In traditional African societies nature was seen as sacred. The trees, rivers, rocks, and soil were believed to possess a divine essence. Such beliefs necessarily encouraged reverence and respect for nature, while they also discouraged rapacious plunder of the local ecosystem.
Author: kamaurashid
The gap
It’s strange being a faculty member in a college of education where, as you might imagine, talk of something called “the achievement gap” is not an infrequently addressed concern. In truth, I am concerned about the paucity of power that we possess as a people. I am concerned about the deep and profound levels of cultural mis-orientation that exists in our community as a consequence of the assault that has been waged against us.
Thus, rather than being concerned about some imagined gap that posits European settler-colonists as the standard to which we, as a people, should aspire, I am concerned about us acting decisively to definitively end the maafa and to restore a condition of Maat amongst our people. The distance between our present condition and such a goal is the only gap which concerns me.
Seeing through nonsense
Historically, African social movements have had a mass character. They were struggles engaged with the masses and concerned with structural conditions. The present effort is to present farce as movement that is concerned with hypermediated symbolism (ex., hashtags), hyperindividualism, and more recently micro-nationalism.
If we have ever wondered what movement would look like under the aegis of neoliberalism, then we have been graced by its presence throughout this decade. It is a masquerade, dense with ideologically-weighted jargon, yet devoid of the potency or potential of past struggles.
In a day best exemplified by personal branding, bathroom selfies, ubiquitous marketing via incessant data-mining, and an anti-intellectualism that masks itself as vehement conviction for all manner of lately contrived causes, propaganda is the very fabric of this epistemic reality.
It is therefore ironic, that we are counseled to “stay woke” in a time where the communal infrastructure that sustained critical ways of seeing the world has become increasingly fragmented. Thus, our “wokeness”, our vaunted critical consciousness, is fed by an unending stream of conspiracy-laden commentators or other content (that is mere nanometers in depth) from the most well-known (though not necessarily credible) social media personalities.
This is why I have said and continue to say that confusion and alienation are the spirit of this age. It is a time for those who have sia, that is exceptional insight and susununya, knowledge born of reflection and contemplation to deploy these tools for the good of others. As Mwalimu Shujaa says: “Throughout human history, truly educated, critically conscious people emerge who demonstrate the capacity to see through nonsense, grow in wisdom, and share knowledge with others.”
Reason against absolutism
Any set of conceptual, paradigmatic, philosophical, theoretical, or ideological premises, even if supposedly liberatory in origin or intent, if grounded in absolutist premises which pose simplistic responses to complex quandaries, can potentially become instruments of oppression.
One should guard one’s mind accordingly.
An outward directed radicalism
Africans in the US are compelled to embrace everyone’s nationalism and liberatory struggle but our own. We are routinely presented with “radical” politics that seek to elevate some group of social actors, while within such configurations we are often fodder or our destiny an enigma.
Overcoming alienation
Many of us in our search for healing, understanding, and purpose have unwittingly taken on ideologies which cultivate aversion and hopelessness. These state that we are alienated from a broader African world community or that African men and women are stark rivals or worse, fetters on our collective welfare. These are poisonous ways of thinking.
One of the most striking challenges of living in a society with “fundamental alienation” as its asili (foundation, essence) is that it infects us on every level. Many of us, in our quest for wholeness & meaning have taken on more of this poison via the ideologies that we imbibe.
We are beset by the fact that the most accessible solutions or answers also happen to be those which are most divergent from an African worldview. As such, we should never be surprised that the most popular or progressive discourses amount to little more than celebrations of alienation. This is why Mama Marimba Ani says that “To be Afrikan is the revolutionary act of our times.” She recognizes being African as an imperative for both personal and social transformation. An African worldview not only informs how we live as individuals, but directs us to reshape the world.
Thus, if we truly understand re-Africanization then, it is not a means for conformity to or within the dominant order. It is an imperative to dismantle a social order that creates and sustains conditions of alienation and to replace it with one that creates and sustains life, power, and health. True re-Africanization then, is nothing short of revolutionary thought and practice.
Border patrol
Language is a carefully maintained border in the domain of social relations wherein power disparities exist between cultural groups. The languages of the colonized may be subject to marginalization, containment, or expungement. They serve as signifiers of inferiority or subordination.
