ISSUE 8

FINGER-POINTING HAS NEVER BEEN THE ANSWER... IT CAN NOT BE THE WAY OF A WISE ONE

Every day on social media, I see Black people attacking religious movements, condemning Europeans and Americans, and laying the entire burden of Af’raka’s present condition at somebody else’s door.

The pointing finger has become very busy.

It points towards Europe. It points towards America. It points towards Christianity, Islam, colonialism, slavery and white supremacy. Some of these fingers are pointing towards real crimes and genuine systems of oppression. The history must not be denied, softened or perfumed for the comfort of those who benefited from it.

But a finger that points outward all day may never notice what the remaining fingers are doing at home.

The purpose of this article is not to excuse colonialism, slavery, racism or religious domination. It is to ask a deeper and more uncomfortable question: What conditions existed within Af’raka that allowed external powers to enter, divide, exploit and remain?

We are often captured by the effect because the effect is loud. The wound is visible. The anger is immediate. Yet one of the great laws of the universe states that every effect has a cause. Before a condition can appear, forces must move to produce it. This is the law of cause and effect.

If we focus only upon the effect, our emotions may become powerful while our understanding remains weak. We may shout accurately about pain while doing nothing intelligent about the machinery producing it. Anger then becomes a permanent performance. The wound gains a social-media account, posts every morning and never enters treatment.

Let us therefore examine the causes as well as the effects. Let us do so without racial hatred, false history or the childish need to make one entire race innocent and another entirely evil.

Truth does not need a favourite tribe.

1. Before the Effect, Find the Cause

The law of cause and effect is simple, but humanity has developed impressive skill in avoiding it. We prefer to curse the smoke while protecting the fire. We complain about corrupt leaders while celebrating corruption when it benefits our family. We condemn division while refusing to marry, trade, worship or cooperate beyond tribe. We attack colonial education, then laugh at anyone who speaks an African language with confidence.

We want the effect removed while the cause is given a comfortable chair in the family compound.

Cause and effect is not merely a physical principle. It operates through thought, culture, politics, spirituality and collective behaviour. A dishonest society does not suddenly receive honest leadership by miracle. Leaders rise from the consciousness surrounding them. A divided people creates openings for manipulation. A people trained to distrust themselves will naturally purchase identity from whoever arrives with convincing packaging.

This does not mean every victim caused the crime committed against him. If a thief enters through an open window, the open window explains an opportunity; it does not make the thief innocent. The person who entered, stole and harmed remains responsible for the choice to steal. Spiritual analysis must never become a clever method of blaming the wounded while congratulating the weapon.

But if the owner refuses to examine how the window remained open, another thief may return next week—perhaps wearing a different hat and carrying a more modern bag.

Af’raka’s present condition emerged from many causes. External conquest, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial borders, racial ideology, economic extraction and cultural domination all played enormous roles. But internal wars, political rivalry, greed, collaboration, betrayal and the capture and sale of fellow Africans also played roles.

We must be mature enough to hold the entire truth.

Some people fear that acknowledging African participation in the slave trade will excuse European powers. It does not. European merchants, monarchies, companies, shipowners, plantation systems and colonial economies created vast demand, financed the voyages, transported millions across the Atlantic and built racial theories to justify permanent hereditary slavery. That machinery did not become innocent because some African rulers and traders supplied captives.

Likewise, African collaborators do not become innocent because Europeans provided the ships.

Different hands performed different parts of the same evil. One captured. Another sold. Another transported. Another insured the vessel. Another purchased the human being. Another worked him to death on a plantation. Another wrote theology and racial philosophy to make the crime appear lawful.

The law of cause and effect is not impressed by uniforms. Every hand enters the account.

This is why finger-pointing alone cannot heal us. When all responsibility is placed outside Af’raka, we unconsciously declare ourselves powerless. We say, in effect, that others created everything, control everything and must therefore repair everything. That is another form of surrender.

If we had no part in creating present conditions, then we have no power to change them. But if internal disunity, corruption and self-betrayal helped build the problem, then unity, integrity and self-knowledge can help dismantle it.

This is not victim-blaming. It is power-reclaiming.

The awakened person does not ask only, “Who harmed me?” He also asks, “What weakness did the harm expose? What pattern allowed it to continue? What am I reproducing today?”

These questions are uncomfortable because they remove the luxury of permanent innocence. They require us to look at African leaders who steal African wealth, African religious figures who exploit African fear, African business owners who mistreat African workers and ordinary people who betray one another for painfully small rewards.

It is easy to deliver a three-hour lecture about the wickedness of Europe while refusing to pay the young African working in your shop. Apparently exploitation becomes less colonial when performed by an uncle.

