Whites Were Blacks

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This dialogic text is about the loss of identity. The mask presented in the text is the mask of the king mother (Queen Idia). Queen Idia was the mother of a powerful king in Benin kingdom who ruled from 1504 to 1550.This mask was taken from Nigeria by a British conqueror. The mask is still in England till this day. This is one of the few remaining evidence that my people (the Nigerian people) were not ''uncivilized savages'' before we were conquered and colonized. Only a brilliant and ''civilized'' artist can carve out such a beautiful mask from an ivory. This is what I call ''loss of identity.'' This is because of the fact that the mask is now a ''European'' property. PS: The mask is about to be auctioned for FIVE MILLION POUNDS! The stallion in this text is the ''Lipizzaner stallion.'' This horse which is named after a village in Slovenia is born black, but it grows up being white. The ''Lipizzaner stallion'' originated from Africa, but it was taken to Europe by the Moors of Africa. These extremely beautiful stallions are known as ''European Lipizzaner stallions'' today. This is what I call the loss of identity. This is because of the fact that these stallions had an African name which our African ancestors gave them. They lost this African name, and they also lost their God given home...which is Africa. What am trying to ''say'' in this text is that the fate of the conquered and enslaved Africans by Europeans is analogous to that of the horse and the mask. The identity of these conquered and enslaved Africans was destroyed by their captors who changed their names from ''Kintakunte or Obiorah'' to Michael Jackson or Oprah Winfrey. © OJ Obiorah 2011