Category: Uhuru

Reclaiming Culture, Restoring Sovereignty: From Theory to Action

I often say that the reclamation of our culture and the restoration of our sovereignty should be our two primary goals as a people wherever we are on this planet. As it pertains to cultural reclamation, Kawaida Theory poses the following as the seven domains of culture:

  1. Spirituality
  2. History
  3. Social organization
  4. Economic organization
  5. Political organization
  6. Creative production
  7. Ethos

Below I elaborate on the implications and significance of each.

Spirituality: Our dependence on foreign religions and spiritual practices is a basis of alienation that not only estranges us from our ancestors and the African way, but also makes us the subordinates of those people for whom such a religion or spiritual system is their cultural inheritance. Hence, we can never truly center ourselves within another people’s tradition. The stories, the ethics, the protocols, and rituals are the product of their worldview and history, not ours. We are either consigned to the periphery of these traditions or burdened with the imagined need to constantly demarcate a “Black” modality within it. One of the critical points here is that religion and spirituality, for all of its talk of the otherworldly, is inescapably political and as such is a critical ground of struggle.

History: We cannot know ourselves absent the reclamation of our history, our living memory of our journey through time and space. In fact, no people can be fully conscious of itself, its character, or its culture bereft of such knowledge. Nor we can draw upon history’s lessons in our efforts to solve the various problems that loom before us.

Social organization: The way that we create, organize, and manage our families, organizations, and institutions must be based on an African worldview, while also reinforcing our political aim of total sovereignty.

Economic organization: Far too many Africans have taken refuge in the polarities of capitalism or socialism without realizing that both of these frameworks consign us to alienation and subordination within someone else’s paradigm and social structure. The key challenge is for us to discover African models of economic organization and to employ those in our work to restore ourselves.

Political organization: Despite the vaunted claims of liberal democracy, African models of governance have, for millennia proved sufficient to effectively govern vast societies and ensure the welfare of the people. Europeans have erased our historical memory or our achievements prior to the Maafa and have thus convinced us than only within the context of liberal democracy can human flourishing occur. Yet we must ask where liberal democracy has delivered a higher standard of living for our people anywhere on this planet.

Creative production: The creative capacity of African people has been tethered to the system of European domination. As such, we create, but those capacities are harnessed in order to enrich Europeans and to further our cultural mis-orientation (consider the popular music of Africans in the US). Instead, we must use our genius to create for ourselves, not only art, but also in the arena of problem-solving.

Ethos: The collective conscious of our people, our asili (essence), is the foundation upon which we recognize ourselves as an African people. It is also the framework that informs the best of who we are in both our day-to-day practice amongst our people and our struggle against our enemies.

Within this framework, one seeks to revitalize our culture in each area, with the understanding that all of these, in total, represent a comprehensive way of living/being for a people.

Regarding the restoration of sovereignty, the Council of Independent Black Institutions has offered a framework that posits that independence rests upon our self-sufficiency in six basic areas. These areas are as follows:

  1. Education
  2. Food
  3. Clothing
  4. Shelter
  5. Health care
  6. Defense

Hence, if we are not educating, feeding, clothing, housing, healing, and defending African people either then we are not an independent people. Our failure to provide these things for ourselves is both a basis of dependency and an instrument of control.

The beauty of this model is that it is scalable, that is that it can implemented on the level of a grassroots organization consisting of a few individuals, or it can be implemented on the global level. For my part, we have worked consistently to build institutions focused on education, food, and defense. We have also supported independent institutions active in all six of these domains. Specifically, our work has consisted of supporting homeschool collectives (Indigo Nation Homeschool Association), rites-of-passage programs (Akoben Rites-of-Passage Society), political education (The Communiversity), cultural and historical education (The Kemetic Institute of Chicago), outdoors skills education (Aya Leadership Development Institute and the Black Survival Network), gardening, urban farming, and food preservation (Your Bountiful Harvest Family Farm), and defense (Black Survival Network and Chicago Malandros de Mestre Touro). We have both practiced and provided instruction in these domains, as talk is insufficient, one must be a living example of the kind of practice that one advocates.

Tough talk, insufficient action, impoverished vision

People often speak of the need to “tear down”, “disrupt”, or “reform” the existing system. I find such discourse fascinating, if not unimaginative. The 3rd position’s popularity is proportionate to its futility. Africans in this country have labored tirelessly to reform the US. We have been the river that flows into the desert that Armah wrote of so long ago. The 2nd option seems to be anomalous in meaning. Disrupt for how long? To what end? I have always seen this as a more “militant” sounding reformist declaration. Vociferous rhetoric is, ultimately, futile in a world where power is based on structural capacity. The 1st is ill-defined. Tear down to replace with what?

