Family Renewal Professor Proposes Ancient African Model Of Shared Gender Equality For Troubled Homes

These are troubled times for a disturbingly high number of African-American families.

A potent mix of high unemployment, the increase in single-parent households, rising drug abuse, and violent crimes threatens the future of many black families.

Oba T’Shaka says it wasn’t always so.

In the first part of this century, he says, African-American families were seen as strong and resilient, capable of surviving and flourishing in an often hostile environment. Respect for elders and a high moral code were the guiding lights that enabled the families to thrive and prosper.

To flourish today, African-American families must return to those ideals, says T’Shaka, chairman of the black studies department at California State University, San Francisco.

In his new book, “Return to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality,” T’Shaka details the positive cultural model for African, African-American and dysfunctional families that he believes can be a guide to stronger families.

The family model is derived from his examination of ancient and precolonial African societies, where “males and females were equally empowered to govern every phase of society.”

“This book was written to take the best out of ancient African culture and African-American culture and apply it to African people and any people who could use this paradigm so that we can revitalize our peoplehood, our families and our communities,” T’Shaka said in a phone interview from his Bay Area home.

Like many Afrocentrists, T’Shaka believes that, despite slavery and the scattering of Africans throughout the world, a deep cultural structure in African family relationships survived.

“African-Americans have carried much of the best of that system into America,” he says. “We know this through examination of records and slave narratives. Many slave practices were carryovers from African practices.

“Among those practices are a respect for lineage through the mother and father, the collection of the nuclear family into a larger family, respect and reverence for elders, and the directing of the business of the family through consensus.

“African women were treated with the greatest of respect, and children were regarded as the reward of life. Elders were viewed as those closest to the ancestors and were respected for their wisdom and their contribution to the development of their people.”

In the African-centered extended family, which T’Shaka says survived slavery, an adherence to a high moral code was at the core of the family system.

“Families were taught to speak and live the truth and treat people right.”

T’Shaka’s conclusions come from his examination of 14 ancient African societies, which he calls “just societies.”

For example, among the Twa people, who live in some of the forest regions of Central and West Africa, T’Shaka says, “All the adult males and females are equally empowered to govern every phase of society. There are no kings and queens; all Twa are equally empowered. There are no rich or poor. Whatever one has, all shared.

“There are no lazy people. The old who can no longer work deserve to be supported by the young because we have an African proverb that says, ‘When you were young and toothless, your parents took care of you; now that they are toothless, you take care of them.”’

In his vision of a just society, T’Shaka writes that people of African descent worldwide have a model, rooted in ancient and precolonial family systems, for restoring respect, love and balance to the black family. In fact, he says, it is a model that can guide every family.

T’Shaka calls this model “twin-lineal” - where equality reigns and neither the male nor female dominates.

“Return to the African Mother Principle” devotes a chapter to describing how the family systems have been disrupted, though not destroyed, by slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and the post-industrial computer-driven society.

T’Shaka blames the erosion of African-American families since the 1960s on the “powerful external forces” of “urbanization, television, the industrial and post-industrial economy, the welfare system, the drug economy and drug addiction as well as government-sponsored attacks against militant creative black leadership.”

But the focus of this book is definitely not on the pathology.

“These just family systems offer hope to a society where violence is too often practiced by men toward women and by the strong toward the weak,” he writes.

“In the past we (African-Americans) have reached down to the soul level and created a new music, a new dance, a new literature and a new spirituality. This time we will have to draw on our creative improvising souls to create a new society and a new humanity.”