The path of awakening begins when we stop using history as an excuse to avoid the mirror.

2. How Af’raka’s Divisions Opened the Gate

There were periods when great civilisations flourished across Af’raka. Kingdoms and communities developed systems of government, trade, agriculture, astronomy, architecture, metallurgy, medicine, art and spirituality. Our people were not sitting in darkness waiting for Europe to invent morning.

But Af’raka’s greatness does not require Europe to have been primitive. We do not need the false image of every European moving helplessly from cave to cave in order to prove that African civilisations were powerful. Europe also possessed ancient and medieval societies, knowledge systems, conflicts and achievements. Black pride built upon false white stupidity remains dependent upon whiteness for its emotional balance.

Our greatness should stand upon its own evidence.

Many early Af’rakan societies were strengthened by unity, kinship, sacred duty and spiritual grounding. Spirituality was not separated from community life and stored inside a building for use once a week. The ancestors, land, seasons, family, governance and moral order were connected. The visible world participated in the invisible.

This spiritual relationship could create discipline and identity. A people who know where they come from are difficult to convince that they are nothing.

Yet Af’raka was never one perfect civilisation living in uninterrupted harmony. Kingdoms fought. Rulers expanded territory. Communities captured enemies. Rival groups competed for trade and power. Greed did not wait for Europeans before entering the human heart. Service to self has never required a passport.

When rivalry deepened, unity weakened. When leaders placed personal wealth above collective life, people became available for sale. When communities were taught to see neighbouring Africans as less human, it became easier to exchange them for weapons, goods and political advantage.

European traders did not hypnotise every African participant. They exploited divisions, expanded existing forms of bondage, created new incentives and transformed human trafficking into a vast Atlantic industry. Their demand for labour in the Americas intensified warfare, capture and forced movement. European ships, capital, plantation economies and racial ideology gave the system its monstrous scale.

But somebody still opened the coastal gate. Somebody accepted the goods. Somebody decided that another African life could be converted into profit.

We must face this without hatred towards our ancestors and without dishonest protection of them. The ancestors were human beings. Some acted with courage. Some resisted slavery and conquest. Some rescued captives. Some fought European invasion. Others collaborated, sold, betrayed and profited. Ancestral honour does not require ancestral perfection.

The lesson is not that “Africans caused slavery themselves,” a statement often used to wash European hands. The lesson is that external domination becomes stronger when internal conscience becomes weaker.

This pattern continued during colonisation. European powers frequently used treaties, local intermediaries, rivalries and indirect rule. They did not conquer an empty continent in one afternoon. Africans resisted in many places, but division prevented resistance from becoming one continental force. One ruler might cooperate against a rival, imagining that the foreign power was merely a useful partner. By the time the larger purpose became visible, the partner had become administrator.

The stranger entered through the quarrel and later claimed ownership of the compound.

Religion also played a complicated role. Christianity was not born in Europe, and it was not first introduced to Af’raka through colonialism. Christianity flourished in North Africa during its earliest centuries, and the Aksumite kingdom in present-day Ethiopia embraced Christianity in the fourth century. African Christianity is ancient.

Therefore, it would be historically wrong to claim that Christianity itself was invented as a European plan to begin the Atlantic slave trade.

But European empires often carried a Europeanised form of Christianity alongside commerce and colonial rule. Missionaries were not all identical: some defended African lives, educated communities and opposed abuses, while others treated African spirituality as darkness and helped build the moral language of empire. Mission schools could offer literacy while also teaching the African child to distrust his ancestors. The gift and the chain sometimes arrived in the same classroom.

Colonial art frequently presented sacred figures with European features. The historical Jesus emerged from the Jewish world of West Asia, yet many Africans were given the image of a pale European Christ surrounded by white angels, as though heaven had established a colour policy.

When this image was joined to the teaching that African spirituality was demonic, submission to the religion could become psychological submission to European superiority. The problem was not the Divine principle of love associated with Christ. The problem was the political and racial costume placed upon it.

Religion became most dangerous where Africans abandoned discernment. A people who already distrusted themselves accepted the stranger’s description of their soul. Sacred groves became evil. Ancestral wisdom became superstition. Indigenous names became embarrassing. The African was told that salvation required separation from himself.

Again, the European missionary did not achieve this alone. Africans repeated the message, enforced it within their homes and taught children to fear their own heritage. The coloniser planted the seed, but many local hands watered it faithfully and still complain about the size of the tree.

This is the cause we must confront today. We cannot recover Af’raka merely by cursing the first planter while continuing to water the plantation.

