Sister's Quarterly

Editor's Note: This article is a reprint that was published on June 1, 2014, by Sister's Quarterly. 

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We, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, have spent close to seventeen years at the United Nations.  During these years, our fight has been to establish an identity.  The identity we have chosen for ourselves is not just for us here in America, but also for Blacks from many nations.  Following the prophecies of the Holy Quran and Bible, God said He would gather His people out of every nation where they are scattered. 

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We, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, were instrumental in accomplishing that.  We have gathered together the scattered children of former slaves in the entire Slavery Diaspora: North America, Central America, South America and the Islands.  For an entire week in Chincha, Peru, during a November 2005 UN regional seminar, all you could hear from every UN official speaking, and every nation, was the term Afrodescendant. 

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That was just one seminar - the culmination, or some say the birth, of Afrodescendants.  There were several seminars, and each time we had a seminar there wet some countries that did not show up.  But we, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam have always been there at every seminar. 

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We saw all of those who came and went. We made a substantial donation towards the expenses of the seminar in Chincha, Peru, and we were sponsors for smaller countries who attended that seminar, all for the purpose of establishing a global identity-not reparations, but an identity.

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While reparation is one of our plights, we were not in Peru to gain reparations. We were in Peru to gain an identity.  What Identity? Afrodscendants. The UN has the name Afrodescendants on their records. Chief Osiris Akkebala, in his intervention at the United Nations, said we want reparations, we demand reparations; we demand that you pay reparations.  

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After he spoke, we waited for a little while and said, "We understand that you, the UN, cannot pay us reparations." Our point to the officers of the UN and to Chief Osiris was that the UN does not pay reparations. People do not come to the UN to get reparations.

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The UN does not pay reparations. We went to the UN to be reinstated into the human families of the earth because the UN, prior to then, did not recognize us. We did not have human rights. The UN had grouped us with the English, Spanish and Portuguese speaking Caucasians in the countries in which we live. 

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We were subsumed in the Americas, and we sought to bring a wedge between us and Caucasians: to let them know we are not Caucasian and that we have a different identity from them. But what is that identity?

We are no longer African only, because of the Mediterranean and trans-Atlanta slave trades, we are, today, scattered into many lands and cultures. Our ancestors, stolen from their homeland, Africa, were forcibly bred and raped and served from their original identity until we the descendants, no longer viewed ourselves as Africans only.  

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Neither are we viewed as Africans by continental Africans, who themselves suffered colonization. So, we in 1998, we asked the UN to do that: to recognize us as a People separate from the countries in which we live, and the NN has done this. From 2001 to 2006, the UN allowed and helped us to self-identify and then began calling us by our new, self-chosen name. 

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There were seminars in Honduras, Canada, Switzerland, South Africa, Peru, and Chile.  While we were in Durban, South Africa to take part in the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) (and we did take part in the WCAR), we had a separate seminar with Professors Jose Bengoa and Asbjorn Eide.  

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It was in Santiago, Chile where the term Afrodescendants was first heard, and Ajani Mukarram, President of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, was present - before 2001 and before Durban.  

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With that said, we offer to the various groups, or organizations among us the following: for accounting and global census purposes, will you, brethren (Pan-Africanists, Nationalists, Bi-racial, Blacks, Americans, Africans, African Americans, Bilalians, New Africans and other self-declared nations among our people), step forward to the global identity, Afrodescendant, as did the Lost-Found Nation of Islam and our brothers and sisters in Brazil. 

 

Most Latin-American countries had already accepted the global identity, Afrodescndant, when the Lost-Found Nation of Islam was objecting to it. During the UN sponsored regional seminar in La Ceiba, Honduras, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, for a second time, objected to this new global identity, Afrodescendants. 

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During the seminar, a representative from Brazil - which has the largest Afrodscendant population in the Slavery Diaspora - stated that they too did not agree with the name, Afrodescendant, that was already in use by Latin-Americans, but acquiesced to establish unity with the many Blacks already using the term.  We were proposing Lost-Found People. 

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After hearing the Brazilian delegate's comments, and being asked to meet with Cuba, we began to think about the term, Afrodescendant.

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by Silis Muhammad,

Chief Executive Officer of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam.