Dwt: A Tool for Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

[Akyeame Kwame]

Dwt: A Tool for Breaking the Chains of Psychological

Slavery



(First Movement)



Uhuru Hotep



“Having a fool is one of the basic ingredients of and incidents to the making of the slavery system.�

-Willie Lynch





Background

The European American ruling elite and their agents, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have clearly understood that their preeminent status, class dominance, and economic superiority are contingent upon carefully managing the thinking processes and cleverly exploiting the labor of the African American people. During the time of Washington and Jefferson — two of America’s most notorious slave owners — most Africans in the 13 British North American colonies (which later became the United States) were in bondage, both physically and psychologically. Consequently, it was easy for Europeans to control the thinking and steal the labor of Africans.



It took a Civil War (1861-5) and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to initiate a legal process, which culminated in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. constitution in 1865, to move this nation toward ending the physical enslavement of African people. And, it took an additional 35 years, or until 1900, before Southern Blacks en masse began to escape from the physical slavery of the share cropping system. Only by migrating North into America’s urban industrial centers were the Black masses able to bring an end to 300-years of physical enslavement.



Because it is a deeply entrenched, intergenerational, mental disorder afflicting the vast majority of our people, the effort to liberate ourselves from psychological enslavement has been no easy matter. Unlike the physical slavery we left behind in the South, we brought our mental slavery North with us. Psychologist Na’im Akbar (1989), the world’s foremost authority on Black psychological slavery, discovered that the European American system of slave making perfected in this country over the past 350 years cleverly weaves psychological conditioning and limited education with outright terrorism and premeditated violence to create a dense tapestry of African dependence on and service to those who oppress them. Willie Lynch, a mysterious 18th century Caribbean planter considered to be a master handler of slaves, best sums up the American approach to slave making.



According to the story, Willie Lynch was invited to the U.S. by a group of wealthy Virginia and Carolina plantation owners in 1712 to teach them the “art� of slave making. Lynch taught the Americans that the long-range goal of Black enslavement is to “create a dependency state so that we may be able to get from them useful production for our business and pleasure.� Using six “cardinal principles� perfected on his plantation, Lynch found that he could “break the will to resist� of his slaves by using techniques he created for domesticating his wild horses which rendered them both — man and beast — submissive and dependent, ready to serve his every need (Akoto & Akoto: 278).



To create self-perpetuating, lifelong, dependent Black slaves, Lynch advocated using an “instruction of containment� to disconnect them from their “original historical base� along with organizing their family structure by dictating male - female relations and child rearing practices (Akoto & Akoto: 278, 280). While the historical authenticity of Willie Lynch may be suspect, can we doubt his historical accuracy when it comes to revealing what has been the true nature of Black-White relations in this nation these past 200 years?



Foreground



“Cast aside illusion, prepare to struggle.�

-Mao Zedong



It is 200 years later, but the game hasn’t changed, only the playing field. The White ruling elite created public education system — even when managed and staffed by Blacks — knowingly provides African communities with an “instruction of containment� designed to keep us disconnected from our “original historical base� and powerless. And, this same White ruling elite through their powerful media and social institutions still shapes our family structure to suit their economic needs by dictating Black male - Black female relations. Two hundred years later and we are still in a “dependency state� exploited for the “business and pleasure� of others just as Willie Lynch instructed.



For African people in the U.S., the end goal of our 21st century psychological slavery is the same today as it was in 1619 when the first 19 Africans arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. The European American hegemony seeks to exploit African labor and resources for European American enrichment. It is just that simple. Over the past 350 years, the White American ruling elite, perhaps best symbolized by Willie Lynch, has perfected a system of Black psychological enslavement based on elementary mind control techniques.* For example, during most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, it was a capital offense for enslaved African Americans to learn to read or write in any language. Consequently, during most of their history in this country, Africans were illiterate; what they knew about the world was restricted, in the main, to only what their White masters wanted them to know.



Following the Civil War, dozens of European American missionaries, mostly women and primarily from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, traveled South to serve as the first teachers of the recently freed Africans. They brought with them, as Booker T. Washington (1900) noted, materials, curricula and pedagogy best suited for genteel Bostonians and urbane Philadelphians, and thus devoid of any practical knowledge or skills suited for improving Black southern rural life.



