Independence
We, The African masses, once a free people that existed within our own political economies in Africa, were kidnapped and transformed into the first commodities of capitalism. The first capital and producers of the capital's first workers. Within a social system defined by the relationship between capitalist production and producers resting on a foundation of enslavement and colonial domination of peoples and territories around the world.
In the United States, we are approaching an election year. A year that still will find the people in the grip of depression brought about by domestic colonial occupation of our communities. We Africans in the United States will continue to suffer regardless of who is elected or who we vote for. Neither of the Parties is in a position to stop (or care to stop) massive unemployment, community displacement, drugs, violence, homelessness, or the calculated miseducation and imprisonment of our young people.
The President has said on a number of occasions that the place for the U.S. in the “future” global economy will be in technology, research, and development. This is the niche they hope to occupy in the global economy. All of the industrial jobs are gone and are not coming back. Let us be clear, with other countries beginning to offer the same or superior set of skills in the area of technology and research; the position of the U.S. as a leader in this area will be temporary at best; for no more than 50 years.
For Africans in the U.S., we have already been marginalized from this new role of the U.S. in the global economy. The collusion and partnership between the school system and the prison system have guaranteed that the fruit of our generations will not gain the skill sets necessary to compete. More young Africans are matriculating into prison than into universities, and it is on a steady and progressive increase.
Added to this is the fact that the cost of obtaining skills for this century has risen to the point that dreams of education and skills acquisition are now mostly for the colonial elite and not the masses. It is not uncommon for students to leave college (looking for jobs that are not and will not be there) to have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. They have been made into nothing more than “educated” debt peons willing to do anything to avoid the debt hunter-collectors. They will make up the new fugitive peons/slaves in this economy. The colonial elite provides only themselves with a means to survive and even then, they will devour each other if it means that only a few of them can survive. They are and have always been cannibalistic and they, when it comes down to it, do not exempt members of their own class from being consumed.
What Must Be Done: Any competent observer of the global political economy knows that it is Africa (not China, Brazil, or India), that occupies the balance of global power for the future. We Africans are a global People, with the world’s first culture and civilization. We must study Africa and the system that displaced its children around the world. We must become conscious and aware of the forces and conditions created by this immoral economic system of capitalism and all of its effects on our People. We must not shrink from identifying those in our own midst that are, in the words of David Walker, complicit (handmaidens) in the exploitation and misery of our People.
A conscious people are a powerful people. We must come to know what is going on around us in our local, national, and international environment. We must collectively struggle to understand and specify what real development means to our People. We must not accept definitions given to us by outsiders, liberal or otherwise. We must study the definitions given by others, but in the end, our own definitions of freedom, justice, democracy, and dignity must spring from our own understanding of our culture and traditions. Our goals and strategies must be our own, based on our own analysis of African and global conditions; and be aligned with the righteous and moral struggle of global forces for freedom, justice, democracy, and dignity.
We Africans are, and have been, historically in the vanguard of the struggle for human rights and dignity. We must make our strength strong and make a contribution to that global struggle on behalf of all humanity. This is our destiny and our obligation to those living and yet unborn. Let 1 billion discussions take place in every nook and cranny of the African world. We, and only we, can educate ourselves for our future development.
Next, we must build a permanent independent organization. When we say independent, we do not mean that any culture or people stand on this globe as an island solely dependent on themselves. There is interdependence in independence…but dependence and interdependence are quite different things — something we can no longer tolerate in this century. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah once said, “Thought without Action is empty…and action without thought is blind”. Once we come to a working understanding of what development must be for us, we must lodge it firmly in the network and structure of a permanent organization. There is and can be no debate on this necessity. The African masses must experience unification…not just unity. This is not only our historical destiny, but the only hope for Africans at home and those of us scattered and suffering around the world.
Finally we, in the end, must be motivated by the love of our People and the desire to make a contribution to them; and through them to the global community of righteous and freedom-loving people. As Martin Luther King once said, “The ark of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Let us begin…Let us Continue. Forever Forward Unafraid Together Amandla Ngawethu!
