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:
- Spirituality
- History
- Social organization
- Economic organization
- Political organization
- Creative production
- 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:
- Education
- Food
- Clothing
- Shelter
- Health care
- 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.