Maafa ceremony recalls enslaved ancestors

By Mary Rickard
New Orleans Advocate

The millions of Africans and their descendents who suffered and perished in slavery will be remembered on the morning of Saturday, July 4, with singing, dancing, drumming and prayer during the 15th annual Maafa Commemoration. According to a statement from Ashe Cultural Arts Center, sponsors of the event, Maafa is a Kiswahili word meaning “horrific tragedy.”

The two-hour ceremony begins at 7 a.m. at Congo Square and will be followed by a procession winding though the historic Treme neighborhood, the French Quarter and ending at the Mississippi River, where slave ships landed. White carnations will be tossed into the river at Woldenberg Park where the procession will conclude. Participants are asked to wear white attire for the ceremonies.

Carol Bebelle, Ashe Cultural Arts Center executive director, said, “The local Maafa Commemoration offers an opportunity for the whole community to pause and reflect on this great transgression against humanity. It allows us to personally, and as a community, agree to distance ourselves institutionally, in word and deed, from that transgression, its legacy and the evolved practice of racism in our civic, social, spiritual and personal lives.”

The healing ceremony in Congo Square will include inter-faith words of healing, a tribute to the indigenous people of Louisiana and the release of white doves of peace. Senegal’s Morikeba Kouyate will play traditional music on the kora, a West African harp.

Ancestors will be honored by name, including victims of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the levee breaches, bombings in Boston, the Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans and other incidents of senseless violence.

According to Luther Gray, coordinator of Ashe’s community and cultural programs, Congo Square is important because it was the only place in the Antebellum South where enslaved African-Americans and people of color could practice their rituals and communicate in their own language.

“We’re 200 years removed, but the spiritual energy is still there,” Gray said. “It’s not just something in the past.”

According to Gray, American Indians in the area were the ones who made Congo Square sacred ground, with their rituals during the corn harvests, before the arrival of the French.

At the ceremony, Queen Chief Warhorse, chief of the Tchufuncta Nation, Chahta Tribe, will speak, while the Treme Fi-Yi-Yi Mardi Gras Indians perform, he said.

At 9 a.m., drummers, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians and African dancers will lead the gathering of participants in a procession, first stopping at the Tomb of the Unknown Slave beside St. Augustine Catholic Church. Guides will be stationed at several significant locations, including the former site of the convent of Sisters of the Holy Family, a Catholic order of free women of color founded by Henriette DeLille; former slave auction sites at Cafe Maspero and Royal Orleans; and the Louisiana Supreme Courthouse where Homer Adolph Plessy appealed a racial segregation law in the case, Plessy v. Fergusson.

Historically, slaves, American Indians and free people of color congregated at Congo Square on Sundays to sell goods and reaffirm their heritage. New Orleans was the only place in the South where drums had not been forbidden. To this day, members of the Congo Square Preservation Society meet weekly to continue the legacy of drumming.

The Code Noir created laws for slavery in French colonies, including rules for punishment but also gave slaves the right to marry, keep families together and have Sundays free from work. These laws affecting enslaved persons were unique to Louisiana.

“New Orleans is a Sunday city, based on the fact that it was a free day,” Gray said.

Celebrations commemorating African ancestors who endured the Middle Passage take place annually in many cities, including San Francisco; Houston; Montgomery, Alabama; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; New York; and Rio de Janeiro.

Shuttles will be available to return people to Congo Square after the ceremony concludes.

Annual event acknowledges slavery

Photo: Eliot Kamenitz

Ceremony gives tribute to slaves

BY JIM DERRY

Special to The Advocate

July 07, 2013

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In 2001, a small group gathered to pay homage to their ancestors. On Saturday, for the 13th time, the annual gathering included hundreds of people at Congo Square — the same site where many slaves sang and prayed more than 200 years ago.

With a white altar sitting beneath oak trees, this year’s Maafa Commemoration opened with “Sunrise at Congo Square,” a three-hour tribute that included worship and celebration. Some arrived before 6 a.m. Saturday to the sound of drums and other music native to western Africa.

A procession followed on foot to St. Augustine Church, where those in attendance prayed at the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, and through the French Quarter, where slaves once were bought and sold. It then traveled to the Canal Street ferry for a sing-along and an offering of gifts to the ancestors.

“Maafa” is a Swahili word meaning great disaster or tragedy, and some represent it to mean African holocaust. Carol Bebelle, co-founder of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center and coordinator of Saturday’s event, said those who suffered “worked from ‘can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night.’ ” A representative of the Zion Trinity offered a song “for all those in the water who jumped ship or who were beaten or burned.”

“This is an opportunity to remind people of this history that is so painful in our country, and to also have people understand that part of being able to distance ourselves from it is to reckon with that past,” Bebelle said. “We need to continue to intentionally work to get as far away from that past as we can. This is a way to force us to reach farther for democracy.”

Others offered praise, in the form of both word and song. That included a dozen children from the Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans, and Grayhawk Perkins, a New Orleans-born Native American Choctaw, who sang with the costumed Spirit of FiYiYi.

Before the congregation left Congo Square, seven white doves were individually released to symbolize and honor both ancestors and those living today. “We won’t bow down, and we will remember” was chanted each time a dove went soaring into the sky.

As it has in the past, the commemoration coincided with the weekend of Essence Festival, and as a result there were many people in the crowd both from the New Orleans area and across the country. In attendance, coincidentally, there was a representative of Congo — a theology professor who is in town spending the summer teaching at Xavier.

“In the Christian experience, it requires an awareness of your own identity and an awareness of your own culture,” said Modeste Malu Nyimi, who also teaches African studies at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. “Here, this is like a lab where the African culture is at work elaborating itself. I couldn’t miss this opportunity.”

There was a wide range of those in attendance, as both the young and old prayed together. Many saw it as an opportunity not only to pay homage to their ancestors but to become more aware of just who they are.

“I’m new to all of this, but for me I always wondered if this sort of thing existed,” said someone who would identify himself only as Reginald from Memphis, Tenn. “This represents a wake-up call for me. This gives me a sense of heritage, it gives me a sense of purpose, and it gives me an avenue to understand myself better.

“This was like a homecoming for me.”