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These deep seated and learned, self-sabotaging attitudes often block them from receiving the necessary ceremonies and blessings from the African ancestors who are directly orchestrating the specified rituals needed by them through their consecrated priesthood's.
In the U.S., there are several African-American groups collectively known as the “Reparations Movement,” who have organized to petition the U.S. and European governments for compensation for 500 years of forced free labor. One of their chief arguments being that as a result of depriving the enslaved Africans compensation for their perpetual labor, it has created a system of multi-generational poverty. This, they contend, is directly due to institutionalized racism compounded by those who were enslaved not being able to pass on to their descendants any earned wealth for centuries. They further argue that those groups and their descendants who benefited directly (and indirectly) from their ancestors labor have prospered enormously.
No one can intelligently argue that slavery is not a barbaric and unjust system. However, the question of who should pay is rife in bitter controversy.
In the New World, particularly in the U.S, more European Americans are obtaining initiations into the Vodoun tradition. Most travel to Haiti to obtain short ceremonies and return to the U.S to practice their own version of what the Vodoun means to them.
A minuscule number have even ventured into the realm of the West African Vodoun system. Because our ancestors form the foundation of our human and spiritual genetic existence, a more penetrating investigation is made into these European American seekers' ancestral lineages from where they actually descend.
When this level of insight is obtained, they might discover that their ancestors have enslaved Africans, or they might have mistreated the enslaved African descendants in the socially sanctioned systems of Jim Crow; or they might simply harbor deep-seated prejudices that they are unconsciously unaware of.
Some might also exhibit learned forms of "white entitlement", cultural or racial superiority or ethnic arrogance, which too might be either consciously or unconsciously part of their social and psychological personality.
In the Mama Tchamba ancestral system, demands for compensation for their children’s enslavement are not made politically, and the methods by which they should be compensated are not delegated to any particular political group.
In the Mama Tchamba Vodoun cosmology, slavery is viewed as a moral crime against God and humanity. Its spiritual devastation lingers throughout the generations in all affected families, society and the world.
As such, the demand for compensation is a divine claim handled by the Mama Tchamba elevated ancestors whose kin have been directly victimized, and in whom God has given them the divine authority to restore balance through a divine system of justice.
In the Mama Tchamba ancestral system of Divine Compensation, the demand for compensation is also not imposed on an entire group, but rather on the heirs of the offending family directly.
It is the Mama Tchamba that determines by what means and methods these heirs are to make compensation.
Additionally, unlike with political movements that might also demand punishment, Mama Tchamba seeks fairness, justice and balance for all parties. In exchange for serving, they offer blessings, protection and healing, which leaves neither party carrying the heavy yoke of guilt, shame, anger or resentment due to the deeds of their ancestors.
The troubling and complex problems of race, class and even gender as it is learned in the U.S., typically makes it difficult for many European Americans to either accept or understand the divine importance of Vodoun’s ancestral systems of Divine Compensation by serving the Mama Tchamba, as they are served in West Africa amongst the Ewe, Mina, Fulani and other ethnic groups. These ethnic groups must also serve because their ancestors either sold or enslaved other Africans into systems of perpetual bondage without compensation.
Most Whites often react with contempt, anger or resentment when it is revealed to them that they must fix what their ancestors have done. Little do they realize that it is in serving the Mama Tchamba that their ancestors are relieved of their karmic debt, which might be the source of their family’s misfortunes by the spirits of those Africans who were either enslaved or mistreated by them. Not only are their ancestors relieved of their karmic debt, but so are they and their children and their future generations.
It is through service to the Mama Tchamba that their blessings, wealth, protection and spiritual growth is actually obtained when seeking initiation into the soul of the West African Vodoun religion.
One such American, anthropology professor and author, Judy Rosenthal, learned this lesson as it was revealed to her during her research into the powerful Mama Tchamba ancestral system. In the following, she recounts her experiences and offers her own personal insight into how other whites might benefit if it were possible to look beyond their social programming.
Excerpt from:
Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. (October 1998)
Need I say that the dimensions of the Ewe dyad of bought people and parents of the house are not the same as those of Western-created master and slave relationships? This was brought home to me when I was informed by an Afa diviner in Togo that I must prepare a Mama Tchamba shrine to worship the spirits of slaves once owned by my ancestors in the United States:
"Why should you not pay your debts to the slave spirits the way we Ewe do? You would be better off for it," the bokono [diviner] advised.
"Some of them died violently. Their spirits are powerful; they can help, heal, and protect you when you need them, if you honor them fully."
I struggled to consider these words in all sobriety. The entire population of descendants of slave owners in the United States would do well to think very seriously about this concept of indebtedness to slaves, of overdue recognition of beholdenness, on the part of American families, cultures, and even nations (if it is not historically and culturally too late, and even if it would be an ever temporary healing of the unhealable).
In Togo both descendants of slaves and descendants of slave owners must give time to the slave spirits, take care of them, and lavish ceremony upon them. But the descendants of slave owners also think in terms of reparations, eternal payments for services previously rendered. The reward is a continuing relationship of mutual service, care, and respect.
According to the Afa diviner, those who neglect the slave spirits and the debt they are owed risk community wide illness, bad luck, unsatisfying personal relationships, lawlessness, the disintegration of social structures, widespread murder, and thus unseasonable death.
When the slave spirits are honored, however, there is reciprocal possession in a complex sense. The caretakers and the slave spirits are in each others hands and thereby have access to each others talents, personalities, and languages as additional personhood (gods also have personhood). The challenge of the Fa diviner provoked a long reverie in which I allowed myself to imagine naively what might happen if white Americans could experience being taken in trance by the spirits of the slaves their forebears owned. (I emphasize whiteness as a major element of identity in the racist West, a culturally constructed essence just as blackness is.)
What follows is an exercise of my moral imagination, romantic and utopian, yet also nihilistic (in the above sense) and political, even as it provokes smiles, thanks to its wild improbability. What if descendants of both slave owners and slaves could become, for a moment, those slaves, empowered and divinized, with African languages glossing their tongues, and the steps of ancestral dances enlivening their bodies the way Ewe, through trance, become their ancestors slaves from the north? What if European Americans as well as Mexican Americans (and all the other Americans) could become "mimetically capacious" (Taussig 1993) in this context? The slaves would come back to heal their descendants and the descendants of the slave owners and to cyclically receive payments for ancient debt, for lives and labor spent in the service of the white people.”
The African slave spirits would be the beloved stranger gods (although their own descendants are no longer foreign but are also hosts); the descendants on both sides would be the host-worshipers. The hospitality would be sacred and reciprocal, a seasonal remarking of history that cannot be undone but that must be commemorated with full honors, gratitude, and eloquence. It would also be a request on the part of the white people generation after generation, to be forgiven for having inflicted the unhealable wound of slavery not a request for this unspeakable injustice to be forgotten. Finally, on an individual plane, this recognition would include a conscious and respectful invitation of the uncanny into ones very personhood, the embracing of the ultimate Other as a consummately desirable being overlapping with ones own self (as well as the knowledge that ones self overlaps with the Others)."
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