It is estimated that one out of three African Americans came from Nigeria. Many African Americans are Igbos, Yorubas, and Hausas. (My friends and I used to indulge in a game of trying to figure out what tribe a particular African American came from. We would observe their behaviors and match them with the stereotypical behaviors of specific Nigerian tribes. If they are industrious and intemperate, we said Igbo, if they are very clever and diplomatic, we said Yoruba, if they are polished and aristocratic in their bearing, and we said Hausa and so on. Of course, we were mostly wrong for the typical African America is a mixture of the many African tribes that came here, and additionally are mixed with Caucasians and Indians. They are, in fact, a new breed of human beings, not African, not European, but the new human being. They are the vanguard of tomorrow’s mixed humanity. As the means of transportation and communication improves, people from all over the world will relate to each other closely. In the past, distance and culture separated people, but that is no more. With increased proximity will be increased so-called interracial marriages…genetically, there is no such thing as different races, and there is only one human species, from the so-called different races are, genetically, 99.9% the same…. and the result would be a new race of humanity, one that is neither white, nor black. In a thousand years, all people would be mixed and brown in color. This is our future and we might as well not fight it. We should rather provide all children with scientific education, and society with scientific culture, so as not to witness degeneration of the race to primitive forms of existence.)

As I see it, African Americans own as much of Nigeria’s oil wealth as those who claim to be Nigerians. Therefore, Nigeria ought to set aside 1-5% of her oil revenues for African Americans. All African countries ought to do the same. Moreover, all African countries ought to pass laws offering any African American (by which I mean those in both North and South America) who so desires it dual citizenship. If an African American desires it, he retains his American citizenship and passport and seeks, say Nigerian, Ghanaian citizenship and passport.

(African Americans came from Senegal through Namibia, all in West Africa. They did not come from North, South or East Africa, so the policy recommendations proposed here do not apply to those other parts of Africa. One is talking about West Africa, from Senegal to Namibia. However, East Africans do not escape Scott free. They sold themselves to Arab Countries. Take a look at Saudis, for example. Some look blacker than me…for some reasons, my family members tend to be fair in complexion, sometimes as white as Italians…East African countries must make reparations to blacks in the Middle East.)

Africans must make reparations for the abuse we subjected African Americans to. We must do so for a whole number of reasons, including the need to assuage our guilty conscience. As noted, some of us consciously feel guilty when we go to the inner cities of America and see how our American cousins live. I feel personally responsible for Harlem and Watts. I used to go through Watts and Compton, California, on my way to teach at a college in Dominguez Hill, and saw, first hand, how our people are made to live like second class citizens. I am personally responsible for this situation. So are my fellow Africans.

It is time for us to accept responsibility for our past wrong doing and ask our African American brothers to forgive us. I personally ask every African American I see to forgive me. I do not always say it aloud: I sometimes say it as a silent, inner prayer. Every day of my life, I ask God to forgive me for my ancestor’s evil behaviors.

(That evil behavior is preserved in my village. When, as a result of Lugard’s conquest of our world, slavery effectively ended in it, the slaves that had been captured but had not yet been sold were left in our village. To the present, these folks are treated as second class citizens. Being a life long rebel, while visiting our village, from my childhood home of Shanty town, Lagos, invited one of my fellow eight year olds from our Catholic church, Jeremiah where are you, to come to my house and my grand mother told me that we do not associate with “those people”, Osus. The boy was made to go home. To the present, we do not intermingle with them. We do not marry their people. As you may have noticed, my last name is Osuji. That means God’s slave. My ancestors, though Dialas, freeborn, were a positive kind of slaves; we were the priests of our clan. We are like the biblical Samuel; we are dedicated to serving God, to leading the people in spiritual affairs. In Hindu terms, we are the Brahmin class, the highest class in society. I suppose that that accounts for my extraordinary interest in spirituality? Perhaps, after all, I am here to do for our people what my ancestors did for them: provide them with spiritual, aka psychological, guidance? You never know how these things work. How do you account for my studying the major religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? I do not know.)

There is no use denying our complicity in the crime against humanity called slavery. I believe that both Africans and white Americans must take ownership of what we did to African Americans. When we do so, we must repent for our sins and make amends. This amends may take the form of monetary reparation to African Americans. However, I am against giving individual persons free monies. If we did so, they would drink themselves to death with it. I want us to set money aside to train every African American child, from elementary to university. This must be done for a generation (35 years).

