“I don’t really know what I’m living for.” Those were the words that came out of this young African girl’s mouth. I recently sat with this young sister from the Northside of St. Louis and she told me her story.
This sister told me that from the age of four, she was being molested by one of her mother’s johns. The john waited until her mother
passed out from drug use before he would creep into her room and molest her. She said that he would make it out to be a game and would “reward” her with cabbage patch dolls and other toys. By age nine, she was in foster care and suffering the same sexual
abuse at the hands of the caretaker of the orphanage.
By age 11, she was on the streets and doing what many young African girls in her situation are forced to do. She was taken in by a pimp and forced to do unspeakable things just to keep a roof over her head. She had to develop coping mechanisms to survive
these ordeals: “Whenever the men are on top of me, I just zone out and pretend that I’m not there.”
She had a $500 minimum that she had to make per day and every cent of that went to the pimp. If she ever came
up short, there was hell to pay. She’s experienced so much trauma in her 13 years of life. At one point, she looked at me and said
“I don’t really know what I’m living for. I feel like I don’t mean anything, like I don’t have any value so I just don’t care”.
They can’t take away your value
When you feel like you have no value, you’ll move through life like that. You’ll enter every relationship like that and allow any and everything to happen to you because you feel that you have no worth, that you deserve the treatment. I told this sister what my dad used to tell me. He would pull out a hundred dollar bill, ask me to look at it and go “that’s a 100
dollars right?” I’d say “yup.”
And he’d continue: “If I spit on this hundred-dollar bill, would you want it?”
“Yeah.”
“If I wiped my butt with this hundred-dollar bill, would you want it?”
I’d say, “Hell yeah, I still want it because it’s still a hundred dollars.”
He’d then respond, “Exactly! So no matter what people may do to you, your value stays the same. It doesn’t lessen. Always remember that. Your value was set at birth, and nobody can come and devalue you.”
“This is colonialism. It’s a system that sucks the life
out of our communities, leaving behind food deserts and abandonedbuildings. It sucks the life out of our people, leaving behind children without their parents and parents without their children.”
Our Lack of Self-Worth is Rooted in Colonialism
She said that every moment of her life, from the moment she was born, has just been horrible, and her only explanation was that since she’d had such horrible acts committed on her body, God had “given up” on her. I told her that it had nothing to do with God and everything to do with colonialism. I told this sister that the reason she feels the way she does is because white people—the colonizers—stole our birthright. They separated us from our identities and made it extremely hard for us to know who we are and recognize our value.
We talked about her future. I asked her what she wants to be when she grows up, and she responded, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it.” This sister told me that she can’t even say for certain when her next meal will be and that she’s too preoccupied with trying to make her $500 minimum for the day to even give much thought to what she’ll eat today.
This is what colonialism does. It robs us of our futures. It makes the idea of our future an uncertain and frightening thing. It robs us of all of our hopes and aspirations to the point where it’s nearly impossible for us to think of a future because we’re busy scrambling, trying to figure out how we’ll even survive the day.
This is colonialism. It’s a system that sucks the life out of our communities, leaving behind food deserts and abandoned buildings. It sucks the life out of our people, leaving behind children without their parents and parents without their children. It’s a system that guarantees a life of despair in our community and robs our children of their futures before they are even born.
Uhuru Movement Fights for Our Future
This sister is many sisters. You might know her, or you might be her. Her situation is the reality for many African women and girls and has been for as long as we’ve been living under colonial domination. God and the devil have nothing to do with it. Colonialism is the reason, and this is how colonialism manifests itself in the lives of young African girls.
This is the system that the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) has vowed to overturn. As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has said, we are fighting for freedom in our lifetime because we refuse to die and leave this system for our children to deal with. Colonialism has stolen our children’s futures from them, and the only way their futures will be returned to them is through the destruction of this system and the creation of a new one.
InPDUM is calling on you to help build a future where our children will experience lives unburdened by the regular hunger, fear, and uncertainty of life under colonial domination. They will be able to dream their wildest dreams and have the freedom to be any and everything they want to be.
I told this sister to start thinking about her future. Start to give it some real thought.
– Kalambayi Andenet
International President, InPDUM
Join InPDUM!
InPDUM.org/join
