Category: Uhuru

Kujichagulia and the liberation struggle

Part of the genius of the Nguzo Saba is the necessity of each of its principles to the attainment of African liberation. From a foundational point of view, liberation in any meaningful sense is unattainable without umoja, unity. Furthermore, any people striving for freedom must, on every level, practice kujichagula, self-determination.

Kujichagula is a practice evident throughout our history. When Nubians under the leadership of Piankhi pushed into Kemet, expelling the Assyrians and initiating the so-called 25th Dynasty, they restored Kemetic sovereignty and affirmed the spirit of umoja between the two nations—Kemet and Nubia. Their actions evidence a spirit of kujichagulia.

When Nzingha rejected Portuguese hegemony and raised the people to resist their rule, she committed herself to a decades-long struggle for African sovereignty. Her actions provide a potent example of a people engaged in a deep practice of kujichagulia.

When Africans stole away from the plantations of Brazil, and fled into the hinterland, creating the quilombo (maroon society) of Palmares, a community that stood for a century, they resolved that their freedom was insufficient so long as other African people remained oppressed. As a result, they fought tirelessly against that system, and in their struggle immortalized Zumbi—one of their leaders—as an icon of African kujichagula.

And when the ancestors of our movement in this country—in formations as diverse as the Shule ya Watoto, The East, The Republic of New Africa, the Congress of African People, the Institute of Positive Education, NationHouse, the Organization Us, and others—declared that we were an African people, and began to struggle towards the reclamation of our culture and the restoration of our sovereignty, they were engaged in the practice of Kujichagulia.

We stand on the shoulders of all of these ancestors. Their practice of Kujichagulia continues to inform ours, because no people can fully express their humanity when it is defined by their oppressors. No people can choose and fulfill their destiny under the tyranny of alien ideas.

Umoja as Pan-African thought and practice

Umoja is not merely an abstraction, but is expressed in word and deed. At the core of our striving for unity is the recognition that we are one people who share a common destiny. Thus in striving for unity, our petty divisions and differences pale in comparison to the grand vision of the future for African people that we should be collectively working to bring into being.
 
It must be emphasized that unity is not the same and uniformity. In fact, the genius of African culture is that despite apparent differences, we find innumerable examples of an underlying cultural unity. This is why many of us speak of the African way as an all-encompassing point of reference. We are referring to those values and behaviors that demonstrate the core of who we are wherever we find ourselves.
 
It is this unity that enabled us to forge great societies in the past, at the dawn of civilization all the way up until the 19th Century. This unity enabled us to wage valiant struggles against enslavement, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. It is this unity that informed the thinking of many Pan-Africanists to propose that we embrace Kiswahili as a unifying language, and made uhuru sasa (“freedom now”) a rallying cry for African people on both sides of the Atlantic as they struggled for self-determination. It is this same unity that causes us to continue to view our people’s struggles, wherever they may be in the world, as our struggle. This is because beneath any veneer of separation, we know that we are one, and have committed ourselves towards intelligent action based on such recognition.

A War Where Victory Equals Defeat

We are in the midst of what I call the “New Holy Wars”. Whereas the old “Holy Wars” pertained to the conflicts between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; the “New Holy Wars” includes African Traditionalists and African American religious skeptics, such as atheists and agnostics, embroiled in withering battles with fellow African Americans who are Christians, Muslims, and (to a lesser extent) Hebrews. These debates often center around questions of legitimacy, that is the idea that only indigenous African spiritual practices can cure the cultural ills of our community and set us down a path of redemption; or they may focus on rationality, that is the idea that religion is an instrument of oppression, and that it is only by breaking with religion, or by embracing a more enlightened spirituality that we will be able to free ourselves. Given the partisan nature of these debates what is legitimate or rational diverge significantly depending on the point of view in question. Moreover, these discourses are often insulated and reinforced within their own respective echo-chambers, thus diminishing the degree of dialog that occurs, and heightening the level of criticism among those who are situated on these disparate (but typically digital) battlefields.

While I think that debate can be intellectually stimulating, our obsession with religion is confounding our ability to effectively organize across our differences, and around our shared interests. Focusing on what divides us does not necessarily make us stronger, it may actually weaken us. This is especially urgent given the myriad of crises that we face, none of which will be easily resolved by the triumph of any of the above partisans over the others. If the African traditionalists are able to vanquish the Black Muslims in these debates, will we then have a solution to the problems of food insecurity in our communities? If the Black Atheists marshal their collective intelligence and crush the Black Christians in this discourse, will the problems of violence within the community be resolved? My point is that any perceived victories in this domain are hollow, making the war itself rather pointless.

