Averting extinction and being true to tradition

Every African combat art is a critical reflection of the dynamic mosaic that comprises our history and culture. Sadly, many of our combat arts have passed into oblivion and others teeter on the brink of doing so. However, in Trinidad and Martinique determined efforts were made to institutionalize and propagate Kalinda and Danmyé respectively. There is much that can be learned from this.

One of the things that is critically important in the work that I and others are doing is that we sustain these fighting traditions. This means taking the time to learn these arts and to teach them to others. This is the only means whereby they can survive. For my part I practice about a half a dozen African arts. Some of these arts I am actively learning, some I teach publicly, others I teach privately. Each one is a piece in larger puzzle that is the African warrior tradition. Each one connects me to a lineage of practitioners through which these knowledges have been transmitted. For some I can name this lineage going back six generations. In every instance, I see myself as an inheritor of this knowledge and recognize the obligation that such an inheritance represents–that is the perpetuation of the lineage going forward.

I recognize that every African martial artist will not commit themselves to this work, many having situated themselves in the domain of Asian combat traditions. Others will embrace the African arts, but not necessarily the propagation of a lineage. To each his own. However, for those of us concerned about the survival of African culture, a different set of commitments is required. Herein, fidelity in the transmission of these arts does necessitate commitments to the legacy of the traditions that we have inherited.

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.

Reaping the bounty of one’s own traditions

All peoples constructs their spiritual practice on the basis of their own indigenous traditions, which enables them to reap the bounty of those traditions. I suggested the following materials to a brother who expressed a desire to reclaim his own ancestral traditions. Perhaps some of you might find this list enlightening.
 
General
Marimba Ani, Let the Circle Be Unbroken
Dalian Adofo, Ancestral Voices
Dalian and Verona Adofo, Ancestral Voices (film): https://ancestralvoices.co.uk/
Akan
Kwame Gyekye, African Philosophical Thought
Igbo
Ogonna Agu, The Book of Dawn & Invocations
Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian)
Jacob H. Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies
Jacob H. Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech
Theophile Obenga, African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780-330 Bc
Kongo
K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Self-Healing Power and Therapy
K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo
K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Mbôngi: An African Traditional Political Institution
Fu-Kiau, K. Kia Bunseki, and A.M. Lukondo-Wamba. Kindezi: The Kongo Art of Babysitting
Mende
Adama and Naomi Doumbia, The Way of the Elders
Yoruba
Wande Abimbola, Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World
Kola Abimbola, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account
Segun Gbadegesin, African Philosophy: Traditional Yoruba Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities

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.

Learning from nature: Reflections on African history and culture on the farm

When I am at our family’s farm, I sometimes see things that I interpret as notable lessons. Today, I spent about 15 minutes removing weeds from among our carrots. It is interesting how that which is undesirable embeds itself alongside that which we intentionally cultivate. Hence our gains are often beset by inevitable struggles. Fortunately, the Yorùbá wisdom reminds us that struggle is a constant of life. The Odù Ifá states: “We are constantly struggling. All of us.”

Also today I saw a smaller bird that was pursuing and harassing a hawk. I don’t know what their conflict was about. Perhaps the hawk threatened its nest, I am unsure. It brought to mind a similar incident from a week ago where a smaller bird was pursuing and harassing a goose. In both instances, the smaller birds’ determination was commendable. It reminds me that a mightier adversary can still be confronted, cowed or even defeated. Those facing seemingly powerful foes should remember that their resolve and strategic approach may be sufficient to carry the day. Such is the basis of the Africans’ victory in Haiti. It was a lesson which was the terror of enslavers throughout the hemisphere.

Finally, yesterday I noticed that a spider had spun its web between two poles that I put out about a week ago. I was struck by the fact that the spider used whatever materials that were available to it to achieve its goal—survival. It reminded me that we often regard our cultural traditions as being static, frozen, but this cannot be true as these traditions have been adapted as our people have moved throughout time and space. Even today, many of us are situated in these traditions, but often do not recognize them as such due to our estrangement from our ancestral homeland and cultural traditions that we recognize as explicitly “African”, yet they nonetheless are—having retained many aspects of their African essence. Thus the spider taught me that we can adapt, as needed, to ensure our survival without the fundamental loss of our asili—our essence. However such an outcome is a matter of determination.