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MAAFA, a Swahili term synonymous with the "great suffering", chronicles the physical, psychological and spiritual journey of African people to the New World - The Americas. This metaphoric experience can be traced back to around the 14th century with the Arab slave trade and the captivation of millions of African men, women and children. Historians suggest that as many as 40 million Africans may have been enslaved during this torturous sojourn to the Americas and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Europe. Dr. Cain Hope Felder, in The Original African Heritage Study Bible, calculates that over 100 million people were either taken as captives or killed in the slave wars. About one-third of the Africans taken from their homes, he writes, died on the way to the coast and at the embarkation stations; another third died at sea, so that only one-third finally survived to become the laborers of the New World.
Tragically, today many African people throughout the Diaspora bear the psychological scars of this period of colonization and dehumanization.
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Minister Eric Jackson, Sr.
Harambee UCC
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