Enlightenment
I was walking through the halls of the university and saw a flyer for a Yoga class with the tag line, “find inner peace”. For Africans, is it rational to seek inner peace without also disrupting the condition of isft that envelops us since the personal and social are entwined?
Jacob Carruthers stated that “The Niswt’s overall function, like that of Wosir, is the establishment of Maat in Tawi, i.e., to establish conditions where enlightenment will prevail over ignorance.”
I maintain that the establishment of Maat is also our charge. To establish Maat in the world is the true basis of enlightenment.
Referenced terms
isft is a Kemetic word that can be translated as wrong-doing or disorder.
niswt is the title of the ruler of Kemet. Pharaoh is a foreign term.
wosir is the divinity that the Greeks called Osiris.
tawi was the national name of Kemet. It referred to the united two lands. tawi literally translates as “two lands”.
Ideology and reductionism
Many claim that ideology enables us to better see. This is only partially true. Ideology draws our attention to particular things or ideas in such a way that it also blinds. Thus one must resist the seduction of ideological myopia and its reduction of reality to absolutisms.
Imani and the Haitian Revolution
On this day, January 1, 1804, Africans in Haiti declared their independence from French rule. This day served as one of the most significant historical developments of the 19th Century, not only because it served as a beacon of hope for Africans elsewhere to continue their struggle against European tyranny, not only because it demonstrated the African principle of complementarity–in that African women and men took up arms and marched side-by-side into battle, but also because the Haitian struggle was just as significant philosophically as it was militarily.
In his work The Irritated Genie, Jacob H. Carruthers discusses the philosophical implications of the liberation struggle. He recalls Bookman’s prayer, where Bookman Dutty concludes with the remark, “Throw away the likeness of the white man’s god who has so often brought us to tears and listen to liberty which speaks in all our hearts” (Carruthers 1985, 22). Regarding Bookman’s invocation Carruthers writes, “This evocation on the night of the celebration of the Voodun Spirit, Ogun, the ‘God’ of war, was more than a call to arms; it was even more a summation of the historical experience of the Blacks on the Island of Santo Domingo and indeed the diaspora in general. At the same time, this prayer was not a mere ‘Ideological’ statement, it was all of these, but more importantly it was the expression of an Afrocentric Worldview” (Carruthers 1985, 22-23).
Carruthers thus reminds us that the Haitian struggle was not merely to throw off the yoke of European dominance, but also to create conditions wherein the African way could flourish unperturbed by the military, economic, or epistemological tyranny of Europeans. This is significant because the European campaign to reorder the world has been totalizing in its effects.
The Europeans, since 1440, have been reorganizing the world. The world we now live in was organized by them. They conquered the lands of all continents and unilaterally redesigned the social and biological modes of existence. They changed the course of rivers, removed mountains, and built deserts. They created scarcity in the land of abundance. They moved populations from one continent to another. They created new races. They established themselves as the master race and all others as their servants. They made what they like good and everything else bad. In order to liberate ourselves we must take the world and then reorganize it according to our worldview. Only then will mankind be allowed to live in harmony with the universe. Only then will we be truly free. (Carruthers 1999, 261)
Those daring Africans who took part in the Haitian Revolution were driven by a belief in the possibility that if they acted to seize their freedom, then such actions might bear fruit in the world. Even as they continued to toil under the lash of the French on sugar plantations, they saw their yet unrealized goal of freedom as possible, if only they dared struggle to be free. Their actions were driven by a truth, one which was apparent to them, but not to Europeans. “The truth is that the African people will never permanently be enslaved or oppressed” (Carruther 1985, 111).
This is Imani in its clearest form. What we are struggling for is not for a place within the established order. We are seeking to bring into being a world in our image and interest. It is a struggle to make Maat, the Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) principle of order, harmony, and balance the fundamental truth of our reality. We are therefore working to concretize a vision of the world articulated in Haiti’s monumental accomplishment, a world wherein we as African people are able to determine our own destiny. This is our struggle, and we believe with all our hearts in its ultimate success.
References
Carruthers, Jacob H. 1985. The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution. Chicago: The Kemetic Institute.
Carruthers, Jacob H. 1999. Intellectual Warfare. Chicago: Third World Press.