And they return home to Africa
BY USMAN MAMA
Jah Eliajah Adanjah and his wife, Jah Evejah, are descendants of slaves from Guadeloupe who settled in Benin, West Africa, several years ago. They are the founders of a Service Corps involved in an agricultural project in the northern part of the country. The couple and one member of their 10-member group came to Ouidah, a town in southern Benin that used to have one of the most notorious slave depots on the west coast of Africa, to take part in a Ceremony of Repent organized by the local elite to apologize to the descendants of slaves.
In his address during the ceremony, Jah Eliajah Adanjah said that black people’s history is all written out in the Bible in order for us to remember that we are the first-born people, and also that our Continent is the Cradle of Humanity. Today, we must take back our history. To back his claim, Adanjah quoted from the Bible Jeremiah 16, verses 14-15: Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but the Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again unto their fathers.
Adanjah also quoted Isaiah 60, verses 8-9: Who are these that fly as a cloud and as the doves to their windows? Surely the isles shall wait for me and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them unto the name of the Lord, thy God, and the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.Adanjah explained that that was why he and his family came back like doves to the paternal continent and especially to Benin from where our Ancestors left for the great tribulation that slavery was.
Speaking later to The African, Adanjah said that the Ceremony of Repent was a prophetic event planned a long time ago, and the time finally came. He added: It was a day of high emotion. It was time for the black man to show the whole world once again that he loves himself through his fellow human being. We must love one another as Negroes, regardless of our social, physical, cultural or spiritual differences. We all have a role to play to rehabilitate our continent and to rehabilitate the black man. Personally, it brought me added impetus to work even harder for the return and the insertion of those among us who live far away and who want to come back to the continent.