The Art of Revolution: A Critical Review of African Liberation

A Critical Review of African Liberation

This article is made up of a series of notes collected over 17 years

We are the only race that wants to beat everyone else in the rat race but without actually running— Shahadah

Real revolutions happen in quiet spaces, Tracy Chapman understood this in her 1988 lyrics; “Don’t you know they’re talking about a revolution; It sounds like a whisper.” The most powerful deals that have determined the path of human history have happened in the quietest non-dramatic spaces far away from the populist view. One of our errors as a people is that we always respond to the loudest bang —the biggest spectacle:

Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods, or tactics, or strategy– Malcolm X

And that bang has never been the root of our problems. We like “solutions” in little Tweets, in Facebook status updates, in one-liners, that excuse any accountability, but place the burden of change outside the reader’s ambit. But waiting for instant massive changes is like Venus waiting for the rains to return. Change is in increments, change is in planning, change is in the tangible, and real change is in the changes individuals make. Change is a collection of related actions, all necessary towards a final result, which impacts lives. Like a farmer in the field planting seeds today for a future harvest, using the experience of the past to know where to plant, and how to plant.

The business of doing is our greatest challenge. And for all the great orators and thinkers that have explained our condition, we still do not go out into the world and act. We will talk about lack of unity, the power of White Supremacy but we rarely talk about actually getting up and doing things: Building businesses and supporting those businesses, building institutions that outlast these flamboyant YouTube personas. For all their spectacular performances and ability to motivate us, does anyone leave their channels to build a Pan-African supermarket or the much-needed African car? Do people leave those talk shows and support African clothes, films and serious books? Do they wake up the next day and join an African lobby?

“Our refusal as Black people to confront the issue of money and wealth is going to end up with our very lives being threatened as a people in this earth.” – Dr. Amos Wilson

Unity without hooks in reality doesn’t stick, and unity and victory will always require degrees of compromise. The hot mouth diatribes are pleasant to the ear, but what is that worth if not realistic? Our liberation will not come in a perfect gift wrapped package, and we must deal with that in discerning what is absolutely essential in a particular moment, and what is not (hierarchy of priorities and concerns). Liberation is not a calendar event in some distant future, it is a process produced only by good works today. We cannot work in the past, as it is gone. And we cannot work in the future, as it has not arrived.

There is a wolf on the road to fetch the water. What is our objective? Getting the water. Sure we must avoid the wolf to get to the water. But what if I said we had no objective and just focused on the wolf? Even if the wolf went to Mars and stayed to hell there, we would still die of thirst.

People wake up after 50 years of sleep, at 16:42 in the afternoon and realize our world has slipped away, and with shock on their faces ask —”What can we do?”! It is what we should have done; all those little cents necessary to make a single dollar; all those daily deposits in our piggy-bank. But we want 11th hour solutions to 500 year old problems, without actually putting in any consistent commitment. So until Katrina part II, or Trayvon part V, or Corona 2020 we are going back to sleep in a world WIDE AWAKE! Its like sheep in the slaughtering pen asking each other “What should we do now?”—5 minutes from death. What they should have done, was 2 years earlier made a run for it when they were out blissfully grazing.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills–W. E. B. Du Bois

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DEAD STRUGGLE 2019

See also : Blacks Do not Support

The struggle is more or less dead. A few may run around pretending to do this and that but all their efforts of those of solo personalities and their solo organizations. It makes no difference if these people are good or bad, on the right track or not–because they exist outside of unity. How is someone building a school in Africa and when you ask them who is working on the African history section or the cultural section they do not have an answer, despite 100s of scholars still being around? It is because the only thing they are working on is a vanity project. A project which celebrates our ego first and not the objective of what is better.

Over the last 20 years, we have barely moved forward, in some cases we are only moving back when it comes to our cultural, historical, and intellectual understanding of self. What happened. Or what the HELL happened? How did we go from the 60-70s -80s to now? Everything bad from the ’80s carried forward but not one iota of good. What progressive idea of ourselves is now universal from this current era? The best we got is to shout out Black Lives Matter. Yet the progressive movement to go natural and to identify with the continent of Africa remains something that is slipping. We have gone from icons like Malcolm X to George, from burning our hair to natural hair and now to Indian hair. From Negroes, to Blacks to African Americans and now back to blacks, black Africans and Niggas.