By 1933, the European control, or better said, “containment,� of African American education had produced such havoc that it prompted Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson to publish The Mis-Education of the Negro, a stunning expose of the self-alienating effects of American educational practice in the African American community. For the past 100 years, the American system of public (mis)education has effectively trained millions of African people to play roles supportive of the political and economic institutions controlled by their oppressors insuring intergenerational White domination and intergenerational Black subordination. The Civil Rights Era spawned the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s and 70s, impregnated by the Pan African nationalist spirit of Marcus Garvey, Queen Mother Moore, Eljiah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture among others planted Afrocentric seeds that took root, grew and blossomed in the 1980s and 90s.



Today, what has changed is not the game or the playing field, it is our understanding of game theory and game strategy. For example, psychologist Wade Nobles (1986) coined the metaphorical term conceptual incarceration to help us better understand a key aspect of the psychological slavery that shackles African people. Conceptual incarceration results from our unwitting adoption of erroneous concepts, ideas, views, opinions and theories about ourselves as African people, about Europeans, and about the world. It is Nobles’ contention that the debilitating anti-Black, anti-African attitudes in the belief systems of virtually all Black people regardless of class, education, or religious orientation are largely to blame for the underdeveloped state of African communities in the U.S. and abroad.



Dr. Nobles also believes that since our behavior is influenced by what we think about ourselves and the world, large numbers of African people are imprisoned by false beliefs about themselves and the world which generates behaviors that keep us among the poor in every nation. We all, in varying degrees as Black people socialized under White supremacy, have internalized a set of beliefs that compel us to serve the needs of our oppressors while blatantly neglecting our own group development. These are the “invisible chains� that bind us.





Futureground



“Free your mind, and your ass will follow.�

-George Clinton



One tool for breaking the chains of psychological slavery and freeing African people from the shackles of conceptual incarceration is a process I call Dwt (Dwat) after the Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) word that signifies the daily transformations wrought by the rising and the setting of the sun. Dwt is the fourth principle of the Johari Sita and thus a scientific method for removing the psychological chains of mental bondage. Rooted in Erriel Addae’s (1996) notion of nyansa nnsa da or “thought without boundaries,� at its most elementary levels, Dwt equips us to experience then actively promote what Thomas Kuhn (1970) called a paradigm shift — in our case, from European centered to African centered world views. At its highest level, Dwt promotes harmonizing the human will with the Universal Will, a process the Kemites called Maat.



Dwt emancipates African people from the dungeon of false beliefs about ourselves, others and the world because it provides us with a new set of historically accurate facts, concepts, theories, and perspectives about ourselves, about others, and about the world based on our African cultural and intellectual heritage. African centered scholars, like Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Linda Myers, Wade Nobles, Na’im Akbar, Marimba Ani, Amos Wilson, Kwame Akoto, Jacob Carruthers, Asa Hilliard and a host of others, are developing a lexicon to free us from conceptual incarceration — not only by replacing our false, limited concepts and ideas with correct ones, but also by expanding and re-centering our analyses, definitions, and understanding of ourselves and the world.



In addition, our African centered scholars have discovered that much of what is passed off in our schools, in our churches, in our civic organizations, and by the media as universal truths are nothing more than select European theories, practices, preferences, and customs wrapped around a core of Jewish mythology and folklore. Today, our psychological slavery in large measure is self-imposed; we have allowed others to imprison us in their ethnic or cultural group’s concepts and beliefs. In short, we have been contained by our infatuation with Europe’s knowledge; therefore, we have scant knowledge of our own.



Dwt, for African people, is a journey of rediscovery and reconnection inspired by what the Akan people of Ghana, Togo, and Cote d’Ivoire call sankofa. Sankofa posits that the wisdom is reaching back and reconnecting with the best of one’s ancestral traditions, customs, and practices. We American Africans are blessed because we are perhaps the only large group in the U.S. with a tricultural heritage. We have three cultural traditions we can mine for “gold�: African, European, and Native American. As recipients of European centered education, most African Americans have an abundance of operational concepts from our European “gold mine.�



But that is not enough; we cannot empower ourselves, our people, or Abibiman (The Black Nation) merely by adopting the world views, belief systems, and life styles of European Americans. Our salvation will not come from imitating others, but only from being our authentic, African selves. That is why we sankofa, which means that we: (1) extract the “gold� from our African and Native American heritages (two long neglected, untapped sources of potent operational concepts) and (2) assess our European cultural borrowings through the lenses of African and Native American philosophy and tradition. In cases where there are conflicting world views, we gravitate toward the traditional wisdom of Africa. Mwalimu Shujaa (1996) sees this process of African cultural “gold mining� and European cultural sifting as aspects of re-Africanization.



