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Baba Ahmed
Asafo...nationbuilding Mentality
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NATIONBUILDING
(MENTALITY)
"So we stand here
on the edge of hell
And look out on the world and wonder....
what we gonna do
in the face of what we remember. - Unknown Afrikan
"Those who would speak truth to us must have a demonstrated record of their practical application of ourstorical theory. There are a few such Afrikan warrior scholars today. But those who are here and have demonstrated clear evidence of our Afrikan mind in action must be fully studied. We must listen carefully to the definitions of those who place the wisdom of our ancestors at our feet in practical terms. In this respect, Kwame Agyei Akoto, a consummate nationbuilder, is definitely qualified to provide us with a working definition of what we must do to build a powerful, conscious, PanAfrikan nation."Nationbuilding is the conscious and focused application of our people's collective resources,energies, and knowledge to the task of liberating and developing the psyche and physical space that we identify as ours. It involves the development of behaviors, values, language, institutions, and physical structures that elucidate our history and culture, concretize and protect the present, and insure the future identity and independence of the nation. NationBuilding is the deliberate, keenly directed and focused, and energetic projection of the national culture, and the collective identity.(1)"Yet as he and others remind us, we do not have to build a nation. The Afrikan nation already exists. It has never gone anywhere. It is we who have become discounnected from our Afrikan roots. It is we who have to reconnect ourselves to them. It is we Afrikans who have to change ourselves to fit within an unadulterated Afrikan reality....
"Knowing that under every condition and every circumstance the European is driven to visualize and pursue an absolute supremacy over all others renders making peace in order to change this oppressor (is) wishful thinking. That would be the equivalent of them taking the cake, eating it and then us, on empty stomachs, soothing their little tummy ache. We are not baby sitters for spoiled, wrongly privileged, children. Our job is not to make their pain go away. There is no feeling the European's pain for those among us who know what we are dealing with. He was not enslaved and dehumanized. We were. He has not lost a sense of his traditions through being violently ripped from himself by others. We have....
"We cannot safely or sanely assume that in the end everything between oppressor and oppressed can agreeably be worked out to everybody's satisfaction. The universe does not hold such unqualified guarantees. In looking at Afrikans and Europeans, we are talking about two fundamentally incompatible cultures. We are trying against all historical evidence to force it into harmony with one overly aggressive culture that is intolerant of differences, the Eu-rope-an. There is no possible grey area. They must remain separate or one must die."
'There are no neutral zones, as the very concept of neutrality has been coopted as a strategy of the enemy. In this war, neutrality of the Afrikan is delusional and suicidal. A soldier with a rifle to his head after the trigger has been pulled is in no position to declare neutrality. A slave already shackled, already beaten into submissionk, and been convinced of his/her inferiority is in no position to claim neutrality, and neither is his/her progeny irrespective of the remoteness in time and space.(5)
Individuality
"White supremacy is unaccepting of criticism. It cannot tolerate blame or condemnation from others or even its own, if their goal is to change the nature of white supremacy. Recognizing this makes it easier to understand why and how Western society trains people to see themselves as wholly responsible for their plight. In terms of success and failure, it is unwilling to concede that any significant external influences meaningfully impact on individual choice. Individuals who experience failure must see the errors that led up to, actualized and continue to insure it as their fault, and their fault alone. Otherwise, European society knows that they will rebel against those external forces in it that created the conditions that systematically prompt and/or produce failure."
'The individual who accepts the ideology of individualism,and sees his failure to achieve as the result of some deficiency in his personality, and thinks that opportunities exist and that if he merely had the right personality he could make the best of these opportunities, when the achievement does not occur, is faced with a major contradiction.....Dissonance,contradictions and conflicts are painful and are hard to bear. They make life discomforting, and hence motivate the individual to seek to resolve the contradictions - to try and remove these contradictions and to put them out of existence.'(6)
"This is not to say that individuals have no personal decision making power. However, their choices are never without external influences. Individuals make decisions that otherwise they would not necessarily make given different circumstances or balances in power. We do not operate within a vacuum.... Our enslaved ancestors had choices. And they did, for the most part, come to individually make decisions based on the best interest of their children and the understanding that Europeans will kill for nothing.The concept of individualism they were forced to engage in and pass on has had a devastating effect on our sense of trust, community and racial-cultural identity. It has become one of the most damaging definitions that we have adopted and accepted as normal for ourselves in this land and culture. For, in it, individuals make selfish choices that have no allegiance or connection to their heritage. And, by default, their decisions are often unwittingly loyal to the Eu-rope-an way.
"The acceptance and internalization of such extreme individualism creates disadvantage in everyone, except members of the group who perfected it and whom it, regardless of the collateral benefits to outsiders, exclusively serves. It leads to crisis after crisis for individuals who exist beyond the pale of that privileged family. And these crises can only be resolved through our re-creation of and reintegration into the global Afrikan community (empowerment/life), or our continued submission to a self-hating inferiority (genocide/death)."In western thinking, not being an individual or being part of a communal group implies not having a mind of your own. You are like the 'Borg' of Star Trek fame who have absolutely no identify outside of the group which thinks with one mind. You are a drone in a hive with a specific repetitive task designed to insure the survival of the queen. Beyond that you have no life or thought.
"In the same way that we have been led to inevitably conclude that it requred the European women's feminist movement to make Afrikan women recognize their exploitation, we have come to believe that it required the divine intelligence of European individualism to correct/improve the communal nature of the majority of humanity. The logic is that everybody on the planet except for Europeans was locked up in an atrophic, individuality-suffocating, group domineering mentality. In other words, we, as individuals, were controlled and owned by stifling, overbearing creativity suppressing societies and had no independent thought of our own."
'No amount of individual achievement or the gaining of personal acceptance by Whites on the part of Black individuals, will remove from them the stigma of their membership in a powerless race. It will not truly enhance their personal power or freedom. The fact that they have to deny an intrinsic part of their being and identity to achieve 'success' and White approval means that a crucially important part of their full humanity has to be negated, that their authentic sense of power and efficacy, their need to be loved unconditionally remains ache-ingly unfulfilled. It connotes that they are isolated and defenseless because they must reject the ability of their group to protect and shelter them in times of social and personal upheavals; that their power is a counterfeited, delegated power, conditionally, tenuously and arbitrarily based on their willingness to ally themselves with Whites in their genocidal assault against the interests and lives of their Afrikan brethren whose fellowship they disdain. The racially isolated Afrikan individual will learn too late that he cannot aid and abet the destruction his 'former' race without ultimately aiding and abetting his own personal destruction.(7)
__________________________________________________ ___________
1. Nationbuilding: Theory & Practice in Afrikan Centered Education, Washington, DC: Pan Afrikan World Institute, 1992, p.3.
5. Kwame Agyei and Akua Nson Akoto, The Sankofa Movement: ReAfrikanization and the Reality of War,DC: )yokoInfoCom Inc., 1999, p.244.
6. Amos N. Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness, Bronx,NY: Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1993, p.74.
7. Amos N. Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century, Brooklyn, NY:Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1998, pp.97-98.
***All above from Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti's ASAFO A Warrior's Guide To MANHOOD, Akoben House Atlanta, Georgia, 2004 pp.144-145;147-151.
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OsunkoyaIfayomi
Originally Posted by Baba Ahmed
Asase Ye Duru=Mama Earth
has weight!! 
Black people will NEVER BE FREE unless Black Womb-men
Assata Shakur
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