Right now on YouTube, you will see a powerful collaboration trend. This tech reviewer is working with another tech reviewer. They all have their own HUGE fan base, they all are known in their genre. Yet despite all being in the same area why do they showcase other tech people on their channel? Why do they promote each other? Why do they big up the accomplishments of each other? We see it in Hollywood, we see it in European fashion they are always celebrating each other. And this is exactly the opposite of what the African struggle does. If you are not in their clique or a sub-set of them and their cult–forget about it. They will not promote your work, acknowledge your contribution or work with you. Everyone’s for themselves. No matter how good you are in say media, they will have a conference and invite only people from their little group. You and your work does not exist. They are people who would work on your film when they are unknown, and once they get some BBC exposure never ever mention the work they did with you in public. ¹⁾This is a personal experience.  Not once but many times. People have used the work to get to certain positions, once they are known and CNN or BBC interview they are islands in the sea. Not one word of the broader work or those who helped them into those new places. As a result the work suffers, eventually even their new positions decline. And this opinion is why our struggle is not dead. Not dying— dead. The African mind is so jealous and egotistical that we cannot patronize each other or work together. We think it takes something from us. If we cannot lead the group–we not in the group. We cannot bring our lips to saying this org is good with tech, so let us work with them or this sister is good at organizing let us work with her. If you are not part of that personal group– forget it. We work alone; We die alone.

Just having information does not mean anything if you cannot understand what the hell it means. So you lived for 80 years been a victim of racism in every decade; seen Katrina and Rodney King saw the outcome in all those instances but this time, despite having all of that data still do not recognize a pattern. And unless a new variable is going on right now that makes this moment unique then what new outcome are you expecting? What we do is look at the data, look at the times we are living in and ask those hard unemotional questions. What are the new variables in this current set up to warrant a new outcome? The Arab Spring caused a huge ruckus around the world, so did the Occupy this and that movement. And by understanding the information you can better be prepared for the outcome. OR if you are smart you can modify certain variables to get a more desirable outcome.

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RHETORIC

Every group has rhetoric. Greeks had it, Romans had it, the British Empire had it. America is practically built on it, Israel uses it 24/7 until you want to vomit. 90% of it is pure rubbish. And our so-called Pan-African rhetoric is just the same. 1/2 of it is garbage. But what happened is in addition to being garbage it fails to do what others do with their hot talk. It fails to transform our condition or allow critical thinking; it is also very monolithic and inflexible. Zionist know exactly what to say to get a stronger Israel. But all who use rhetoric are also conscious of its limits– but not us. For us we think it is FACT and exists are ultimate truths for the sole purpose of existing with no agenda behind it. Jews have what Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein calls a Holocaust industry. And it is a clear industry of fearmongering. But it also reinforces Jewish identity so much so that they end up running all kinds of industries globally in a united pro-Israel way.

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CHANGE

How we measure change is different from how another person might measure change. Change can be a curve which means an increase in Black ownership and sales. Because that sales curve indicates an increased interest in African products; That increase means an increase in the people now employed, an increase in our buying power, an increase in how much of African culture is being exported out of African communities to communities all over the world. That is change on an economic and cultural level. A fisherman measures change not by how blue the sea looks, but by what the volume of their catch and what the market pays. Change for the environmentalist maybe a drop in Co2 emissions and an increase in the trees planted vs those destroyed. And real change is not a FAD, it is not like the spike we saw when Blank Pather was the thing–when for a few months Africa became important. Change is permanent and forward moving. You cannot be free on Monday and then a slave on Friday. So we cannot speak of change when globally we see a decline and annexation of African markets.

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IRREPLACEABLE RESOUCES

There is one thing people usually do not factor:  The power of any nation/group is determined by its intellectual genius or its creative genius. As time goes by we naturally lose these things,  they cannot easily be replaced. Europeans, however, have mastered passing the baton from generation to generation. After Einstein, there was Hawkins and many others. It took 30 years to create an Ali Mazrui or a Diop or a Karenga or an Amos Wilson out of millions of people under conscious conditions. Just like it took 30 years or so to create great engineers, great filmmakers, great fashion designers and doctors, great Musicians like Prince, MJ, etc. If a people are no longer creating these things then we do not have them. We currently do not have an Amos Wilson, or a Ali Mazrui. The work that we do at AHS is part of a dying breed where deep and analytic scholarship has been replaced by loudmouths on YouTube with the rhetoric of bygone scholars but without the deep scholarship of them. You cannot in 1 year create the next filmmaker to make 500 Years Later or Sankofa. You cannot in 5 years, in a barren environment of Tweets and Memes create the next Malcolm X or Che, Fidel, or Gaddafi. So while we go forward into the future we are doing so without one of our most powerful resources. When we lose TransAfrica Forum or Halaqah or anyone it is a blow we are not recovering from. When we lose an African business we did not have enough of them in the first place to recover from losing any of them.