I think that it is in taking ownership for our past criminal behavior of selling our people that Africans will finally become emotionally grown up. In their present state of denial, they tend to seem very childish. We must tell the universe that we accept our sins against some of God’s children.

I know that there are those who claim that there is no God. I can even make these atheists and agnostics’ arguments for them. But deep down in my soul, I know that God exists.

God tells me that Love is the highest form of being. As brother Jesus said: do unto others, as you want them to do to you. I want to be loved and, therefore, ought to love other people. In as much as we did not love our African American brothers, I believe that we violated God’s moral law.

I believe that one of the reasons why nothing is working out well for Africans is because of our evil behavior in selling our own people, that is, in not loving some of God’s children.

God is merciful. He tells us to forgive one another. Forgiveness is the highest form of Love. I ask my African American brothers and sisters to forgive us Africans, that is, to love us. I ask my fellow Africans to engage in behavior that shows that we love our African American brothers and sisters.

At the individual level, loving our African American cousins’ mean accepting and caring for them. If you are good at science and mathematics, please go the ghetto and teach black children physics, chemistry, biology, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, calculus etc.

I am a block head when it comes to mathematics, but I am very good at psychology. I do go to jails and prisons to counsel my brothers who are essentially political prisoners. Please do not get me wrong. I do believe in law and order and would punish a criminal in a jiffy. But things are such that in America a black boy is likely to be jailed than a white boy. One out of four black men between ages 14-24 is either in jail or being supervised by parole and probation officers. America annually spends more money to house one African American in jail than she does to educate each African American school child. It spends about $35,000 on each inmate and $6,000 to educate each student, annually. I think that this is an outrage against humanity.

My goal in this essay is not to take issue with white Americans’ abuse of African Americans. I have done that in other essays. Suffice it to say that I believe that if white Americans do not change and make amends for their evil against African Americans that their empire would eventually collapse. Where are Samaria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Britain, Russia, and other hitherto great empires based on exploitation of God’s children?

All empires based on oppression, sooner or latter, fall. If America does not change her ways, her military might will not prevent her from joining the other evil empires. History is littered with fallen evil empires and there is no reason why America should be an exception.

I know that to Americans their present sole super power status is intoxicating and they may not imagine themselves no longer at the apogee of human civilization. But they must ask what happened to the other superpower, the Soviet Union? It took only a small trigger and Stalin’s oppressive house collapsed in a year. America is already a house built on a shaky foundation. It does not take too much perspicacity to appreciate that America’s morality is degenerate. We already have pedophiles and other such bestial creatures in ascendancy in America. Every moral deviancy now wants to be recognized as alternative life style. It is Nero’s decadent Rome all over again. We have been there before, de javu.

If Americans are mesmerized by their possession of weapons of mass destruction, perhaps, they ought to study a little history. History teaches us that no weapon system ever invented by man stays in one group’s possession for ever. The Chinese invented gun powder but Marco Polo brought it to Europe, and with it, Europeans ended the feudal era of bows, arrows and lances. Look around and see who is studying science at American universities. It is mostly third world students. By and large, these folks will go home and develop their own nuclear weapons.

All things being equal, America will, of course, fight tooth and nail to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons; it is in her self interests to do so. If others have those weapons, they could use them on America. Moreover, if only America has those weapons, she enjoys the status of a terrorist and is able to use her weapons to intimidate other people into doing what she wants. American leaders would saber rattle and generate fear in other countries, and out of fear they would obey America.

However, it is precisely because of this unacceptable intimidatory situation that other countries feel compelled to seek to acquire nuclear weapons. No one likes to be bullied by the school yard bully. If history is constant, and it is, by the end of this century, those countries, including African countries that want nuclear weapons will have them, America’s opposition not withstanding.

One is a political realist and knows that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. All we can do is redesign the international order, so that we can manage the necessary weapons of mass destruction available in our world. The United Nations must be transformed into a real world government, with teeth to punish member nations. We must reduce the present nations’ sovereignty and give law enforcement powers to the United Nations Organization.

America’s culture is so fragile that with a little external and internal push; America will implode under the weight of her moral corruption.

Of course this does not have to happen. America is the first universal country. Indeed, it is my adopted country, and I wish her well. But as a moral agent, I cannot countenance abuse of any of God’s children. As some one said, do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you. The abuse of any human being is my abuse. I look forward to a morally regenerated America and the collapse of a morally degenerate America.

