
By Yolanda Mrshall
Dr. Sam Tita Fombang is the President/Senior Project Manager of Enrich Building Solutions and has authored several empowering books. Dr Tita has made appearances on various important platforms in Canada and around the world where he provides valuable guidance as a Christian leader. “It was an honour to interview this intelligent writer.”

Tell us more about your book, ‘Black Truths: Healing 500 Years of Colonial Lies.’
“I wrote Black Truths: Healing 500 Years of Colonial Lies not as a lament, but because I wanted to empower our people who are mostly still struggling with the trauma from the period of enslavement. Enslavement was a cancer whose designers and their pedigree, and now, even some of our Black leaders, want to make us believe it can be cured with topical ointments and bandage. However, to cure that cancer, a deep cut must be masterfully executed, followed by deep truth therapy over a prolonged period.
The cut is to remove the lie that people of African descent (aka Black people) are mere consumers of space who have never contributed anything useful to our collective human enterprise. Then follows the deep truth therapy, with the endgame of reprograming the minds of Black people all over the world to the truth about who we are and have always been. I propose in the book, on the foundation of academic literature and experiential knowledge, that Black people will only truly heal when we learn the truth about who we were before enslavement, learn the truth about the criminals who truncated the natural order of our progress by pillaging and brutalizing our progenitors, and the truth about our great successes despite all the hardships that we have been put through for centuries.

For example, Black people have never been slaves, but have been enslaved. A slave is a state of being and is permanent while being enslaved is transitory. Therefore, Black people went through a period of enslavement in their rich and complex history, and that period is over. Before, during and post the period of enslavement, people of African descent have had, and still have thriving societies (kingdoms in many cases) that engaged in transcontinental commerce hundreds of years before Europeans landed on Africa’s shores to steal their resources, kidnap their strong, rape their women and murder those who resisted.
The point I’m making is that Africans were exploring the world centuries before Vasco Da Gama and Christopher Columbus. So, when we talk of Black History, we must go back over 3000 years. Then, we must continue considering the linear history of the world, where Black History is located, to continue extracting more Black Truths. “

What have been some of your experiences with people who refuse to accept the truth about Black people, the truth which has been historically and purposely hidden?
“Truths such as the fact that Africa cannot logically be the poorest continent in the world when its resources power the economies of the whole world. How do you call the family with the most diamonds in your town the poorest family, unless you have succeeded in constructing a false narrative concerning them, using every conceivable tool, both physical and psychological, to the point where even they buy into the deleterious narrative?
For those who don’t believe that there has been a concerted global effort to cement Black people in a posture of servitude forever, with the epicentre of that global effort located in the hallways of power in the Global North, I warn them that severe greed is a terrible monster that eats its young. If they don’t stand up for what is right today, the monster of neoliberal greed created by their progenitors will slowly consume them as we see happening right before all our eyes.
The great news is that truth is indestructible and will rebound even if it takes a thousand years. In 2023 the African Union accepted a permanent seat at the G20 table, a demonstration of the power of truth to rise to the surface, despite efforts to keep it down. The Black renaissance is well entrenched, and the face of the world will never look the same again.”
You can visit the author’s website at http://blacktruths.ca/ to learn more and buy Dr Tita’s books wherever books are sold.
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