Suggestions- What we need to start doing - CHINWEIZU "a) Conceptualize our future We need to start to focus on our future as a people, to conceptualize our possible futures and how to actualize those we desire and prevent those we dislike, taking care to avoid defining our aspirations by the expectations of others. This would help wean us away from an excessive and disabling focus on our past, on our great and remote past in Kemet etc, on "when we ruled". That much needed effort to rehabilitate our past in the context of our amnesia and the gross enemy distortions and disparagement has gone on for too long. We seem to be stuck in it. While we need to constantly draw psychic sustenance from our rehabilitated past, we need to get on with the all-important task of rescuing our future. Visualizing our desired future should help us work out how to get there. If we do not take care to avoid defining our aspirations by the expectations of others, we might end up building for ourselves a dungeon where we languish in voluntarily servitude to enemies who have manipulated our aspirations. (b) Shift to a new and illuminating conceptual framework A blind man hitting wildly with his stick has little chance of winning his fight. Just as we change lenses when our old ones become blurry, we now need to employ a new conceptual framework to help us see our reality correctly. The main concepts with which we still apprehend our reality are now obscurantist. Among these obscurantist concepts are independence day, postcolonial, development, and the African continent. Here are ten new concepts that we need to start using: 1] UN imperialism 2] White expatriate colonialism 3] Black comprador colonialism These three concepts clarify the fact that imperialism is not over but continues through the UN system; that though White expatriate colonialism ended in each country on its so-called Independence Day, far from being in a ‘post-colonial’ era, black Africans are actually in the era of Black comprador colonialism. 4] G-8 Bantustan – this concept clarifies the fact that Black African countries today, far from being independent, are the Bantustans of the G-8 system; and that ‘Independence Day’ is really Bantustan Day. 5] Arab racism 6] Arab Expansionism 7] Arab Colonialism These three new concepts help to clarify what’s been going on for the last half century in South Sudan, Mauritania, Darfur and the entire Afro-Arab borderlands along the Sahelian zone. 8] Black Africa: Thinking and talking of black Africa instead of Africa or ‘the continent’ will free us from the deadly identity confusions spawned by Continentalist Pan Africanism and its odd preoccupation with the continental land mass rather than the indigenous black African peoples. 9] Industrialization: Since industrialization is at the core of development, and development without industrialization is but maldevelopment; thinking and talking of industrialization instead of development will help focus our efforts where they should have been for the last 50 years—on the rigorous program of industrialization whose fruit would have been the development we declared was our goal, and which still eludes us. 10] Race War: this unacknowledged fact has been the basic context of the lives of black Africans for the past millennium or more! The trans-Sahara ‘slave trade’ to Arab lands was race war; the trans -Atlantic ‘slave trade’ was race war; Colonialism was, and still is, race war! South Sudan is race war; Darfur is race war; Mauritania is race war; AIDS is race war; USofAfrica is race war. Until we realize this, what chance do we have of surviving, let alone winning, a war every phase of which we have lost thus far? To survive this 21st century, let alone prosper, we need to acknowledge and act on the fact that we have been in a long race war with the aggressor Arab and European branches of White Power. c) Move the ‘revolution’ from virtual reality and into the street To minimize the isolation, sense of futility and tendency to burn-out among activists, they should organize themselves into a social movement with a conscious and overarching goal -- an organized community of committed agents of change whose hearts are free of cowardice; a living mini-society with its own structure of institutions and an exciting subculture of its own; a miniature alternative society gestating within the larger and hostile society; an alternative society with a full and satisfying life of its own: its own study groups, weekend schools, Young Pioneers, social clubs, picnics, concerts, Film and video screenings, radio stations, newspapers, festivals, protest marches, street demos, mutual help associations, recreation centers, guest houses, songs, drama troupes, meeting halls; task forces for fundraising, letter-writing and other campaigns; social welfare units bringing help to the needy; neighbourhood sentinels who ensure security on our streets, leadership training outfits, bookshops, reading rooms; community shops, restaurants and other businesses that fund the movement. To minimize burn out, we need to enjoy what we do, and we need to form a warm and supportive group for that. We’ll do much better political work if we do it in high-spirited teams that enjoy what they do. Much could be learnt from the culture of British trade unions, Oliver Tambo’s ANC, Cabral’s PAIGC, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam, Mao’s base areas, etc. And also from the evangelical missions and how they envelope their members in a total living community. Since all our problems of the last thousand years are rooted in the lack of black African power, I would suggest that this real-time movement be the Black Power Pan Africanist (BPPA) Movement—a movement of Black Africans building Black African Power wherever Black Africans find themselves on earth; building the power to define, defend and advance the Black African interest locally and globally: in the home and in the workplace; at the levels of the street, the city block, the neighborhood, the ward, the municipality, the village, the county or Local Government Area; and upward at the state/provincial and country levels; and eventually at the levels of ECOWAS and SADC, and at the inter-country level of a global Black African League of Nations, Communities and States—our own equivalent of NATO and the defunct Warsaw Pact. c) Anchor “the struggle” in Political education The foundation of the political education that black Africans need should be the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Amilcar Cabral and Steve Biko. To that core should be added the works of Mao Tse-tung and Noam Chomsky, as well as Afrocentric studies of Arab Racism, Arab Enslavement of Black Africans and Arab Colonialism in Black Africa. Furthermore, we should study the modes of unity and the ways and means of building each type in Black Africa. Black African scholars should be enlisted to supply materials on these vital subjects."
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:34:22 +0000
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