Again, this essay is not directed at Americans but at my fellow Africans. I want my African brothers and sisters to think about the evils our ancestors visited on our American brothers, and think of creative ways to do their best to correct the situation. We must all pitch in to help those whose lives we made hellish. It is really hellish to be a slave and to live in America as the children of slaves, daily reminded of ones second class statuses by racist institutions.

DISCUSSION

In this essay, I am thinking out loud. Nothing written here is written in concrete. I am merely trying to provoke a discussion that I believe needs to take place among Africans.

I believe that there is tension between African Americans and Africans. That tension is rooted in our mutual awareness of our secret past. We Africans harmed African Americans. African Americans know this fact but it does not yet seem necessary for them to bring it to the open. They have one war to fight at a time. Currently, they are fighting a war with Caucasians, to redress the evil the later visited on them. But when their issue with Caucasians is properly disposed of, they would turn their attention to Africans. Sooner or later, African Americans will ask us Africans to make amends for our role in their suffering.

But it must also be remembered that some African Americans, while still in Africa, participated in slavery, until they were enslaved. Many of them went to wars to capture slaves and wound up been captured and sold. Even in the Americas, some of them had their own slaves. One has read about blacks in Virginia who had other black slaves. But then again there were the children who were caught in adult’s stupidity.

There is no use blaming any one for the past. What needs to occur is for us all to take mutual responsibility for the past and make sure that it does not repeat itself.

Long ago, I noticed an interesting phenomenon among Africans in America. Some Africans put a distance between them and African Americans. They saw only the bad in African Americans. They were always harping on what African Americans did wrong.

In my Igbo community, such persons called African Americans Ndiakata (troublesome people).

While putting African Americans down, such persons, nevertheless, did not hesitate marrying them, if only to obtain the almighty green cards. Unfortunately, as soon as they secured their green cards, they divorced their African American wives. They then went home, to Africa, and got themselves what they called their real wives.

These folks used our American sisters to secure permanent status in America. What is new? These people are as callous as their slave selling ancestors; they are merely engaging in modern forms of slavery, using others for their own good. If you use an American woman for green card, you are a practicer of slavery. You should only marry a woman you love and take care of her for the duration of your life on earth.

The tendency to see only the bad in African Americans is the same mental trick employed by white racists. By seeing them as not well, one justifies using them and discarding them. The slave master told himself that Africans are subhuman beings and that enabled him to have good conscience, while he exploited them as slaves. By the same token, when Africans put African Americans down, they rationalize using them to secure green card and discard them after words. That way they do not feel bad for using some of God’s children.

But in as much as Africans are human beings, they do feel guilty. As pointed out, Africans tend to employ projection and denial to get rid of their guilt. As also noted, those who do so tend to be emotionally immature. Hence the Africans’ tendency to give one the impression that he is childish. I am sorry to say it, the average Nigerian comes across as very emotionally warped and stunted, and a child in adult uniform. This is primarily because he over uses denial and projection in his childish efforts to avoid guilt and depression.

For Africans to become emotional adults, they must accept guilt and feel remorse, even depressed, if needs be. We need to put some sadness in those silly, smiling faces of Nigerians. What are these fools laughing about, any way? They are merely trying to avoid examining their evil past and seeing the guilt in their subconscious minds. They must learn to accept guilt, feel sad and become emotional adults.

If they are adults, for example, they would rather die than take bribes. I would feel degraded were somebody to offer me bribes. In fact, I would slap the idiotic face of whoever dared insult me by offering me bribes.

Nigerians do not feel insulted taking bribes or demanding it. What children! I know that Nigerians may feel insulted being called children, but if you behave like one, you must be prepared to be seen as one. If you are corrupt, you are an emotional cripple; that is all there is to it; there are no ifs and buts about it.

One is not naïve. One lives in the real world and sees all the dances of God confused children dance. These dances are not limited to Africans; whites and Asians dance them, too. In this essay, however, I am restricting myself to Africans.

Why did Africans sell their brothers and sisters? They did it because they are human beings. And on that note, let me end by re-presenting the familiar Christian theological view of the human condition, the view that man is sinful, a view that is no longer in vogue in our modern, secular society, but a view that I accept as correct. Make of it what you like. I am not trying to impose my religion on you; I am just sharing with you what I believe.

I believe that all human beings, me included, are born in sin. To be on earth is to be a sinner. To be here one has sinned already.

The Catholic Church has a concept called Original Sin, with which it accounts for our sinful nature.

