to them, and about what seeing
through African eyes might mean.
(Miriame Kazadi)
(Kevin Booker)
(Cathy Mathis)
“Where is the spirituality in that?” was Steve’s constant thing.
I felt strongly about the feeling of everyone being responsible for helping each other that is basic to the people we met in Africa. In the USA there seems to be much more of a Me/Mine/ feeling versus the Ours feeling in Africa. The Bible talks about people working together for the good of all. Resources are seen as abundant for all and replenishing. In American we see resources as limited and must be stored selfishly and amassed to show your power and wealth.
America—the purpose of m life is to amass as much wealth as possible for me.
Africa—The purpose of life is to share with my family and everyone is my family. The more I share the more spirituality grows within and around me. “Take no care for everything will be provided”
When I pile up my own wealth I have trouble finding the spirit because it is not able to be contained in just one place.
We saw fetishes, gods, and such but I thought they were reminders of things people didn’t want to forget. I wear a ring on my finger as a reminder that God and Grandma love me. I think it is very much the same thing.
The most intense and intimate sharing we do results in another human being. Spirituality is that kind of intense involvement with God/god which shapes your life individually or culturally.
The beauty of the nature we saw in Ghana, Togo and Benin was breathtaking. My journal about the nature of slavery and how it affected people there and wherever the people were dropped off to live is still a work in progress in my head. Our study was to try to understand the beginnings of slave trade and then to it to the current age and how it affects daily life for persons of color. Perhaps in my mind I wonder how white Americans have come to have such prejudices and power to continue to control the lives of people who don’t fit their image of a white god-like self. We don’t realize how much we all benefit from the music, culture, resources and strength of the people of Africa. Blocking their ability to have good education, access to jobs, freedom of life, harms all of us and reduces everyone’s humanity.
No matter how people were treated then or how they are abused now, no one can take away the Spirit within us.
(Steve CONT’D)
If I may, I’d like to return us to the beach in Oudiah one final time, and to our circle. Earlier in the day, I had gathered some soil from under a shade tree, and then at the ocean we collected some water – the same waters that many African captives died in, and whose spirits, some believe, still reside there. Those waters are joined to those we experience on the New England coastline. Then I mixed the water and the soil to create mud. After mixing it, I placed it on each of the foreheads of those standing in the circle. The mark on our foreheads was something like the one that many of us receive on Ash Wednesday, when we learn to contemplate the world through the lens of Christ and his cross. This was akin to that, but different. The oval of earth that I rubbed on each forehead represented a new, or maybe an enhanced, set of eyes – African eyes. They were given not by me, but through the land itself, its people, and its history. When I was through, Kevin, and also Susan and Carleen, placed the soil and water on my forehead too. We closed our time by singing Amazing Grace, with its powerful refrain, “I was blind, but now I see.”
That’s my prayer for our entire church community. Only a handful of us were able to travel, but I hope that the stories and perspectives we brought back, the African mud through which we are trying to see the world, might help to renew our vision at FCCOL. My prayer is that by learning to see with African eyes, we might move just a little closer to a restorative vision of the future that heals us all.