And so, she remembers Timbuktu in the late 1300s, when her father was a priest who underwent cataract surgery at the University at Timbuktu. This novel is the story of an extraordinary woman who is a poor, blind waitress in Richmond, Virginia, who remembers past lives. If you can’t remember yourself, you’re suffering from serious debilitation. Now, memory is the active agent of all collective social progress. And this name, this new name, this new label, helped to facilitate that loss of memory. And so, we thought we had no history before slavery. And so we lost our mothers, our fathers, our families, our religions, our languages, our cultures, our memories of what we had been. And we were only called Negroes when we were labeled during slavery as that as a way of severing us from any memory of what we had been. It only becomes one when it is captured and put in a can. There’s no such thing as a sardine as a fish living free in the ocean.

And it turns out that it’s much like the case of the sardine. And so, we didn’t know anything about ourselves, except we had been called this, but not by ourselves. It had no connection to what we might have been before we were blocked from view by that lethal, opaque space of slavery.

No one I knew knew why we were called that. RANDALL ROBINSON: When I was a child growing up in Richmond, Virginia, we were called Negroes. In Juan González and I interviewed Randall Robinson in our studio. Randall Robinson’s books included An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, and Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land. role in the coup that ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Randall Robinson also spoke out for years against U.S. He was also a leading advocate for reparations for slavery. He also fasted, went on hunger strike, protesting against the apartheid regime and U.S. He played a key role in the launching of the Free South Africa Movement, arrested many times at the South African Embassy in Washington. Robinson was the founder of the group TransAfrica. I’m Amy Goodman, as we end today’s show remembering the human rights leader, lawyer, Randall Robinson, who has died at the age of 81 in St. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report.

The Debt by Randall Robinson