I am struck by the fact that many of the would-be-champions of this “war” have taken the position that this conflict can only be resolved by a collective embrace of their particular system of beliefs. This amounts to a form of ideological uniformity which is both impossible to achieve and impractical to sustain. If we organize from the standpoint that we cannot collaborate absent ideological uniformity, then we severely undermine our collective capacity, and we demonstrate a fatal under-appreciation for the importance of devising and adhering to principles of “operational unity.” A Pan-African orientation necessitates this, it requires that we forge alliances across our supposedly vast differences for the sake of achieving a larger objective—liberation. A Pan-African orientation would also challenge us to seek the value or potential value in our cultural diversity.

The Haitian Revolution demonstrates the potency of Traditional African spirituality as a force for radical change, as it provided an ideological impetus for struggle and the attempt to concretize an African worldview both during and after the victory. The vanguard role of the African American church during the 19th Century, and leaders such as Bishop Henry McNeal Turner who exhorted Africans to take up arms in their struggle for liberation, are fine examples of the ways in which African Americans have sought to adapt Christianity to the political exigencies of the Maafa—the interrelated processes of enslavement, colonialism, and racial subordination. The legacy of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam in sustaining the spirit of Black Nationalism in the mid-20th Century, and creating a context which problematized America and the supposed promises of integration, were classic examples of how Black Muslims played and continue to play a role in the liberation discourse of the community. Finally, the impact of Black religious skeptics, people who were often atheists or agnostics is best exemplified by the work of scholar John G. Jackson, who sought to repair the shattered historical memory of Africans in America, and in doing so, offered a vision of history that could help us to better understand our present and extend ourselves into the future.

To be sure, I have been a participant in these debates at different points in my adult life. However I have come to believe that if we cannot unite around our common interests, then we consign ourselves to oblivion. My point here is simple. We are surrounded by a cacophony of ideas, a myriad of voices. I maintain that chief among all these is one singular objective—liberation. If our ideological positions precludes us from working in concert with our brothers and sisters, particularly those who think differently than we do, then we are not working in the interest of freedom, and are quite likely betraying our future.

Culture and sovereignty: An evaluative criteria

The reclamation of our culture and the restoration of African sovereignty in the world are two of the highest struggles that we can engage in. The first enables a fuller realization of and engagement with our humanity. The second makes us the shapers of our collective destiny.

All of our politics should be evaluated through the lens of how and whether they support these two goals: Does this achieve the restoration of our culture? Does this achieve our actual sovereignty in all spheres of life? If not, then these politics are, at best, insufficient.

Far too many of us have made vacuous investments. We’ve gone down the rabbit hole of alien paradigms that can in no way inform or produce an African reality, but merely a caricature of a European one.

The maroon position

My intellectual genealogy is not traceable to Europe or any European thinker. Similarly, my position on the politics of most things can be summed up as the “maroon” position, that is the position of those Africans who, so determined to escape chattel slavery, that they fled the plantations and established free and independent communities in the swamps, hills, caves, and so on of the so-called “New World”.

Not content to be free while others suffered, many of the maroons would often wage war against the system of slavery. The maroons were advocates of African self-determination. They were advocates for the preservation and adaptation of African cultures and traditions. They realized that institution building was vital to their survival, thus they sustained families, grew food, defended their territories and so on. Their logic could be summed up as follows: The only means whereby we can fully actualize optimal living conditions for our people, is to live free of foreign domination.

Again, as stated, my position on most things is the maroon position. I see no separation between the imperatives of our ancestors and ourselves.

Desolation

I believe that there is a great desolation in our souls that results from our failure to create a sovereign expression of our peoplehood. Absent territorial sovereignty, we are and will remain subject to the caprice of more powerful groups. Nationhood is no guarantee of happiness or security, but it reflects a more determined pursuit of these things.

“Black Nationalism is a self-help philosophy”

“Black Nationalism is a self-help philosophy. What’s so good about it? You can stay right in the church where you are and still take Black Nationalism as your philosophy. You can stay in any kind of civic organization that you belong to and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can be an atheist and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. ‘Cause if you’re black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you not thinking black at this late date, well I’m sorry for you.”
-Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet

Revisiting the Nationalist Vision of Emigration

Being in Ghana has given me a good opportunity to reflect on the proposal advanced by Africans as early as the late 18th Century as a solution to our American problem. This solution was the central focus of the African Civilization Society and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, as well as great African thinkers such as Martin R. Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey. That solution was emigration. Though there were variations in their individual and organizational proposals, collectively they posited the following premises:

1) African people would never achieve their full potential in the United States and other contexts of internal colonialism that so characterizes our condition in the Western hemisphere,

2) Africa was the rightful home of its descendants wrongfully displaced by the savage plunder of racism and the exploitations of enslavement, and

3) The creation and defense of a united and sovereign Africa should be the aim of all African people.

