Black Skin White Masks by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

What Is True Freedom?

When a person has been in prison for a long time and freedom is announced, some people carry their chains out of the prison. Some decorate the prison. They are free but they do not want to walk away. Some put decorations on their chains and walk around shouting freedom.

Freedom must be self-determination. Freedom must be the restoration of previously disenfranchised resources. Freedom must be the ability to refind your voice and retrace your ancestral roots. Freedom is washing away embarrassment. Freedom is regaining your rituals. Freedom is determining your own governance structures. Freedom is eating what you want. Freedom is healing yourselves the way you want. Freedom is giving birth to your children the way you choose, migrating with your cattle, doing your ceremonies.

What is called western civilization is, more accurately, the vandalism of nature. It is material extraction and the creation of tools while disregarding everything that is natural. African knowledge of nature, birds, animals, butterflies, trees, and soil was custodial. You live within them. You die and return to them. That knowledge is absent from what is presented as civilization.

The Obsession with Owning African History

Why is the western world so obsessed with owning African history? Why would you want the pharaohs of North Africa to be white? Why would you want Cleopatra to be white? Why would you want Jesus to be white? The convenience of going to the center of people's history and owning it is the life of a parasite.

A parasite is a species that finds itself on a living organism with its own DNA and lifestyle, and begins to drink from it, to multiply on it. In some cases, the parasite multiplies so much it kills the host. After killing the host it either dies or migrates to find another host. Africa has been that host.

The African has been told that their immune practices were primitive. But what looked like putting a child in a dish full of clay, mud, and cowdung was immunization at its best. Thousands of years of research produced that practice of introducing natural bacteria to the body of the child. Academic students who claim education but know everything about everyone except themselves have missed this entirely.

What is called western civilization is a stolen civilization. Look at the American dollar and you find the Egyptian pyramid. Look at science, look at formulas, look at alchemy in its basic form of Egyptology and you find that the foundational knowledge was built on African heritage. The binary system that powers modern computers is found in African traditional mathematics.

France Fanon and the Psychological Wound

Frantz Fanon in his 1952 work likened the effect of colonization to a deep psychological wound. The whitening of African culture that intensified in the 1800s, including a white Jesus, white Egyptian ancestors, a white Cleopatra, created a condition where Africans were told to believe a narrative fundamentally hostile to their own existence.

When Christianity arrived in Africa shaped by western culture, Africans were no longer dealing with Solomon and Abraham as black people. They had already been painted white. Then an African was told to believe this version of faith. And in accepting it, they also inherited hatred for Muslims, accepted white supremacy, accepted a white Jesus, abandoned the earth in longing for a heaven, and adopted modes of governance borrowed entirely from Rome.

This is the schizophrenia France Fanon described. The very thing you despise is the thing you most desire. You say black skin is bad but you tan in the sun trying to darken yours. You mock African lips but you inject fillers to make yours fuller. You mock African body proportions but you insert padding to exaggerate your own. Something is wrong at the root.

Religion as a Tool

Religion separates. Spirituality unites. The authentic Hebrew Abrahamic faith, as found in Ethiopian writings, Ethiopian history connecting to the Igbo in Nigeria, the Lembas and Karangas in the south, was intrinsically embedded in African culture itself. That is a different thing from the colonial Christianity which arrived dressed in white liturgy, Roman collars and gowns, with languages and practices that had nothing to do with the original text.

By the time that Christianity arrived in Africa in the 1900s, it was no longer about a spiritual encounter. It had become a mechanism. The system does not want a personal relationship with God that the church cannot supervise. So you need the church, the bishop, the pastor as mediator. But if spirituality is taken in its essence, every father of a household should be able to conduct communion with his own family.

Not all religion is negative in essence, but religion has been weaponized. Christianity and Islam have both been used as marketing departments of a deeper agenda with financial backers who profit from the hatred between them. Every war over religion has financial beneficiaries. Every bullet that kills an African has a banker who paid for it.

The Reset Button

Look at the seven structures of society: governance, agriculture, business and economics, education, health and technology, sports and recreation, spirituality. Now look at whether you are satisfied with how any one of them is functioning. Are you happy with your government? With the food you are eating? With the education your children are receiving? With your banking? With your health system?

If the answer is no to all of them, then the invitation is to press the reset button. Delete all the corrupted apps and restore the African mind to its factory settings. Then return to the same seven structures and ask: How did we used to govern ourselves? How did we educate ourselves? How did we do business? What food did we eat? What spirituality did we have?

Any politician who enters parliament with nothing and leaves a millionaire is a thief. The money came from a foreign contract where a percentage was taken under the table. The one who funds the campaign is the real president in the shadows. Politics is a prostitute of economics.

The Africa of the Dream

The Africa of the dream is one where:

• Good health is restored through natural, organic means.
• Cattle cross rivers and drums are heard from village to village celebrating the new moon.
• Truthfulness is embedded in the ethical behavior of leaders.
• The mines are replaced by knowledge of the land's caves where the earth has opened herself for access to minerals without destruction.
• The rivers are clean enough to drink from.
• Movement is seamless across the continent without currency changes.
• National armies unite into one continental army protecting the weakest nations as readily as the strongest.
• One stock exchange allows the sharing and distribution of resources equally.
• Ancient historical sites are restored so the continent can confirm: where we are coming from is where we are going.

Development without environmental preservation is destruction. The question is not simply how to get richer. The question is what quality of water will we drink, what quality of food will we eat, what quality of life will we live, and who will be the African in that global village?