Dwt, because it vigorously promotes re-Africanization, breaks African people out of conceptual incarceration by shifting what psychologist Julian Rotter (1966) calls our locus of control from external sources to internal sources. It is Dr. Rotter’s belief that individuals (and my belief that entire communities) have either an internal or external locus or center of control.



People and communities that have internal centers of control believe that through their own persistent effort, they can rearrange or change their life conditions without outside approval or assistance. Because they believe deeply that they are the “captains of their fate� and the “masters of their destiny,� they feel empowered, optimistic, creative, productive, energetic, and positive. Because of this deep faith in themselves, their people, and hard work, they are willing to take calculated risks to fulfill their dreams. Such people are successful and such communities are autonomous, wholesome places to live and raise children.



On the other hand, people and communities that have an external center of control believe at their core that they cannot arrange their lives and construct their futures without the active approval of and assistance and guidance from external human agencies. Those with an external locus of control look for powerful others to think, legitimize and provide for them. They are victims of a psychology of dependence often to the extent that they are willing to place their lives and the lives of their children in the hands of others who they believe will treat them fairly. Because they believe that others are better equipped to make decisions about their fate than they themselves, they are considered child-like and foolish, worthy of exploitation and abuse by their oppressors. Such people and communities languish in a “dependency state,� depressed, demoralized, and disenfranchised.



The American institution of psychological slavery is predicated on African people maintaining an external locus of control. Through a variety of tactics and strategies, like those advocated by Willie Lynch, slave masters shifted the self-perception (locus of control) of most captured Africans from that of “prisoners of war,� which is an internal focus to “accommodating slaves,� an external focus. As Akoto and Akoto (2000) pointed out, there are vast differences in how these two groups see the world.



Though both are “constrained by the dominant order,� the prisoner of war or P.O.W. “steadfastly refuse to accept the legitimacy or permanence of his/her condition.� She/He constantly seeks opportunities to escape from, sabotage, or destroy her/his captors. Even in the face of unspeakable horror and brutality, the P.O.W. maintains her/his internal locus of control, which Akoto and Akoto believe to be “an unbreachable psycho-emotional fortress anchored in the unknowable depths and expanse of the spirit.� Once they escaped from slavery, British and American slave owners called African P.O.W.s, Maroons, a term which comes from the Spanish word cimarrones, meaning “wild ones.�



Stripped of the “spirit� of resistance inherent in knowing one’s ethnic group history, culture and traditions, the slave, on the other hand, accepts “the current order as permanent and seeks only to modulate the personal discomfort associated with that order.� Forsaking all thought of rescue and seeing small chance for permanent escape, over time, vast numbers of African P.O.W.’s came to see their European captors as first their masters, and then their superiors and benefactors thereby completing their conversion to “accommodating slaves.� In exchange for petty creature comforts, favorite status, or merely, like house slaves, close physical proximity to their beloved masters, slaves, by definition, are content to center their locus of control only on those external “rewards� provided by their masters.



Dwt teaches that the maintenance and perpetuation of African psychological enslavement and its chief expression, conceptual incarceration, pivot on African people maintaining an external locus of control. As long as we turn away from Africa and our ancestral wisdom and embrace as solutions to our life problems the views of Europeans, Arabs, Asians, Jews and others from outside of our traditional African cultural centers, we will remain the servants of Europeans, Arabs, Asians, and Jews, in both thought and deed.



Because of its emphasis upon re-Africanization, Dwt ends our “dependency state,� liberating us from psychological slavery and conceptual incarceration by re-centering us in traditional African knowledge bases. This re-centering returns us to Maroon status, permanently shifting our locus of control from external or European-based concepts and definitions to internal or African and Native American-based concepts and definitions. For African people, Dwt may be our most effective strategy for combating European mind control and defeating its attendant, psychological slavery.



Reversing the Psychological Effects of Slavery in the African American Community:

A Meditation



(Second Movement)



Introduction



“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by those whom they oppress.�

-Frederick Douglass



African Americans are the only group of American immigrants whose ancestors came to these shores involuntarily. As prisoners of war (POWs), Africans were captured or kidnapped then brought to the Americas where the slave making process was completed. If they survived the five to six week trans-Atlantic voyage of horrors known as the “middle passage,� African POWs were then trained for a life of obedient, faithful service to their European captors.