You cannot create something out of nothing. You cannot be a great scholar out of thin air in 4 minutes. Once our world was saturated with talent—now it is drying up. So at least when I started making films you had an environment to support me coming up—where is that today? And this is why Europeans go far, because after Chomsky they have a 100 others already up there to take over. Right now as I am typing the last African lobby in America has been dead for 5 years and nothing has come to replace it, and you cannot replace it from thin air. It took 20 years to get it in the first place in an intellectual environment with hardcore people who did the work. The Diaspora passport who is working on that? Far fewer people than 2 decades ago. The entire wing of the Diaspora-AU thing is gone. What about David Comminsong and the ICC? Who is doing that? When he retires or dies who will pick it up?  So tomorrow when Ocacia goes, it is not like in 2 minutes someone else is going to come and do what we do, or the work of African Holocaust Society which took at least 10 years to get going.

All the victories people all over the world fought hard to win have been studied by oppressors and they have evolved counter-measures. So they study Malcolm X and NOI and formulate countermeasures. They saw what happened in Cuba and how Che and Fidel started something and now they have counter-measures in place. They saw Lumumba and Biko and by the time 1994 happened they already had a plan to stymie that type of liberation. Same with Fanon and Thomas Sankara. They recognized the music of Bob and Grandmaster flash was a problem so carefully evolved our music of revolution to be our music of destruction. We cannot REST, because oppressors do not sleep. Right now they are formulating a plan to counter whatever is happening. And part of that plan, unfortunately, is to herd us all here on social media so our struggles and discussions elsewhere die out.

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PURPOSE OF REVOLUTION

A revolution is only a revolution if it remains functional and relevant to the prevailing conditions of those it intends to revolutionize. Just like a weather forecast is relevant if it can predict storms, or a clock only if it keeps accurate time.

The world is a dinner table of diminishing opportunities, but exploitation of these opportunities requires progressive thinking, and an investment in infrastructures. The threshold and standards of work, and the quality of our work ethic become critical in competing in this new world. And in our Pan-African space, unity ultimately means pooling resources and intelligence and taking advantage of every opportunity to advance the majority.

Someone is a master of X, while another person is a master of Y, it is not unity or organization if the resources are unknown, and hence untapped. You do not go into battle without a cavalry, or throw stones at the enemy when someone else knows how to make arrows—but disorganization makes them unknown or unemployed in revolution. And this is just what we do when we organize and only include talkers, and showmen in our line up.

Two people meet up at a conference and are floored by how much they have in common, they talk for hours straight, one works in media one works with an educational project on the ground. 1 + 1 = 2 but they do not know how to add, and never meet again. Our people have a problem putting things together; of seeing opportunities and exploiting them. They know there is something they are suppose to be doing, but cannot get pass the blocks in their mind allowing them to bring these things to fruition.

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EASIER THAN YOU REALIZE

Unfortunately, the next superpower will not be Africa. Even after China, some say it will pass to India. We did not do the work. And I know when we speak like people do not fully understand. They come with excuses– Oh but we had slavery apartheid and colonialism. And we say you got the wrong understanding and it is time for a new paradigm. Two people set out on a journey, take different paths have different experiences. Then they run a race and one wins and one loses. The only thing that matters is victory. In this life, no one cares why you lost that race. So either Africa has a phone to beat Samsung’s new Note 20– or we don’t. Either Africa has the manufacturing capacity to process iron ore into steel–or we don’t. Either our population is educated to be the new silicon valley– or not. These are the real questions serious people discuss. Not rhetoric. And are we currently building our way back to greatness of simple just a client of the more powerful world?

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CRUMB THEORY

The prevailing ideology of many African leaders is if you collect enough crumbs from the floor of European tables we might be able to make a cake — ‘Alik Shahadah

Alexander fought to expand Greece, Saladin fought and conquered Jerusalem and Islamized the region for eternity. Ben-Gurion fought and stole a nation, Washington fought and got all of America, Ho Chi Ming fought a campaign and won back Vietnam with Vietnamese owning the means of production. We fight and get to use white people’s toilets in America, and shop in their malls in South Africa (feeling cool about being their plantation managers–aka government). We fought in the 60’s for the right to vote in the elections of our oppressors: for the right to decide between Clinton and Trump. The fruits of that victory is Whites should hire us over Mexicans and continental Africans. King  started something, it was a means to get something else. But we sat with the matches and failed to light the fire. By default out of the gates we were not born slaves. The battle against enslavement was not a move forward, it was a course correction to get us back to normal. It would be something if we fought and took over North

America. After Independence in India and Pakistan they were done with the White man. No White owns their garment industry, no White owns their film industry at any level. I would call that a victory.We fought for crumbs . Others fight for the entire cake.

So while the Chinese, India et al, are practicing throwing things into Earth’s Orbit (and getting better at it), and Arabs are making sand castles in the sea, we got our “intellectuals” planning another conference; another sit down with the old talkers. The same conference every year for 30 years. This is the only thing they know to do as a response to the globalized world. If this was a race, while the Asian and the European are discussing who will cross the finish line first, the African has not yet heard the starting gun.