These proposals stirred the Black imagination in the Americas throughout the 19th Century and into the 20th. It was only with the decline of the UNIA that the thought of returning home was momentarily quieted.

In some respects, this thought has returned, and with some vigor. The confluence of America’s ever-virulent racism, the mobility and social capital of the Black petty bourgeoisie, the economic growth of various African countries, and the absence of viable counter-proposals that center upon the question of territoriality and African diasporan humanity has once again situated emigration as an attractive solution to our American problem.

I do not disagree, at least in principle. Emigration is a path that we should consider among others. However I think that the viability of emigration is predicated upon several factors which I never hear addressed in the often romantic appeals for emigration to Africa in general and Ghana in particular. Each of these factors are inextricably linked. These are land ownership, citizenship/residency status, and continuity within the broader global struggle for African liberation.

The first factor, land ownership, is relevant in that land is, as Malcolm X stated, “the basis of all independence.” This is not simply an appeal to agrarian ideals of self-sufficient communities built upon the mutual cooperation of collectives of families, but rather an acknowledgement of the imperative components that enables our struggle to progress, that is its intergenerational survival via our ability to create, sustain, and expand our institutional capacity. When I refer to institutions I am referring to the six levels of institution building articulated by the Council of Independent Black Institutions which are education, food, clothing, housing, health care, and defense. The ability to own land is a central element in the process institutional development. Indeed the paucity of Black institutions in the United States is in part linked to the destabilization of Black communities, that is the denial of autonomous territory wherein our cultural expressions might be effectively directed towards the recreation of a political-economy that (1) rests upon the needs of the community, (2) is sustained via the will of the community, and (3) seeks to project our community into a self-determined future. Absent the legal ability to own land, to acquire land that we might set about developing as the spatial locus of our own grand vision of the future—a necessarily intergenerational vision—we are doomed to the myopia of today, for our inability to truly concretize our vision will constrain our capacity to build a bridge to our desired tomorrow.

The second factor, citizenship status or resident status rests upon the myriad dimensions via which one exists within any social environment. In African societies one could argue that social inclusion exists at each of the following levels: clan, ethnicity, and nationality. Emigrants from the diaspora would generally fall outside of the bounds of clan (save for those who gain some connection via marriage to nationals of that country) or ethnicity. Citizenship or resident status is critically important to the process of creating home, of shaping the political context in which one might propose to forge the future. The American experience illustrates how our physical presence alone is insufficient to contribute appreciably to shaping the social environment in which we exist in ways consequential to our cultural visions of the future. There we are denied a destiny of our own design. In any prospective and adopted home it would be inadvisable to content ourselves with something beneath second class citizenship—non-citizenship or impermanent residency. This is an insufficient basis upon which to position ourselves, as it makes us the hapless spectators of others’ designs for the future, merely the viewing audience to a political process that decides our future while we sit as muted observers.

The third factor, the connection to the broader struggle is perhaps the most important. The problems faced by Africans in the diaspora are both deep and debilitating. These are problems that cannot be solved by simplistic proposals, but only by solutions that seek to satisfy the crises born of a paucity of political, economic, and cultural power. Absent our ability to exercise power consistent with our own vision of the future, create and distribute the goods and services that provides the basis for our material well-being, and demarcate and refine our productive and creative capacities we are minions of other peoples and their designs for us. Desired departure from the embattled shores of the lands where our ancestors were made to suffer and where we are daily subjected to the evisceration of our humanity is wholly understandable. However such a departure is largely irrelevant if it does not contribute towards the formulation of structural solutions for the malaise of African people. How would the settlement of diasporan Africans in any given African country enable them to create institutions that seek to address the myriad problems that we face in the Americas? How might the works of diasporan communities on the African continent be synergistically linked to those corresponding efforts in the Americas for community transformation and empowerment? In short, how might processes of emigration contribute to the reclamation of African culture and the restoration of African sovereignty in the world?

The purpose of this essay is not to answer such weighty queries, but rather to pose them as being inescapable imperatives whose resolution underscores the relevance or irrelevance of emigration as a solution for our people. It should be noted here that the emigration envisioned by Delany or Garvey and the UNIA was not one of the absconding of individuals and their families, or the forging of islands of individualistic capitalist accumulation, but rather the movement of masses of like-minded Africans, resolved to forge a new society, one that would be a gleaming exemplar of African redemption in the world. I think that those who propose emigration as the answer to our American problem should revisit these proposals, as they can serve to enrich our vision.

In another essay I’ll examine a parallel proposal, one that poses an altogether different answer to this question of territoriality.