Usually initiated in the West Indies and commonly called “seasoning,� the first two-to-three years of life under White slavery for what the Europeans called a “raw negro� was devoted largely to forced labor and rudimentary language instruction. It was during this period that POWs were made to work 16 or more hours per day and learn from “seasoned� slaves the rudiments of their captor’s language (Franklin & Moss, 1994; Parish, 1989; Jordan, 1968; Haley, 1976). Despite frequent revolts and the constant Maroon presence, slowly over the course of time, the vast majority of African POWs were either murdered or converted into slaves (Aptheker,1968; Price, 1979; Franklin & Schweninger, 1999).



Slave owners used a myriad of tactics and strategies, from physical violence, terrorism and brutality to family destruction, forced miscegenation and mis-education, to transform Africans and their descendants into slaves (Blassingame, 1979; Van Deburg,1979; Oakes, 1983; White, 1985; Akbar, 1989; Spring, 1997). As evidenced by our complete political and economic dependency on European Americans and their institutions, we are still enslaved, psychologically and emotionally, to the children of our former masters (Muhammad, 1965; Wright, 1984; Akbar, 1989; Baldwin, 1992; Wilson, 1993). Slavery in the U.S. may have ended in 1863, but the African American people are still reeling from the after shocks of a 350-year holocaust of dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and dependency known today as the Maafa (Ani, 1994; Borishade, 1996; Farrakhan, 1993; Akbar, 1989).





Sovereignty is Our Goal



“Our next assignment in history is nation manage-ment and nation structure.�

-John Henrik Clarke



To rescue African Americans from intergenerational dependency on European Americans and their institutions — which is the psychological aftermath of 300 years of slavery — requires that we invert the seasoning process. Africans in large numbers first came to these shores as POWs and then they were systematically terrorized, methodically brutalized, deliberately mis-educated — in a word, “seasoned� — into accepting first slave status and now second class citizenship. But, before they were POWs, Africans were free and sovereign people. And that is where we must return; national sovereignty is our one and only destination.



To get back home will require that we travel a well-defined path leading to a number of critical junctions. These junctions are important milestones that signal that we are indeed making progress and headed in the right direction. Reaching our destination of mental liberation requires travel in reverse order starting from our present-day status as quasi-educated, pseudo-citizens. We move next to the point of establishing a POW mind set and world view, which slowly awakens our Maroon consciousness, the consciousness of autonomous nationhood.



As stated earlier, this journey of return to our source I call Dwt after the Kemetic word for the daily transformations occasioned by the rising and setting of the sun. Dwt, in essence, is a journey of rediscovery and reconnection that leads African Americans toward freedom and wholeness through three distinct stages of self-awareness and self-recognition.



Stage I



Start Point: Well-Seasoned, Mis-Educated Quasi-Citizen.

The intergenerational Black dependency state (Lynch, 1712) demands an instruction of containment (Lynch, 1712) to produce an external locus of control (Rotter, 1966) and exclusive eurocentric world views and frames of reference (Woodson, 1933), which confines African Americans to conceptual incarceration (Nobles, 1986), and thus psychological enslavement by our assimilationist-integrationist fantasies and yearnings (Akbar, 1989).



Stage II



Mid-Point: ReAfricanized Black POWer Practitioner.

As a result of constant sankofa practice, which incorporates a process psychologist Linda Myers (1988) calls Belief Systems Analysis, a system educator Mwalimu Shujaa (1996) calls the D-R-C method, and a perspective philosopher Erriel Addae (1996) calls nyansa nnsa da, the African American escapes from conceptual incarceration, internalizes his/her locus of control, and negates the “instruction of containment� inherent in European centered world views. The impetus to break the bonds of dependency is heightened with knowledge of the American tradition and legacy (1619-present) of White domination and oppression and the American tradition and legacy of Black resistance and triumph.





Stage III



End Point: 21st Century Maroon Freedom Fighter.

Self-emancipated from all forms of psychological slavery, centered in the best of traditional African philosophical belief systems and world views, empowered by an indigenous African religion and speaking at least one African language, the 21st century Maroon actively works for African American national sovereignty through service in Pan African nationalist organizations. Committed to restoring Maat (truth, justice, order, harmony, and balance) and terminating the maafa, Maroons are servant leaders in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Kwame Ture. Active in their families and communities as well as the larger African World, they joyfully embrace the role of scholar-warrior-family-nation builder as their life’s mission and work (Akoto & Akoto, 2000; Williams, 1974).



Conclusion



“We ain’t what we want to be, and we ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God we ain’t what we was.�

-African American Proverb



Completing the journey from psychological enslavement/dependency, or Stage I, back to Stage III — group autonomy, world leadership and planetary restoration – is the cosmic assignment, divine mission, and thus supreme life challenge facing the African American people. This is the great task that our history and this century places before us. Taking it on requires unprecedented clarity, courage, and commitment.