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GOOD WAYS

Good ways of doing things are universal, and will always return profits regardless of whether you are selling heaven or hell. Marketing is marketing, time keeping is time keeping. Good organizing helps keep your house clean as much as it helped Tuthmosis III win at Battle of Megiddo: Applying the best traditions of efficiency to revolution, make revolution successful. Because the tool that builds nothing is no good to no one.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will– Frederick Douglass

Hidden behind every great work of art, science, or ideology, is a work-ethos, which creates success. These policies, habits, or principles are equally critical to the things they produce, because without the correct formula no good idea, no great work will come into fruition: Making a great product usually means a great process. If our broader revolution is failing it is very likely that the methodologies, work ethos is critically flawed. We are very good, as a people, discussing ideology, but ideology alone is not even 1/2 the war if our ways of doing things is under developed.

Everyone was interested in joining the revolution until they saw the commitment and work involved in real change. (They are committed in-between distractions). Because real work takes a detachment from ego. You cannot get an instant boast like when you post on a Facebook page. So spending months working on an article, or lobbying or starting up a business does not feed the ego like posting some trash and getting a quick response under the delusional rush of “being revolutionary.” Today, there is no patience for the most basic process; it is all about instant gratification, which confirms someone’s self-worth, more than the end result of that work. So as long as someone feels good—regardless of the change—that is what matters most.

They might agree on the need for new economic models and to flush out capitalism, but they cannot then see that starts with research, reading books, discussing formatting references. No, they want to jump from nothing to a new system like God in Genesis. I mean they cannot even leave Facebook to email someone, but expect some great new world out of thin air. The old people use to say “If you cannot do small, well you certainly will not be able to do big“. It is like if you cannot play a basic musical scale, how on Earth will you play Jimi Hendrix on guitar? And as it relates to revolution if you still struggling with basic commitments, punctuality, replying to an email, organizing the most basic aspects of your life, how on God’s green Earth are you going to run a revolution?

How you look at the world (your paradigms of analysis) will determine the availability of solutions you have for navigating this world. It would be accurate to state if your outlook is severely flawed the available solutions that can be born from that outlook would also be limited. Many of us are stuck with very binary ideas, which do nothing but keep us on the outside of progress. And “progress” is a very clear and unconfusing: Either we make our own clothes, grow our own food, run our own industries– or we do not.

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SELF CRITICAL

Being self-critical is critical. Someone said “I am so busy now, I am working so hard.” All of this is based upon facts or illusions based on poor self-appraisal? Because you need to know the difference. A friend just ask me for my opinion on his film, and I told him something he did not want to hear: I said are you 100% sure you are capable of directing it? Because you need to know beyond your ego. Ego cannot cover for lack of skills and talent. So who are you fooling? Jump height or jump low you cannot fake talent. So when someone says they work hard is this compared to who? It is relative. and you going to mess yourself up thinking you are “working hard” when you really just wasting time. I know one person who works hard 3/7 days a week (wake up at 10 go to bed at 9PM) and then complains about money. Most cannot see themselves in the mirror to be self-critical and if you are not self-critical you will not become the best you can be.

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INCAPABLE?

On our tombstone will be written “Here lies the Race that could not do sh-t for self. Not even own our stories, and make our own food”

Go to South Africa with one of those alien ships and abduct all the White people and Indians and come back in 2 weeks to see what happen with the place, then come back in 10 years and see if the place is still the richest country in Africa. This is because that wealth is not created by us. We are hired help, like how Marvel hired us to do a Black film. We have no skills and where we do have skills they are only optimized when exploited by Whites.

You can look at the skyline of SA for weeks and struggle to find any African ownership: Who runs FedEx, who runs Checkers. Who runs/owns Samsung, BMW, Afrihost, Takealot, Hellopeter. But Africans enjoy the malls, the nice roads, the mod cons. Twenty-something years after apartheid ownership has not changed. It is so bad that the government had to classify Indians and Chinese as Blacks so they could say BEE (Black Economic empowerment is growing). Where the majority of the “Black” is Indian and Chinese ownership. We are not even late to the race. The race is finishing and we still in bed.

We do not even realize there is a race. So either Aliens take all these people away and we finally learn do or die, or by some miracle, we start doing some catching up. And we all know neither Aliens or a revolution in our mindset is going to happen. It seems there is only one race on Earth Africans will be winning–and that is the 100m and the 200m. 