Such ambiguous language is not sufficient to inform a critical understanding of the world or to provide a conceptual model that would serve as a basis for its reorganization. This is why it is important to study the works of great thinkers, organizers, and leaders–who thought deeply about such things, built institutions, and left us a path to follow. People such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Thomas Sankara, and others come to mind. As Amos Wilson would note in his book Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus the New World Order of Marcus Garvey, the true nationalist studies the needs of the people and works to bring into being an institutional framework based on such needs. Their work is driven by a “grand vision” of the future, one wherein African sovereignty is an existential reality and the African worldview is the basis of our consciousness.

We will discover that such clarity and determination does not need vacuous appeals for reform, vociferous rhetoric, or bold but visionless declarations. It only requires, as has been stated, constant and determined effort.

 

On ideology

Ideology is often a fetter of the mind. In fact, given its method of operation, it may be most appropriate to consider ideology within a similar vein to religion or any form of dogmatism, as both place parameters on thought and action.
 
It is important to note that ideas and ideology are not identical. An idea can be considered as the novel product of human cognition, that is thought, whereas ideology can be considered as a system of ideas. It is the organization of ideas for some specific end that demarcates ideas from ideology.
 
Here, what I am critiquing is the role of ideologies in constraining human thought, that is of binding ideation–the production of knowledge or ideas. It is not that ideology negates the possibility of ideation, rather that it enables or rather sanctions only narrow forms of ideation. For instance, I may conceive of a new method cooking a favorite dish, say black-eyed peas for instance. I may devise a new sequence of movements in a martial art. Again, such things are products of ideation. They are ideas manifest. However, ideology would instead insist that only black-eyed peas be eaten or that they only be prepared in a specific manner. It may mandate that only particular movements or sequences of movements are acceptable, that only certain martial arts are permissible. Such mandates may be offered without any grounding in any system of reason or critical analysis that is not bound within the circular logic of ideology–that is that the ideology is a basis of truth and that truth itself must be determined within the framework of the ideology. Thus, the only basis of legitimacy may be the consonance of a thing or practice with the ideology itself, not its utility for life itself.
 
It is the delinking of action from purpose and thought from reason that is the basis of ideology’s idiocy. One may discover that the constraints of ideology may create patterns of living that are in fact either impractical or untenable, but such limitations are never sufficient to warrant either the revision or rejection of the ideology, as it is (due to its religious inheritance) sacrosanct. Instead the very critique of or deviation from the tenets of ideological purity is taken as evidence of personal failings, rather than the structural flaws of the ideology itself.
 
Paradoxically, ideology, is often the idiom of discourses of freedom–both personal and collective, and it may indeed prove facilitative of this to a degree. However, freedom conceived solely on such a basis may prove fragmentary. Freeing one in some respects, while binding one in others.
 
What is the solution? What lies beyond the fetter of ideology? Perhaps little more than a commitment to human flourishing, a striving to practice a deep and abiding mindfulness, and a willingness to engage in critical investigation of thought and action. In one’s search for optimal ways to promote wellbeing, sustain deeper levels of self-awareness, and ways of interrogating the world one may find that the search necessarily leads to paths wider than those that the delimiting logics of ideology allows for.

 

Escape

Everyday the news (local and national) reminds me of how backwards, decadent, and dangerous this country is. From time to time I watch videos on a Youtube that highlights the stories of Black folks who have moved to Asia. One common theme in their narratives is feeling safe. While I am not necessarily advocating moving to Asia (I for one can’t see myself moving to any non-Black majority country), I can relate and often feel the attraction to another place.
 
One thing that I am aware of however, is that it is not enough for any person of African descent to leave the West. The destructive forces that make our lives unlivable in these places is hard at work at the universalization of misery. The solution is to empower ourselves by focusing on the restoration of African sovereignty and all that this entails. This is, necessarily, a collective solution to a shared problem. It is based on the assumption that escape will not address our problems, but that power and independence will. The alternative to our, at-present, individual approach to emigration, will be the formation of collectives of determined individuals, who depart and do the work to both pave the way for others to come behind them, while also seeking to create a new consciousness via the formation of institutions that seek to reflect–in both mission and action–a new African reality.

Maroons

Europeans told our ancestors to accept enslavement or die. Those that did submit found that they lived under the authority of a savagely violent system. Such an understanding guided the maroons, who truly lived the ideal of freedom or death as they fought an oppressive system.