The Garden of Eden story is a metaphor of man’s descent to sin. According to that creation mythology, God created us and placed us in a place of abundance, a place where all our material needs were met. He, however, asked us not to eat of the fruit of a particular tree.

If we know any thing about God’s children, us, it is that we are defiant. We did what we were told not to do.

We said that the devil made us do it (excuses, rationalizations). Satan made Eve do it and Eve made Adam do it. That way each of them had excuses for disobeying God’s Will.

God does not make compromises. If you disobey his will, you suffer the consequences. Thus we were driven out of the garden of abundance and sent to a world of scarcity, where we could only secure our daily bread through our labor.

Obviously, the biblical Adam and Eve story is a myth. It is a story meant to teach the lesson that we are sinners and account for the origin of sin.

There are other ways of accounting for the presence of sin in our world. Gnosticism presents its own stories. According to one version of it, Lucifer, also called the Demiurge, was an angel that God loved. He felt pride swell in his chest. He envied God’s creatorship of him and wanted to be his own creator. He rebelled against God. The arch angels Gabriel and Michael organized loyal angels to defeat Lucifer and he was driven out of heaven, and came to earth to start his own kingdom.

As Gnosticism sees it, heaven is the kingdom of union. Union is love. Love is light. The earth, on the other hand, is the opposite of heaven. The earth is the kingdom of separation. Separation is hatred. Separation is darkness. To be on earth is to be in darkness. To be in heaven (love, union) is to be in light.

Gnosticism aims at taking people out of this world of darkness (hatred, separation) and back to the world of light (love, union). (See Plotinus for a concise essay on Gnosticism. Also see the Gnostic Gospels, particularly, The Gospel of Thomas.)

Of course, Gnosticism is also a myth of the origin of this world. All stories of creation are exactly that, stories, metaphors for what we do not know.

I have presented my own story of creation in a four volume book called Real Self Psychology. I built on the story of creation presented by an amazing Jewish clinical psychologist called Helen Schucman, in her book called A Course in Miracles. She recast the Gnostic view in psychological categories. (Helen’s book probably will not appeal to Africans. Africans seem not to like psychology; they tend not to analyze their behaviors and feel put off by any effort to give them insight into the etiology of their apparent childish behaviors. In that light, I suspect that many of them will not like this essay. Nevertheless, one must try to reach them, to provide them with insights as to why they do some of the most terrible, horrible things they do while laughing, such as sell each other into slavery, and steal moneys from their governments and squander them while their people suffer in preventable poverty. In the past, I had believed that, perhaps, Africans were at a lower level of evolution and wrote them off. But now, I am resolved to do whatever I could to transform them into moral beings, not just animals who ate and did not bother with others not eating.)

According to Schucman’s mythology, God is one. God extended himself into his Son. The Son extended himself to his own sons. This way, creation has no beginning and no end and is always on going.

There is no space and gap between God and his children. God and his children are unified; they are one. They share one spirit, one self, and one mind. The son of God is in God and God is in his son. Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere. (See St John’s Gospel, Chapter 14. Jesus responded to Phillips question: show us where God is, with, where you see the son, Jesus, you see God, for God and his son is one.)

The son of God resented being created by God and wished to go create him. He could not do so in reality, so he appears to have done so in a dream setting. Our world is said to be a dream. (This is solipsistic and idealistic philosophy ala George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer, Pascal and Leibniz. And Vedanta Hinduism, as articulated by Shankara and Ramanuja.)

In the dream, the children of God invent space, time and matter. They invent self concepts and self images. Each sees himself as apart from other persons, and as housed in body. Each sees space and time between him and others. Each pursues his own self interests at the expense of others.

Helen Schucman’s myth is exactly that, a myth, not a fact. The fact is that none of us understands how we came to be in this world.

Science too presents a mythology of the origin of this world. The current accepted science story of creation is the Big bang fairy tale. According to this nursery tale, fifteen to twenty billion years ago, every thing was one thing, state of Presingularity, which is beyond the categories of contemporary science to understand it.

Somehow, that one thing shattered itself and in a nanosecond invented space, then time and finally particles (quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons etc). These subatomic particles somehow united to form atoms. Given changes in space and time, atoms made changes that led to the 104 and continuing elements on the chemical table.

Somehow, the various elements combined to form biological organisms, first unicellular organism, then multicellular organisms like trees, then animals and, ultimately, human beings. (What a quant fairy tale! This story is as unbelievable as the one found in Genesis, the Christian Bible.)