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NOT EQUAL

The Negro is ignored today simply because he has kept himself backward; but if he were to try to raise himself to a higher state in the civilized cosmos, all the other races would be glad to meet him on the plane of equality and comradeship– Marcus Garvey

We are not equals with Europeans, Asians, Arabs, Indians. And we need to get out of this habit of thinking us and them can waste our time the same way. They can afford to have some waywardness in their ranks– we cannot. So on social media we behave as stupid as they behave and no one can do stupid like white people on social media. No one can beat the Asians at dumb behavior either. But for every white fool 20% of them know how to own Price Water-House, Dutch petroleum, and get a man on the moon (or at least a sat in orbit without help). For all the silly Italians and Germans wasting their lives enough of them know how to run BMW and Ferrari. For all the silly selfie lovers in India there is a % of them that do not need Marvel to make their super-hero films. For all the silly cultural traitors in Japan with blonde hair and Western ways enough of them run Toyota, Honda, Yamaha, the Japanese way. We are good at matching other groups when it

comes to stupid, but remember unlike them,we have zero products on the global or even in some cases local market. We do not make our own cars and even our African clothes now come from China. Africans, for our size have the lowest production output of any sizable race. And it is not like they have 21 car companies to our one. We have NOTHING!

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DEPENDENCY vs INDEPENDENCE

Tanegashima (種子島), a Japanese Matchlock (gun) introduced to Japan through the Portuguese in 1543. The lord of the Japanese island, purchased two matchlock muskets from the Portuguese and put a swordsmith to work copying the matchlock barrel and firing mechanism.Within ten years of its introduction, over 300,000 tanegashima firearms were reported to have been manufactured. ²⁾[https://books.google.com/books?id=zPyswmGDBFkC&pg=PA30 ”The connoisseur’s book of Japanese swords”], Author Kōkan Nagayama, Publisher Kodansha International, 1998, {{ISBN|978-4-7700-2071-0}} P.30

This is because of the national mindset of Japanese people. In the African world it seems to be the reverse, we would be more comfortable selling our people into slavery in exchange for European made weapons and never ever make a single attempt to empower ourselves with the technology.

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THERAPY

We  must discarded  over intellectualizing these things where we make these eloquent but redundant truisms  like “Capitalism is a vampire that is exploiting Africans” because that statement true or not, makes no difference  if all you going to do is drop it every time the hard questions come up. Or “but our ancestors went through some unique hardships” yes we all know that already. Now what? We believe the people who have moved on to the now what are the progressive Africans seeking true liberation.

Therapy only serves to offer us some superficial comfort for our terrible state. It rarely causes an awakening to action. So what good is hearing how “The Black man invented science, and mathematics” if none of us today are going out there and designing the African challenge to Android Nougat or iOS 11.0.3. You can click like 2 billion times on your favorite YouTube Afrocentric video, it will bring you not even 0.000000001% closer to owning a market share in this world or redressing the issues of capitalist exploitation and neo-liberal globalization.

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THE TEST

You ever seen someone fake playing guitar? Well you actually cannot fake playing guitar in-front of another guitarist. And this is more or less true for all professions. And those who are really involved in advancing this struggle can smell the BS from the real deal. You talk long enough you end up exposing yourself, because either you have work and a legacy–or you do not.

So are you really in the struggle for African liberation? If so you should be able to answer some of these questions:

1. What organization are you working with ? (Ture said organized, so what org are you part of)?
2. Who do we know that you know that can vouch for your track record?
3. Can you take me to a web-page where I can get more information about the things you care so much about, your research –no not your personal Facebook page or someone else’s blog.
4. Can you email your blueprints for victory? The objectives and the game plan?
5. What are you currently supporting? Community projects, films (like this one), Business in the African community, building wells in Africa, educational programs etc. Adult literacy, teaching Swahili.

The African struggle must be recovered from confused and self-centered jokers. And it is time we set up a process to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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TYPES OF REVOLUTION

The minute it actually comes down to walking and not talking anymore, the strongest talkers get wobbly knees and buckle under their own rhetoric

• The Hobbyist- Revolution is a recreational activity, they are interested in it like an old man likes to fish to past the time. They have very low investment in anything, and outcome does not concern them beyond complaining. Because just having ideas in your head and no action leaves the world in its original state.–Unchanged.
• The Career Revolutionary: It is a job they do, it pays the bills, they lecture about it because they fill that niche and have an audience which supports them. They might be artist who perform inside of African themes for a living. They care about struggle within vulgar self-interest. Victory actually puts them out of work.
• The Social revolution: Revolution is a social event to re-affirm identity and make them feel included in something. It is like a football club or any other social group. The reward is not from fixing anything but the process and the social rewards of being part of a community
• The Fake Revolutionary: Revolutionary is only a cover to boast ego, or some harmful desire. They are the lowest form because they destroy the revolution within.
• The Real Revolution. Is interested in absolute objectives. Victory is of paramount importance. Results are high priority.