We need to rediscover our history, spirituality, traditions and cultures—not to romanticise every ancient custom, but to recover the principles that served life. Returning to our roots does not mean digging up everything buried in the past and placing it upon an altar. Some things were buried for good reason. Discernment must decide what is medicine and what is poison.

The work begins with love and unity. A people who do not love one another cannot protect a shared inheritance. They will sell it piece by piece, then gather online to discuss who stole it.

3. Revenge Is Another Chain

Among some who call themselves awakened, a dangerous movement has appeared. Because white racism harmed Black people, they conclude that Black racism is the proper medicine. They believe hatred should be returned with interest, as though the universe were operating a spiritual revenge bank.

This is not awakening. It is injury wearing African colours.

Racism does not become righteous because the victim has changed. The belief that an entire race is naturally wicked, inferior or deserving of harm remains darkness, regardless of the mouth speaking it. If white supremacy is evil because it judges human worth by colour, then a Black version of the same principle cannot become Light merely because history explains the anger behind it.

Pain may explain hatred. It does not transform hatred into wisdom.

We cannot heal Af’raka by becoming the thing that wounded her. If the racist taught us to reduce people to skin colour and we adopt the same method, then the racist remains our teacher. We may hate the lesson, but we have still graduated from his classroom.

The awakened person must ask: if I become cruel because cruelty was shown to me, what difference exists between my consciousness and the consciousness I condemn?

Revenge is often presented as strength, but revenge is usually pain begging to feel powerful. True strength is the ability to remain conscious when the lower self demands destruction. Anyone can return hatred. The reaction requires no spiritual development. Fire does not need enlightenment to spread.

We are children of the Sun. The Sun illuminates without first checking the colour, nationality or religion of the person standing beneath it. Light does not become smaller by revealing the path to one who once lived in darkness.

This does not mean allowing injustice to continue. Love is not foolishness. Compassion can possess a spine. We may demand reparations, justice, truthful history, institutional change and accountability while refusing racial hatred. Forgiveness does not mean handing the thief another key. It means refusing to let the thief continue living inside your emotional body after the physical theft has ended.

When someone hates you, that person may need love most—but love must be wise. Sometimes love embraces. Sometimes love establishes a boundary. Sometimes love removes a corrupt leader, prosecutes a criminal or refuses further cooperation with abuse. The path of Light is not the path of becoming a decorative carpet for wicked people to walk upon.

But the purpose of justice must be restoration, protection and balance—not the intoxication of making another race suffer because ours suffered.

If your vision of Black liberation requires a permanent white enemy, then whiteness still controls the direction of your consciousness. You are not free; you are simply moving in opposition. The enemy whistles, and your entire emotional army begins marching.

Being ourselves is more powerful than becoming an inverted copy of another people’s sickness.

Af’raka does not need to prove superiority. The obsession with superiority is itself part of the disease. We need self-knowledge, dignity, production, unity and spiritual depth. A civilisation confident in itself does not spend every morning announcing that another civilisation is inferior. It has work to do.

Pointing fingers and planning racial revenge will not return Af’raka to her roots. It will not produce ascension. It will deepen separation and call the darkness “justice.”

Af’raka must remain upon the path of Light because Light alone illuminates darkness. We cannot raise the vibration of the Earth while feeding hatred into its field. The awakening we seek is not only for one continent. It is for humanity.

The mystical truth is that separation is an illusion. Bodies differ. Cultures differ. Nations and tribes provide different classrooms of experience. Yet the life animating all beings proceeds from one Source.

Within our schools of spiritual thought, karma and reincarnation reveal that the soul is not limited to one tribe, race or country. The soul is greater than the physical identity it temporarily wears. It seeks conditions through which it may encounter lessons, settle causes, develop consciousness and experience human life from different angles.

One may leave the world in an African body and return through an American, Indian, European or Asian family. The person you despise because of race may represent a physical condition your own soul could one day inhabit. The universe has a rather sarcastic method of placing us inside the lessons we refused to understand from outside.

The racist may eventually awaken within the race he hated. Karma is an exceptionally patient teacher and does not appear impressed by political slogans.

When we understand the mobility and universality of the soul, racial hatred becomes spiritually ridiculous. We are costumes attacking costumes while the actors behind them belong to one theatre.

All humanity is one. This does not erase historical responsibility or cultural identity. Oneness is not amnesia. It means that justice must heal the whole field rather than create another generation of hatred.

4. Become the Change You Keep Posting About

Finger-pointing will not solve half of our problems. In fact, after a certain point it becomes a way of avoiding the work entirely.

Social media has made accusation wonderfully convenient. A person can condemn colonialism before breakfast, insult African Christians by noon, quarrel with another awakened brother in the evening and sleep peacefully believing he has liberated the continent.

