By Sunday Isuwa
Participants at the US Embassy Black History Month event have called for more collaboration with their brothers in America especially those who can’t trace their African roots.
The programme which was with the theme: “Building Bridges between Africa and the African Diaspora,” the participants said there is no good awareness between Africans in the continent and their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora especially those in Britain, Spain, America, Caribbean and other places about their roots.
According to some of the participants, the great migration from Africa to Europe was huge but insisted if they must build a strong continent, there must be a better collaboration and relationship with the African-Americans.
Speaking at the event, one of the discussants a seasoned professor in Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Prof Mabel Itohanosa Erioyunvwen Evwierhoma said for African continent to make progress, their brothers and sisters in Europe must renegotiate the place of the African continnt in the world politics and economy.
According to her, the Berlin conference that let to slave trade ‘cut the African continent into pieces’ adding that such an issue must be looked at.
Prof Mabel who decried the issue of under development, killings and kidnapping especially in Nigeria, added that Africans in Europe might not want to come back to such a continent.
“The future is for Africans to see,” Prof Mabel said adding that, the past is not all bad but that Africans need to counter the western media misrepresentation in the African based media.
She said the bridges Africans in America have built over the years need to translate to a voice for ideological and political movement adding that Afrocentricity championed by some African- Americans in the past does not have a curriculum.
“There should be paradigm shift from depending to independence. The looted artifacts should be returned. The continent must move from consumption to production,” the professor added.
Speaking earlier, a staff of the US Embassy who is also a career prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, Ms Tanya Hill said many African-Americans who don’t know the particular country their roots are, now conducting DNA test which according to her, is helping them to know their ancestry.