“Take what you do best and do it for your people.” -Dr. John Henrik Clarke
The best of ourselves should always be used to uplift our people. The sixth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Kuumba (Creativity), which encourages us “To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.” This principle reminds us of the importance of using our talents, skills, and intellect to improve the condition of our community, recognizing, as the Ewe proverb says, that “Your goodness is not for yourself but for others.”
“When a people lose the knowledge of who they are, that is, their culture, they lose the very foundation upon which their individual existence and their society is based. To combat this loss, each African person must be equipped with a ‘Grand Vision of the Future,’ a vision extending beyond personal interests such that this vision becomes the embodiment of the vital interest and moral centerhod of the entire African World Community. I refer to this vision as The African Principle.” -Dr. Anderson Thompson
In our ancestral paradigms, the purpose of life was inextricably linked to the collective good. The fifth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Nia (Purpose), which encourages us “To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.” This principle reminds us that in African traditions, the purpose of human existence is to to contribute to the betterment of one’s community. It also encourages us to study the past and to use it as a standard for excellence.
“The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don’t live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.” -Malcolm X
An economic system provides for the material needs of a community. The fourth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), which encourages us “To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.” This principle compels us to seek to control the economies of our communities and societies. Economic dependency is a basis of enslavement. True sovereignty requires that we provide for our own needs to ensure a prosperous future.
Akpata na abọ di mma nkụkọta. “It is good to join two brooms together when sweeping.” -Igbo proverb
Cooperation is the lifeblood of community. The third day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of Ujima (Collective work and responsibility), which encourages us “To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.” This principle teaches us that our obligations are not limited to ourselves, but that they extend to our community as a whole and our collective well-being.
“A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation.” -Malcolm X
A sovereign people defines its own reality. The second principle of Kwanzaa, Kujichagulia (self-determination), expresses “To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.” This pinciple necessarily teaches the interrelatedness of self-reliance to self-determination. To determine our own future, we must also be secure within ourselves. This means that we must feed, cloth, house, heal, educate, and defend ourselves. Without these, we are dependent on others and cannot be truly self-determining.
Mbooloo mooy doole. “There is power in a group.” -Wolof proverb
Unity of purpose is critical for our success as a people. The first principle of Kwanzaa, Umoja (unity), expresses “To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.” Unity is the basis of any collective success, and enables us to effective practice self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, or to have faith in ourselves and our capabilities.
People like to suggest that there is a separation between US foreign and domestic policy, but this cannot be true, especially in relation to the Black struggle and its interconnections with the struggles of other oppressed peoples. US opposition to the Soviet Union resulted in the suppression of alleged communists, writers, and Black activists including Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois here.
US support for colonial regimes abroad was intimately connected to the surveillance of leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It is no wonder why the former was targeted for elimination by both the CIA and FBI, and the latter was the subject of a sustained effort to prompt his suicide by the FBI. Further, the violent suppression of Black Power formations such as the Black Panther Party, the Us Organization, the Republic of New Africa and others was linked to a desire—not only to negate Black self-determination, but to also nullify the emergence of a domestic armed struggle analogous to the many that were being waged in both Africa and Asia.
In the 1980s, the murder of leaders like Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara, and support for South Africa’s apartheid regime ran parallel to campaigns of destabilization within domestic Black communities, in some cases utilizing similar tactics of repression as in the case of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia and the toppling of Bishop’s government in Grenada, or South Africa’s arrest and detainment of anti-apartheid leaders and the US’s continued containment of Black political prisoners.
Finally, the continued imposition of neo-colonialism on the people of Haiti (under every president since Clinton), the destabilization of countries in the Americas like Honduras (under Obama) and Bolivia (under Trump), the resource exploitation of Congo, and complicity in proxy wars and mass-killings are all reminders of the depravity of the state, but also actions which have profound consequences for the lives of Africans and other racialized and oppressed groups in the US as the ideological and political aftershocks of these events will result in continued surges in refugees who have been displaced by war, an intensification of resource extraction in vulnerable communities (i.e., oil), the enlargement of the poor due to economic dislocation, continued disinvestment in domestic infrastructure aid institutions in order to support the war industries, the on-going militarization of American policing, the expansion of the surveillance state, the suppression of civil liberties, and the exponential growth of insecurity in the world. Whats more, these things are not simply artifacts of a reality yet to come into being, they are with us at this very moment.
The world is not “out there” in some far flung place. The world is here with us, where our lives will, to greater or lesser degrees parallel what is happening within it. We ignore this to our peril.
