Submitted by Ras Jahaziel

This excerpt that follows is chosen to strengthen the point that what we are clinging to in our colonial mentality is nothing more than European invented identities that were created solely for the benefit of Europe/America.

The slave economy of the past was never for the benefit of the slave. Similarly the slave economy of the present was never designed for the benefit of the modern slaves that do not like to see themselves as slaves because they have fridges and telephones and TVs in their rented and mortgaged houses.

As an African you have to look past the enticing trinkets of Europe and face the fact that you are still doing the same exact thing that you were brought on the slave ship to do…PROVIDE CHEAP, EASILY AVAILABLE, AND EASILY DISPOSABLE LABOR. The truth is that you have graduated from the field to the sweat shop, and you survive on what is left over after the modern slave-master or CAPITALIST counts his billions. How long should we sit here with our fates pinned to the fortunes of the billionaire white man while praying that he will soon have an economic recovery?

This is the time when we have to dare to reinvent ourselves in our own image, and we must not be content to cling to the fragmented arrangements that were made solely for the benefit of The Colonizer. If you were far-sighted you would see that this is the only thing left for us to do if the future generations are to be saved from a fate where prostitution is the main vocation.

It is not an accident that neither Church nor school ever acquainted you with the teachings of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, because the worse thing that could happen to THE SLAVE MASTER’S PROGRAM is for the slave to reject his slavery-imposed identity and reach across the artificial divisions and declare himself to be a member of A GLOBAL BLACK NATION. But that is the nation and the consciousness that is arising now, and those that want to cling to the European cage will sink with Europe, and those that have the courage to reinvent themselves will embark on the project of reclaiming and rebuilding Africa. Zion train is coming our way, so people get on board.

(EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK REMEMBERING THE DISMEMBERED CONTINENT BY AYI KWEI ARMAH)

THE ACCIDENTS OF HISTORY MAKE US WHAT WE ARE TODAY

But we can work to shape the course of our future if we give ourselves the trouble to know what it takes. The argument of this essay is that in our historical behavior, we the people of Africa have tended to regard the continent-all of it-as our home;

that regimes imposed on us by invaders, from Europe and Arabia, have attempted to configure African space and time in ways beneficial to themselves, cutting off important portions of our space and time, in the expectation that only a residual portion could be acknowledged as ours; that under the European fragmentation of African space and time formalized in Berlin in 1885, the residual fragment was further subdivided into plantation-style colonies; the same truncated units we are now invited to identify with, rebranded as our nation-states; that these divisive units, the colonial states, based on the dismemberment of Africa, serve purposes that invariably degrade African life while enhancing European well-being.

And that the completion of the unfinished business of our political, social, economic, and cultural emancipation depends on our scrapping the Berlin design in favor of a unitary African design;

That this task is complicated because the physical, military, and administrative dismemberment of Africa was consolidated by a colonial culture that programmed our ruling elite to recognize the divisive configuration of African space and time as its sole reality, with the result that we identify with our divisions in our actual behavior, even while proclaiming in our rhetoric our undying attachment to Pan-African unity;

That this behavior is deeply anchored in a lethal indoctrination alias FORMAL EDUCATION that hooks African intellectuals on the false but incessantly repeated notion that Africa has no intelligent history, no rational philosophical culture, and that therefore to progress into modernity, Africa must keep stroking the psychic strings tying us to Europe by borrowing something called Western rationality;

That this colonial ideology quite apart from being demonstrably false, is also soporific, mentally sedative, and lethal;

That if we are to wake from its spell and remake our society and our continent, Africans will have to retrieve our suppressed ability to conceive of our wholeness in both spatial and temporal terms, that we can begin doing this by rearticulating our suppressed history, philosophy, culture, science and arts.

That for this awakening, all necessary intellectual information exists here and now, though in scattered form; That it requires the work of groups of determined researchers to bring it together, to process it, and to make it widely available in forms accessible to all, these being the requisite preparations for Africa’s intellectual awakening.

END OF EXCERPT.

The task alluded to above is the task that that has been taken up by visionaries like MARCUS GARVEY, HAILE SELASSIE, and RASTAFARI. Africa awaits its creators.