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BLACK DIAGNOSIS

An inability or unwillingness to form complex working relationships with members of one’s group. If this statement is true, then it explains why we have so many scholars writing books (you really do not need to be good at working with others to do this), It explains why IF we do business it is usually a one-man show (unless we in someone else’s project). We struggle with filmmaking because that depends on complex working relationships. It’s a theory of ours and so far explains a large aspect of our behavior. Large companies like Price-Waterhouse will be way out our reach despite us having equal intelligence and abundance of talent.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

There is one very important thing you need to know about this struggle, perhaps one of the most disheartening things. This struggle is not simply about building schools and libraries, and creating opportunities for African people. If it was just that—fair be fair. But the people you are liberating must want to be liberated. They may say with a passion “I wish we had a library”— Until you build one. “We need films about our history, because the oppressor tells our story”— until you make one. “I wish we had business opportunities”—Until you give it to them! “I wish there was a free website with information about our history and culture— until you point them to one. They are happy saying “I am sick of the White man’s culture, I want to wear my own culture.” Until you show them where to buy it.

They are so passionate about change they will always ask “But what can I do for change?” until you tell them where to sign up. And we need to seriously factor in this. The minute you start talking about REAL anything 90% of the people switch off. And we all know why because between a complaint and a course of action; the complaint is so much more colorful as a Tweet or a Facebook status. Between a nuanced complex understanding of what needs to be done, a fiery piece of tired rhetoric moves the heart more.

No one wants to claim being from the stone-age cannibal tribe of drunk layabouts. Everyone wants to be Ancient Egyptian or Ethiopian because they built something. Everyone wants to be descended from Moors of Spain, or Nubian kings and Queens. And likewise today when we see people rejecting African identity, it is usually because we have not made it attractive.

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FIGHT THE POWER

So you throw your fist in the air and scream FIGHT THE POWER. Fight the Power was an excellent motivational song by Public Enemy so fist in the air is symbolic of what we did in the 60’s. If a fist is an empowering symbol of the struggle, then why since the 60’s are all the indicators of “Black power” so low? So Now define the power? What about market economies, what do you know about globalization, and industrialization? Not a clue. So what power are you fighting? If you not sure how the world works, how democracies, a chain store, a supermarket, banking system, credit system, judicial systems, capitalist systems work how are you fighting them? Can you fight a flu if you have no idea how it is spread? Can land a plane if you never heard of a plane? So since BPP you still have people content with rhetoric and nothing else. You just deceiving yourself. And because of that, it will be the “Power” forever Fighting you and winning.

The “Power” makes Glock, Smith And Wesson, Ozzi, Beretta, F22, B1 Bomber, welding torches, cell phones, pizza boxes, Rx lens for eyewear, electricity, Spaceships, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Wifi Routers, Facebook, YouTube, Universities, your job– what do you make? So pull the plug out of the wall and see how dark the room just got. Well that is the power, now go and fight it.

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60’s REVOLUTION

Hope doesn’t exist without individual change. Change makes hope possible. If we want to remain ignorant of self (history, culture, morals) and do not become nation builders then we steal our own hope. If we fail to instruct our children in honor and dignity then we are the thieves of hope. Be sincere as if Malcolm X was watching over every thoughts, create economies as if Garvey was waiting on us, and fight like if Askia’s armies needed us. The last words of Kwame Ture were “Organize, Organize, Organize.” honor him by doing just that.

Paradigm shift is not a cute phrase at the end of a speech; it is a tangible transformation of work ethic and processes. When the talented 10th among the African nation gather in close session, they must combine their collective central intelligence to formulate, brainstorm, and foster new models and new agendas to challenge the plethora of problems. Understanding each on teach one is central and inescapable in our liberation. A strong foundation a strong work ethic, consistency, dedication and professionalism make light work of heavy task. The future belongs to the bold that are brave and diligent enough to seek out a new paradigm.

What happened to all those cool hippies that used to hang around us in the 60’s and 70’s smoking pot and listening to Jimi Hendrix and Brothers Johnson? They were down with us and calling us Brother and Dude. You see while we were spitting the rhetoric that defined the era, and dressing hipper than hip, and making cool statements like “The Revolution will not be televised” our “friends” understood at some stage they would commute this rebellion and return to “society.” So they took out the cameras and filmed us; we innocently thought nothing of it. They took out the notebooks and made notes– which became scripts for Blaxploitation and best selling books. So now when we wanted some stock footage of the “struggle,” we had to go and ask all those White hippies. Well they not hippies anymore, they have huge companies in Silicon Valley, they run record companies that sign our desperate and poor artist for peanuts. The hire and fire our “radical” professors of Black studies. And if the revolution is to be televised we need to pay them royalties first. No wonder they had no problem iconizing Black Panthers.

