DAY 28...Do not Forget

WE MUST NOT FORGET The actual number of men, women and children who were snatched from their homes in Africa and transported in slave ships across the Atlantic, either to the Caribbean islands or to North and South America, will never be known. Writers vary in their estimates, but there is no doubt that their number runs into millions. The following figures are taken from Morel's calculations as reproduced by Professor Melville J. Herskovits and cover the period 1666-1800: 1666-1776: Slaves imported only by the English for the English, French and Spanish colonies: 3 million (250,000 died on the voyage). 1680-1786: Slaves imported for the English colonies in America: 2,130,000 (Jamaica alone absorbed 610,000). 1716-1756: Average annual number of slaves imported for the American colonies: 70,000, with a total of 3.5 million. 1752-1762: Jamaica alone imported 711,115 slaves. 1759-1762: Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves. 1776-1800: A yearly average of 74,000 slaves were imported for the American colonies, or a total of 1,850,000; this yearly average was divided up as follows: by the English, 38,000; French, 20,000; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; Danes, 2,000. The above paragraph and statistics are excerpted from the following article by Jose Luciano Franco: "The Slave Trade in the Caribbean and Latin America." in The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth CenturyReports and papers of the meeting of experts organized by Unesco at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 31 January to 4 February 1978 We must not forget that we did not want to come here. We are not from here...not really. We are not rooted properly and it has been difficult to lay down foundations on the shifting uncertainties of life in America. The genocidal rampage of the psychopathic madman hitler (whose name we will not capitalize, because he was never human: more animal than ever was man...possessed by devils and driven by delusions and followed by a nation of sociopaths), is avidly remembered and we are reminded of it often and well we should. Such a blight on human history is to be remembered. The more recent rampages in Rwanda, The Congo and other parts of the African continent not so well remembered;  probably due to the fact that not as much precious blood was shed, not to those who usually speak for the remembered anyway.  Sometimes it comes in me suddenly without warning a dark anger that wells up from some primal well kept capped by a spiritual cork. It is atomic in its intensity and I must go to quiet, for only there can I humbly deliver my wounded self to the altar and ask for the will to go on. He calls me to forgive, to harken to my destiny to follow, trust and obey. I have not chosen an easy way, and if this is the way to freedom, then I will continue to listen to Truth. DESTINY It is on a quest that we are called a path lighted by an outer eye that see's the all and knows the end It is a quilt that we are stitching with colored threads of different hue which Atropos will cut one day without a clue My way is clear the path is narrow twisted and uneven in another's wake and sometimes I fear  I am lost and alone and will not get home But the joy of the journey is mine to know the end of the road a dimly seen far distant place that forks into another time another space...