The Book I Wrote When I was Eight: An Unpolished Journal

For the centuries of the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, Europe and the African continent, African people were violently deprived the liberty of reading, writing and thinking. Savagely brutalised on the American and Caribbean plantations, mentally and emotionally dispossessed off their lands on the African continent, Africans became paupers and beggars on their lands for Europeans to live happily ever after. None of the savage treatment they endured in the hands of European slave and colonial masters were they allowed communicating about with each other. If caught reading and writing or strategizing about their conditions, they were beaten or killed. Only towards and after the global abolishing of slavery were Africans allowed to read and write –in the interests of colonial and slave masters. Only with intense anti-colonial and slavery organisation and rebellions did Africans begin to document themselves into history as thinkers and architects of their own lives. Much of these documents and books were banned, destroyed and hidden from public awareness and consumption, with the thinkers and writers killed and imprisoned. Despite the gloom and doom inflicted on them, Africans continued to imagine new ways of expressing and validating themselves into social existence although with preying eyes of European colonizers and enslavers. With time and changes in the global world order, journals and speeches of American enslaved Africans began emerging while colonised Africans on the African continent wrote themselves into existence as they integrated into European academies and institutions. Through books, journals and speeches, new generations of Africans learned of trajectories their ancestors navigated to give them the few liberties they could afford to sacrifice for. Nineteen years into the 21st century, Lindiswa Jan has followed in the footsteps of her ancestors and documented herself into human history. In the form of a journal, she has written and instructed history to never forget that she, too, was here, living through colonial nightmares as her ancestors documented of their lives and fought against. The journal is a documentation and celebration of her life despite the continued African holocaust. It serves as a salutation to future generations of Africa. It is also a thanks giving and gratitude note to the global African ancestry. About the author: Lindiswa Jan graduated in International Relations, Social Anthropology, Public Policy and Administration, at the University of Cape Town. Her Honours degree was a comparative analysis of former President Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma’s foreign policies. Her anthropology master’s research looks at the structural and social violence against black women in Cape Town townships. And her upcoming book, “African Americans and the rest of us” is a multi-disciplinary approach to pan-African politics and the seemingly complex relationship between Africa and the African diaspora. Read more