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BLACK EGO

See Mental Slavery

Alexander of Macedonia had an ego the size of Mars. Now his ego was rooted in this ideology of him being son of Zeus. Ramesses II had an ego the size of the Nile and all its tributaries, but his ego was rooted in his great prior accomplishments and his self-belief in his divinity. Now the garden variety ego running rife in the African world is not rooted in accomplishments it is there to compensate for an inferiority complex. It is directly proportional to how truely low they think about themselves. So Black ego puffs itself up beyond its pay grade and legacy. It loves to be called Dr. so and so, CEO, Vice Chair, despite barely having a track record of actual work done. It exist because it exist: “Do you know who I am? I am the crooked wife of a crooked useless politician with no education.” While others might have some source for their ego, Black ego has none. It is in the leadership role not by any system of merit, but because it needs to stimulate a weak person surrounded by weaker people. In the real world they skin and grind and bow and scrape.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear

Story: We spoke to 8 recent graduates and do you know all of them are starting 8 different companies. All of them with no experience of anything are CEO of some company which has no resources, no skills, no experience, no legacy, no accountability, no inventory, no operating hrs, no offices, no equipment, nada. This is the new trend. Not to follow, or join, not to work together, but to jump from nothing to CEO of an ant hill. This is the black mentality driven by ego. This ego is compensating for the low self-expectation and the lack of know how. Feeling important triumphs over doing important things. 

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THE ART OF TALKING

Death by talking. You never heard about it? Well that is what many of us are doing. To switch on a light they need to call a conference and even then they get sidetracked by tangential issues. And you start to realize the entire purpose is to meet up and talk the same buzzword driven yak.  And those that exploit African communities also support talk over work. There are big business who pay our people to walk around the community getting the youth to talk. They sponsor forums , business initiatives: Yet nothing comes out of it. But in their marketing they say Natwest and Absa is supporting this and that business initiative. It makes them look like they care about the community they exploit like they are “Partners in African development.” It is all a distraction. Nothing will come from it except hand-picked tokism. It will not build a African version of HSBC or a Black Mitsubishi corp. And all these org that are doing this are all making a killing doing it. and silly African governments are complicit in this. It is a case of look busy when you not sure what to do next. Proudly South African is one such venture–how many of the business are African owned? Yet they are up and down doing all kinds of “grassroots initiatives” (another buzzword). 

We, as Africans, have an intellectual culture where talking pretty is how we define intelligence and status. An African politician can sting together more complex sentences than British PM May, because we have a culture that promotes useless talking. I was in the Caribbean and I have never seen such a complex usage of the English language. If you didn’t know better you would think English was created there and spread to the UK. Leadership in the African world prides themselves on eloquent speech (especially in colonial languages) and but that is where it starts and stops. They will have you listen to themselves for hours and they say nothing. If there is a long way to say “We need to create more opportunities for business” they will take it.

You do not actually have to commit yourself to what you say or write. That is not how it works. And if you want to test this just go and read a book by one of these African American scholars (like Cornel West) and contrast it to his counterpart. We have this thing with looking smarter than we are by using obfuscating language. I was at a major media meeting in Southern Africa and they were using the word “Digital archiving” turns out they had no idea what it was when I told them I was prepared to contribute to their Digital archive and ask what systems they had in place for me to do so. Just fancy words on paper. And it is a culture because everyone copies it in order to be seen as smart. They write business proposals, respond to challenges with concoctions of verbose that make no sense. See an example below:

• AHS: South Africa, like most of Africa has made very little progress in the area of African ownership. Africans still have a country that is heavily dependent upon White and Indian skills for it economic prosperity.
• REPLY: African Holocaust, am afraid you are parroting the white supremacists narrative of denigration of Africans and selective amnesia of positive facts. I will recommend you do better research and may be compare and contrast developmental benchmarks set by UN organizations between Botswana and South Africa then maybe you will post facts not unsubstantiated opinions.

Words highlighted showcase how the user strings words together–totally irrelevant to the discussion–to display their so-called intelligence. But none of them offer a rebuttal to the statement. Death by talking. You never heard about it? Well that is what many of us are doing. To switch on a light they need to call a meeting. And you start to realize their entire purpose is to meet up and talk the same buzzword driven yak. Our entire purpose is tangible work. Theirs is to talk about work. To meet, to create chat groups. And I think Whites play a role in letting us do this nonsense. I have seen big business pay our people to walk around the community getting the youth to talk. They sponsor forums etc. But yet nothing comes out of it. But in their marketing they say Natwest and Absa is supporting this and that business initiative. It is all BS. It makes them look like they care about community. It is all a distraction. And we need to really know this. Nothing will come from it. It will not build a African version of HSBC or a Black Mitsubishi corp. You just study this history of other people and you will never ever find these stupid and useless talkshops. And all these org that are doing this are all making a killing doing it. and silly African govs are complicit in this. It is a case of look busy when you not sure what to do next.

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THEORY V. DOING

KING AND MANDELA POWER PRINCIPLE

Mandela and King, when you study the foundation of their mindset  had in a major flaw with how they viewed power in this case White power. Both had this idealistic notion of a “better world” via integration. Now Nation of Islam (NOI ) were on a different path to liberation by being separatist and were preaching the message of Do for self and build our own.  Today we can see this direct path was all that was needed because even after the right to vote in South Africa and America and even after independence in the Caribbean Africans remain the subaltern, because voting does not confer true power. So today do for self and build our own world is TINA (there is no alternative).