Physics is fascinating and every person must study it. I cannot see how an individual can be considered educated if he does not have university level understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology. Nevertheless, science does not answer all our questions.

Given the vacuum in our understanding, Meta science purports to provide some useful answers. Alas, metaphysics is mostly speculative and not verifiable. As Karl Popper reminds us, all scientific, all propositions, really, must be verifiable and discard able.

No one understands the origin of our being. Where ignorance prevails speculation exists. We have a need to know and tend to confabulate where our knowledge ends. Here then is my own conjecture…an abbreviation of what took me over 2000 pages to accomplish.

I believe that we separated from our creator. Our Creator has no name. To name something is to limit it. Our creator is limitless. But if it helps you, call him God.

I believe that our separation from God was probably motivated by our desire to go seem to create ourselves and to be special. As it were, each of us wants to play God and pretend that he created himself and created other people.

On earth, we all seek our self interests, often at the expense of others interests, but, sometimes, we cooperate with others and seek mutual interests. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, human beings are self centered and selfish and will eat and have you starve. I proved this thesis for myself. During the Biafran war, as a very observant child, I saw people struggling for scarce food. In my own family, when mom obtained salt, a very rare commodity indeed, we literally fought for access to it. One would rather have that salt and others not. Thus, I learnt that I was self centered as others were. I am a sinner as others are.

I believe that on earth, we are all sinners. We are born in sin and live in sin. We need to be saved from our sins. It is here that Jesus Christ comes in. He transcended the separated self, the ego, the I, and returned to the spirit of union. As it were, he gave up his sense of self creation and accepted that God created him. He returned to obeying the will of God, and gave up his desire to do his own wishes. In effect, he transcended the world of separation, the egos world we live in. He returned to the original world of Union, which is love, which God created. He overcame the world and returned to heaven.

Jesus Christ is now the mediator between heaven and earth. He is our intercessor. If we call on him, he tells God what we ask of him and brings God’s response to us. He is a bridge between the earth and heaven. He knows the earth, for he was here, and knows heaven, because he is in it.

Jesus is one with the Holy Spirit and with God. When we separated from God, and came to this world, God entered the world, the temporal order, as the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love and union in us. The Holy Spirit asks us to love each other. The ego asks us to fend for only ourselves. Jesus, as part of God and the Holy Spirit, teaches us to love and forgive one another.

The Catholic Church has a concept called the Holy Trinity, Triune, and God in three persons: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

The Church also has the idea that God can be seen in two manners, the transcendental God in heaven and the immanent God on earth. The Holy Spirit is the immanent God. ( If you love Catholic theology, as I do, see the writings of St Augustine, Origin, Tatulian, Montana, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Erasmus, Anselem, and such protestant theologians as Martin Luther, Calvin and so on. )

In our minds are three parts, God the father, God the Holy Spirit and our mind, God the Son’s mind. Each of us is the Son of God, a part of God. We separated from God and transformed our mind into the separated mind, aka ego mind. Where our real mind, son of God’s mind, Christ’s mind was, is now the ego mind, the spirit of rebellion, the desire to separate from God and from each other.

You can cast it this way: on earth, in space and time, each of us has a right mind, and a wrong mind. Our right mind is the mind of God, the Holy Spirit in us. Our wrong mind is the ego mind. To be righteous is to be led by the Holy Spirit and do what he asks us to do, love and forgive all people at all times; to be sinful is to behave from the ego mind, to look after ones selfish interests at the expense of others interests.

In eternity, our true mind is unified mind, the mind shared by God and his son. The One son of God is all of us.

I know that all these are confusing, so you can skip this part of the essay.

To be sinful is to look after only ones self. To be sinless (to approximate it, for no one on earth is completely sinless) is to love all people.

To love is to serve all people. To love is to see common interests and not just self interests. To love is to work for our social interests.

In Nigeria, indeed, in all of Africa, people mostly seek self inertest. In pursuit of their self interests, they sold their brothers and sisters into slavery. My grand parents sold African Americans and used the money they got from the white slave buyers to buy useless but ego serving goods. Our house is filled with those trinkets from yore: swords, guns, beads, empty bottles of expensive French wines (that they drank) etc. These primitive ancestors of mine, and yours, used to adorn their bodies with those useless trinkets and that made them feel important, powerful and worthwhile.

In bodies, we all feel that we are nothing. In ego states we feel like we are worthless. So we do things to make us seem worthy and powerful. Alas, we are never worthy and powerful apart from God. Our real worth lies in God.