Theorizing movements: dissipation, co-option, and revolution

During the Occupy Movement, I speculated that the movement would likely move in one of three directions. I based my premise on my observation of social movements in the context of history as well as the synergistic relationship between social conditions, social movements, and political consciousness. I have decided to revisit these reflections in light of recent occurrences.

Succinctly stated, movements for social change can move in three directions. First, they can dissipate due to insufficient momentum and political consciousness on the part of the movements’ actors and the masses. Poor social conditions coupled with certain forms of political consciousness are the fertilizer for movements. Where the movements’ goals fail to gain traction in the consciousness of the masses or where the requisite levels of critical consciousness are lacking, movements may decline with various degrees of rapidity.

Further, in contexts where reforms are sufficient to pacify a masses’ yearning for a better society, movements may cease to seem relevant. It should be noted that the perception of reform may be as effective as the actuality itself, at least in the short term. That is if the masses accept the viability of reform as a signifier of social progression, then the movement itself–given its oppositional nature–may fade into irrelevance. Hence reforms, as a process of signification, may effectively blunt the further progression of a movement. Of course, when such reforms prove illusory, there is always the possibility of new movements of opposition forming–which may be further animated by the conscious awareness of the failed reforms of the past.

Further, insufficient social consciousness, that is limitations in the political education of the masses and a movements’ core actors can also lead to its eventual dissipation.

Second, movements can be co-opted by the establishment. This typically takes the form of them merging with, being absorbed by, or having their core platform adopted by the dominant political parties or other structures of the mainstream political apparatus. This differs from dissipation in that the aims of the movement continue, albeit within the dominant system. Such co-option may be represented by a range of structures such as the appointment of movement leaders to key positions in the government or private foundations, the provisioning of funds to movement actors by the state or civil society, the creation of policy platforms based on movement objectives, as well as the creation of institutes focused on the development of movement aims in some form or another. Often the latter may entail connections to major universities, and with this the provisioning of monetary resources, social status, and–necessarily–a degree of legitimization by the existing system.

Of course, co-option may result in movement fragmentation, as certain movement actors opt to continue on a more independent basis, perhaps due to differing forms of political consciousness or a striving towards different end goals beyond those symbolized in the supposed gains afforded by co-option. In any event, this suggests that the progression of movements themselves may also be characterized by bifurcations.

Third, movements can also become more radical wherein they look beyond reform as the solution to the existing system.

Returning to the above formulation–social conditions and political consciousness, in addition to a rejection of the legitimacy and viability of the existing system is the conceptual basis for revolutionary movements. In fact, the difference between reformist and revolutionary movements is largely based on the latter factor, as those who have rejected the dominant order may be less inclined to hold out hope in its redemption. One additional critical element which serves to concretize revolutionary movements is a vision of a new future possibility–that is the movement is ultimately animated by its pursuance of a new society, one whose birth requires the dissolution of the present one.

The latter stage necessarily entails three sub-stages: proto-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. However, these will be discussed in another essay.

Of course, these three possibilities are predicated on the movements’ self-conscious evolution. They do not focus on a fourth possibility, destruction by the state–a common fate of many movements, though perhaps less common than the first or second. Also, given that all movements do not form for the sake of achieving revolution, it must be stated that many do form for short-term, limited objectives–thus making dissipation inevitable. Further, others may come into being with the express goal of moving the establishment in one direction or another. Though such reformist movements may engage in various forms of  “militant” performance including, among other things, vociferous rhetoric, such movements must never be confused with revolutionary movements–which posit the necessity of fundamental social change, not reform.

Moving forward

The notion of progress is often dependent on an imagined movement from a supposedly lethargic and backwards past towards some signifier of forward direction. However, “forward” is not neutral, but is heavily dependent on power, that is the meaning of this idea is often dictated by those with the institutional capacity to define “progress” and to make their definition the definitive conception of it. Thus this definition does not merely reside in minds, but is bound up in policies, and institutional structures. Consequently, many of us, due to the political and economic dimensions of knowledge, embrace conceptions of progress that are inescapably Eurocentric.

Opposing elements

Opposition is inevitable in an oppressive society. The conditions of alienation necessitates it. Those focused on maintaining hegemony recognize its inescapability and direct the creation of oppositional elements that fall under the control of the political and economic elite. The existence of a controlled opposition enables an outlet for the disaffected, while also limiting the disruption that this poses for the broader system. A controlled opposition, even when decried by some sectors of the dominant political-economic system, will be buttressed and legitimized by others. This particular drama is necessary in order for it to maintain its nominal appearance of being radical.