Mandela lived long enough to realize that this idealism cannot work, it does not pave the path to  true liberation–just another type of cage. The other fellow is not interested in your idealism. So ending apartheid for Mandela was for good idealistic reasons, gaining the right to vote for King was motivated by good idealistic reasons. But White power was negotiating these things to get a better purchase on a changing globalized world. It is like the British and the banning of slavery: They were not doing it for humanitarian reasons. That world was slipping (abolitionist work, slave rebellions, changing economy, etc) so they changed grips to get a better purchase on the world. Banning slavery allowed them to move on to new economic models while suffocating their enemies (like the Arabs, who were still stuck on slavery as a means of economic power) And this is why we say there are no pacts between lions and lambs. Strength speaks to strength. The Kalashnikov vs the M16. Not Kalashnikov vs spliff. So we build our own world, and everything else will place. Right to vote gave us no bigger share of the world, neither did ending of apartheid: We still own nothing.

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CONCLUSION

If tomorrow we won everything we said we needed to win to be really free, the next day we will have to start another revolution to keep that victory a victory’ especially from ourselves and our own corruption. No victory is permanent. No truce or pact forever. The truth is revolution can never end, as no victory (real or imagined) is permanent.

Africans need a new way of planning which address immediate, short-term, long-term, life-time and cross-generational targets and strategies. if you need to bring in White specialist to fix an engineering problem how does it fit into the above plan? How do you plan to solve this problem on an cross-generational level, or will the same “white experts” solution be applied in 200 years’ time?

Looking at the issues of Pan-Africanism we have far more challenges than appear on the surface. Technical issues and attendance issues as well as long term commitment issues are not limited experiences but global Pan-African realities. So in beating a path to unity means factoring in all these things; not only the obvious; “we don’t unite”. Most issues in our stagnation are tied to education in the broad sense of the word which includes systems of doing things, ability to utilize technology and being generally socialized in a modern working globalized world. Limited funds means limited technology, limited everything. So how does someone without a computer and no car, unite effectively with a CEO of a accounting firm? Socialization is overlooked but it might be even a greater issue than the economic barrier. Even the challenge of talking on Skype proves that people based Pan-Africanism is untested in reality and only an idealistic vision. After 40 plus years of African struggle you will not find much written on the practicality of actual people-based unity.

Only if I had… The only if I had revolution is very appropriate because you can find an issue to indefinitely delay doing any work. Only If I had a million dollars I could open a school in Africa, Only if we could … xyz we could cause a revolution. Work with what we got, win where we can win. Plan across the generations. Every time another group gets success we say it is because they had xy and z. Jews got reparations so that is why they are economically sound – false. With reparations they were able to enhance an already economically sound foundation. Had reparations come and found them in Bling bling, they would have failed to utilize that money, moreover the money would have probably destroyed them. On to the next excuse; “Jew’s Holocaust didn’t destroy their identity” – True. So now we know that lets rebuild ours and get to work. Identify the good, chase out the bad. What is the x y and z that doesn’t depend on our oppressor, Identify it and go and get it.

Mentally how many times can you call people to a unity platform that collapses five minutes after it is formed? And the youth, with their passion, burn out. They expect that in one month they will unite Africa. They believe in the academy of YouTube and weekend scholarship as oppose to ardent research and study. Revolution is multi-prong but they are frustrated (and rightfully so) with the elders slow out-dated pace. However, they neglect work done and end up poorly re-inventing the wheel, not having respect or time to study and reanalyze. Then before they know it they are 50 and the hard rhetoric didn’t build anything. They are frustrated with the process that builds real wealth. They want to snatch the land back but not spend 8 years in Horticultural school – Instant revolutions.

Hope doesn’t exist without individual change. Change makes hope possible. If we want to remain ignorant of self (history, culture, morals) and do not become nation builders then we steal our own hope. If we fail to instruct our children in honor and dignity then we are the thieves of hope. Be sincere as if Malcolm X was watching over every thoughts, create economies as if Garvey was waiting on us, and fight like if Askia’s armies needed us. The last words of Kwame Ture were “Organize, Organize, Organize.” honor him by doing just that.

Paradigm shift is not a cute phrase at the end of a speech; it is a tangible transformation of work ethic and processes. When the talented 10th among the African nation gather in close session, they must combine their collective central intelligence to formulate, brainstorm, and foster new models and new agendas to challenge the plethora of problems. Understanding each on teach one is central and inescapable in our liberation. A strong foundation a strong work ethic, consistency, dedication and professionalism make light work of heavy task. The future belongs to the bold that are brave and diligent enough to seek out a a new paradigm.