The Son of God has worth only in his father, not apart from his father. By himself, the son of God can do nothing, but with the power of God in him he can do every thing.

I am worthless, no matter what I do on earth. I only have worth in God.

We sold our brothers and sisters to obtain useless trinkets to adorn our bodies with. In doing so, we are all sinners. In contemporary Nigeria, folks buy expensive lace to make elaborate attires for themselves and adorn their bodies with gold and imagine that such childishness give them existential worth. They are nothing. In fact, they seem hideous in those archaic robes they wear. (Those clothes are not adaptive to modern industrial life. Suit and other Western type clothing are adaptive to our times. And before you talk nonsense about how the clothes Nigerians wear is traditional and how we ought to be proud of them, let me immediately tell you that they are of Arab origin. What Arabs have discarded we call our own. Japan and China had their national clothes but to modernize had to discard them in favor of Western clothes. You can not work in modern industries with clothes that adapted to feudal eras.)

Our worth is only in God and has nothing to do with our external appearance.

In as much as I do what my ancestors did, seek self interests at the expense of social interests, I am a sinner.

We are saved when we follow the example of Jesus Christ, Mohammed and other messengers of God. We are redeemed from our sins when we give up identifying with the separated ego self and accept the unified Christ self, the son of God who is as God created him, unified with his father and with all his brothers and sisters, as our true self. We are delivered from the hell of living in ego state when we see our brothers and sisters pains as our own, and do something to help them, for in helping them we help ourselves, for they are part of us. God has only one Son, all of us as one spirit, one self and one joined mind. In Christ self we reconcile the ego, and its world with the Son of God as his father created him, earth and heaven.

.

Some children of God chose to listen to the Holy Spirit and therefore teach the message of the Holy Spirit. These people are the messengers of God. If you like, they are the prophets of God. (Call them what you like; in reality, like their father, they are nameless for they are limitless.) For our present purpose, Jesus and Mohammed are messengers of God. Listen to any one of them and you will learn the gospel of God.

What is God’s message to us? He asks us to love one another. He teaches us that we must forgive one another, for to forgive is to love. The messengers of God teach love and forgiveness.

Love is union. The messengers of God teach the unity of mankind. We are all one, literally and figuratively.

In the temporal universe. When we love and forgive one another, and serve one another we are saved. More importantly, when we relinquish the delusion that we created ourselves, accept that God created us and worship God through his most Christ like son, Jesus Christ/Mohammed, we are born again.

God created us. We metaphorically died when we separated from him and from each other, left union, heaven, and came to earth and assumed ego, separated status.

We are born again when we return to the awareness that God created us and that we are all members of God’s one family.

When we love and forgive one another, serve one another and accept God as our creator and Jesus/Mohammed as our guide, we are saved. We are on our journey back to God and his unified state, heaven, our real home. We are, as it were, now at the gate of heaven.

Heaven’s gate is not heaven. Heaven is perfect union. Perfect union is spirit. You cannot be in body and be unified. At best, one uses ones body to love other people. On earth, all we can do is approximate heaven, but we cannot be in heaven. Heaven requires formlessness and total love.

(Heaven and hell are not places but states of mind. If you love all people, you are in metaphorical heaven; if you hate people, you are in metaphoric hell. However, there is heaven in the sense that it is existence outside of body, a formless, unified spiritual state. That state is beyond ego, rational explanation; it is ineffable. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience and Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.)

We can aim at sinless living, which, in real terms, means loving and forgiving and serving all people. This is our present call and duty.

We have done wrong to our African American brothers and sisters. We are sinners. We must repent of our sins by loving and serving African Americans. We must collectively and individually find ways to help our African American brothers and sisters.

West African governments must seek ways to show African Americans that they are sorry for what our ancestors did wrong, and make some financial reparation to them. The African Union must publicly apologize to African Americans.

At the individual level, each African must bow down before one African American and honestly beg for his forgiveness. You must do it, if you are to be forgiven your sins. If you ignore this advice, well, see how well things are working out for you, and for all Africans. We are the world’s laughing stock. To change our fortune, we must make changes in our lives. We must apologize to those we sinned against. We must stop denying and projecting our guilt out to others. True, white folks are also sinners, but that is not our issue. Our issue is to find our own salvation by correcting our past mistakes and leave white folks to find their own salvation, when they are ready.

Dr. Osuji can be reached at africainstitute@yahoo.com
600 First Avenue, Suite 325, Seattle, Washington, USA 98104 ( Phone 206-464-9004)