Af’raka, apparently, was waiting for the correct comment section.

We should reduce the endless bashing and increase intelligent teaching. I cannot force anyone to stop, but I can ask the awakened to examine results. Has insulting African Christians caused them to investigate African spirituality, or has it pushed them deeper into defensive religion? Has mocking believers opened their minds, or merely confirmed their fear that every traditional seeker is hostile?

You cannot awaken a person by humiliating him. Humiliation closes the door through which understanding might have entered.

If someone has been taught from childhood that African spirituality is demonic, shouting “you are brainwashed” beneath his photograph will rarely produce illumination. It will produce resistance. The ego protects whatever it believes protects identity.

Teach with patience. Ask questions. Present history. Demonstrate the moral beauty of the tradition you want others to respect. Live so honourably that your life becomes evidence.

The awakened community itself must practise what it preaches. There is no love and unity in declaring ourselves spiritually advanced while betraying one another over money, attention, titles and followers. Some Light Workers spend so much time fighting over who carries the brightest light that the room remains dark.

If Af’raka must rise into an awakened civilisation, awakened Africans must first learn cooperation. We must build schools, archives, spiritual centres, ethical businesses, research institutions and communities of mutual protection. We must support one another’s work without treating another person’s success as an ancestral attack.

Unity does not mean agreeing on everything. It means refusing to destroy the larger purpose whenever personal pride is offended. Brothers and sisters may debate history, religion and strategy without turning disagreement into civil war.

We must also honour our traditions and cultures intelligently. Learn the language. Record the oral history. Study the symbols. Protect sacred sites. Listen to elders, but do not abandon critical thought. Investigate spiritual practices with humility. Restore what elevates consciousness and reform what violates life.

The change must begin within us because the cause operates within us. If greed weakened Af’raka, practise integrity. If division opened the gate, build unity. If cultural shame maintained mental slavery, honour African knowledge. If religious domination survived through ignorance, teach history. If racial hatred continues the cycle, choose conscious justice and love.

Do not allow emotions to become your master. Anger can alert us that a boundary has been violated, but anger is a messenger, not a king. Receive the message, investigate the cause and decide your action through wisdom.

The person who controls your emotions can control your direction. Every provocation then becomes a rope attached to your mind. A single offensive statement online pulls the rope, and there you go—dragged through the comment section for six hours while your actual purpose waits unattended.

Freedom requires emotional discipline.

Leave the effect long enough to study the cause. Ask what produced the condition, who benefits from it, what part of it survives inside us and which action can alter it. This is how problems are solved.

We must stop attacking whole populations. “The whites” are not one mind. “The Blacks” are not one mind. Europeans and Americans include oppressors, resisters, exploiters, allies, ignorant people, awakened people and ordinary souls working through their own lessons. Af’rakans contain the same range.

Judge systems and deeds accurately. Name colonialism. Name racism. Name slavery. Name the corporations, laws, institutions and leaders involved. But do not transform millions of unrelated human beings into one spiritual enemy. Collective accusation is intellectually lazy and karmically dangerous.

The same principle applies to African Christians and Muslims. Criticise religious domination, false history, fear-based doctrine and the demonisation of African traditions. But remember that the believer remains a human being, often carrying inherited beliefs rather than a personal plan to destroy Af’raka.

You can bring change to your people if you allow that change to begin with you.
Become the love you demand from Af’raka.
Become the unity you say our ancestors lost.
Become the integrity you demand from leaders.
Become the spiritual confidence that no foreign image can erase.

The finger that has finished accusing must become a hand that plants, writes, teaches, protects and builds.
Af’raka does not need more experts in describing the darkness. She needs bearers of Light who know how to switch on a lamp.
Those who harmed us must face truth and justice. Those among us who betrayed the collective must also face truth. But after the accounting, the work of restoration remains ours.

No amount of blame can perform it for us.

POINTING FINGERS IS NOT THE WAY.

LOVE, UNITY, SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIOUS ACTION ARE THE WAY.

MAN, KNOW THYSELF.

Best wishes,

Knight Fredel

---

Editorial reference points

• The transatlantic trade’s enrichment of imperial powers and its racial ideology: UNESCO—Transatlantic slave trade.
• Voyage records and the commercial scale of the Atlantic trafficking system: SlaveVoyages—The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
• The fourth-century Christian legacy of Aksum in present-day Ethiopia: The Metropolitan Museum of Art—Foundations of Aksumite Civilization and Its Christian Legacy.
• Scholarship on the connections between Christian missions and the framework of British imperialism in Africa: Oxford University Press—The Communion of Women.