I am very happy to have been able to attend the mswt ra wpt rnpt today. We met on the shore of Lake Michigan to the sound drumming and the glimmering of the sun just beyond the horizon. It was a beautiful occasion that served to remind me of some central values that informed the lives of our ancestors.
For them, time was cyclical. They viewed these cycles as, not merely temporal phenomena, but as expressions of the orderlies of the universe. These cycles, often represented by their celebrations of the new year, served to reinforce core social values and behaviors, particularly those which were so central to the maintenance of community and the nation. This is exemplified by the importance of agricultural festivals in many parts of Africa. Further, the new year symbolized the renewal of the bonds between humanity and nature, which in the ancestral paradigm, was the clearest manifestation of the divine.
Personally however, these cycles held further significance. They served as reminders of the unfinished nature of our being, that is, our continued journey through life and the possibilities within us to transform ourselves, to be the exemplars of good speech and good character, of the importance of striving to both discover and fulfill our purpose in the world. Herein, the celestial, terrestrial, social, and intra-personal were all conjoined within a coterminous cycle of being and transformation.
Lastly, today was a good reminder of the importance of rituals. Rituals serve as anchors of meaning which delineate critical junctures in the unfolding of time. They provide us the opportunity to focus our energy and intention. They also enable us to affirm the ideals which we seek to concretize in the world.
My wife and I recently visited the Whitney Plantation. It is about 40 minutes west of the New Orleans. While we have visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York, this was our first visit to a plantation.
We learned that the Whitney Plantation was founded by a German immigrant who later became assimilated into the surrounding French Creole culture. In the 18th Century, his and his family’s fortunes were made off of indigo. Once this crop ceased to be viable, they transitioned to sugar. Both crops were profoundly dangerous to the enslaved Africans whose forced labor they exploited. As in other parts of the Americas, those who worked in the cane fields had short, miserable lives of about 7 to 8 years.
When touring the plantation you can learn how the plantation functioned as an economic engine. It was highly regimented with ringing bells to signal shift changes and a 24-hour labor force. While I am familiar with the labor dynamics of cotton plantations, sugar plantations were quite different in terms of the nature, structure, and hazards of the work which our ancestors were compelled to do.
Even after the end of legalized slavery, the brutal exploitation of African labor continued as a type of neo-slavery, a practice that was given legal sanction via laws which both restricted the movement of newly freed Africans/Blacks, mandated their employment on the local plantations where they were previously enslaved, and assigned convict labor to the cane fields.
Today, the Whitney functions as a museum and a research site. Several of the structures from the 18th and 19th Century have been preserved there. There are also structures from surrounding areas that have been transported to the site for preservation. You can even see the large iron vats that were used to process sugar. Various memorials and monuments have been erected to tell the story of the 500 Africans who were enslaved there. These monuments were very moving.
One monument details the Africans who were sold when two brothers, who owned the site parted company over 200 years ago. Each of the Africans who were sold in this “transaction” are listed. Another set of monuments lists the names of each African who has been identified as having been enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. You can see various names that indicate their place of origin (i.e., the Senegambia or Congo) or their ethnicity (i.e. Bambara, Congo, Igbo, and so on). Some African names are also visible. I noted a number of popular West African names like Mamadou and Boubacar, as well as various Akan and Ewe, as Kofi, Kwaku, and Aba. They also shared accounts of the savage violence that our ancestors were subject to.
There was a memorial to the Africans who took part in the 1811 German Coast Revolt who were later executed, and another to the many children who died on the plantation. We were so moved by the latter two, that Safia suggested that we do a libation in their honor, which we did—one near each memorial.
It was a moving experience, one which reminds me of the importance of study and reflection upon our past, and determination in our efforts to create, as Maulana Karenga says, “the world that we want and deserve to live in.”
At the heart of the problem is our fractured sense of cultural identity. Many of us see ourselves as Black, unmoored from any kind of ancestral foundation.
Afro-Brazilians emphasize their ancestral inheritance from the Kongo, Yorùbá, and to a lesser extent Gbe-speaking peoples. Haitians note their connection to Kongo and, again, Gbe-speaking peoples. Even in this country, there were times where our connections to Kongo, Igbo, and Mande-speaking peoples were quite salient.
I think that such a sense of ancestral identity is quite valuable as a means of anchoring oneself. It enables us to see ourselves as (A) Africans/Blacks in the US, (B) whose culture and traditions rests upon the foundation of many African ethnicities, (C) which are themselves emergent from a continuum of African historicity stretching back millennia. Such a grounding should be sufficient to inoculate us against the kind of cultural and historical mis-orientaiton which is ever-fashionable amongst some of us.