We begin, however, with the clear understanding that millions of African Americans are stuck permanently at Stage I. As well-seasoned, half-educated, quasi-citizens willingly deceived by illusions of inclusion, they are content to live out their lives as faithful servants to the European hegemony; they see no compelling reason to do otherwise. Only the complete collapse of the European world order would shake them out of their lethargic, myopic dependency of thought and deed.



And those few who re-Africanize and reach Stage II are extremely susceptible to co-optation, content with the fact that they have a little knowledge, but not enough to build on what they have learned or to pass it on. Just as in the days of our Great Enslavement, many are called, but few are chosen. Only the boldest, the baddest, and the bravest dared to reach out for the freedom and the responsibility that Maroon life guaranteed.



Perhaps one out of a hundred who re-Africanizes and self-emancipates will reach Stage III. But, that is all we need to win. Victory is ours when 21st century Maroon freedom fighters form trans-national family-based alliances to harness the political and economic power inherent in our historical vision of total African emancipation.



Glossary



Belief Systems Analysis - Approach to transpersonal psychotherapy rooted in African philosophical principles and designed to move African people toward self-empowerment and wholeness (Myers, 1988).



Conceptual Incarceration - State of being bound and limited in both thought and action by our self-imposed containment in European centered paradigms (Nobles, 1986).



Dependency State - Psycho-emotional state of child-like reliance upon and subservience to White authority figures inculcated into Negro slaves by their masters (Lynch, 1712).



D-R-C Method - Liberatory reasoning that posits that Africans must first deconstruct the formal canons of western thought (democracy, Christianity, capitalism, rationality, progress, etc.), reconstruct those Western concepts that are potentially transformative, and then construct new concepts based on our African traditions (Shujaa, 1996).



Dwt - Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) term for dusk and dawn, which is the period between the rising and setting of the sun thought to usher in changes of consciousness (Nobles, 1990).



Instruction of Containment - Type of pedagogy and curriculum designed to educate Africans for European servitude. Involves both mis-education and diseducation (Lynch, 1712; Woodson, 1933; Carruthers, 1996).



Locus of Control - Seat of our sense of power, legitimacy and authority. Rotter posits that people have either an external or internal center of control (Rotter, 1966).



Maafa - Swahili word for “disaster� first used by Marimba Ani to mean the past 500 years of European and Arab conquest, domination and exploitation of African people (Ani, 1984).



Maat - Kemetic word for truth, justice, order, balance, harmony, reciprocity and propriety known to the ancient Chinese as the Tao. Also a moral code and standard of conduct for evaluating leadership and society (Karenga, 1988; Ashby, 1996; Hotep, 2000).



Maroon - European (English) slave owner term for self-emancipated Africans, 1500-1863 (Price, 1967).



Nyansa nnsa da - African centered liberatory orientation advanced by Kofi Addae (E. Roberson) that posits that African liberation turns on developing the capacity to think outside of and independent from the prevailing Eurocentric norm. A Twi phrase meaning “unlimited thought;� or “thought without boundaries� (Addae, 1996).



Paradigm Shift - Ability to adopt another world view, which allows us to see the world from another angle or perspective (Kuhn, 1970).



POWs - Prisoners of War. The status of the captured Africans stolen out of Africa by Western Europeans and Arabs and then transported to the Americas, Europe, or Asia (Akoto & Akoto, 2000).



Psychological Slavery - Incarceration in European belief and value systems that promote African allegiance and subservience to European political and economics needs (Akbar, 1984).



Re-Africanization - Pan-African nationalist approach to African development rooted in cultural and intellectual traditions and practices found in both classical African societies (Akan, Kemet, Nubia, Zulu, Yoruba etc.) and the present-day African World Community (Shujaa, 1996; Akoto & Akoto, 2000).



Sankofa - Traditional Akan epistemological concept which posits that wisdom is learning from our past to build for our future.



References



Addae, E. (1996). Nyansa nnsa da: Killing the enemy within. In To heal a people: Afrikan scholars defining a new reality. Columbia, MD: Kujichagulia Press.



Adero, M. (1993). Up south: Stories, studies, and letters of this century’s African-American migrations. New York: The New Press.



Akbar, N. (1989). Chains and images of psychological slavery. Jersey City, NJ: New Mind Productions.



Akoto, K. & Akoto, A. (2000). The sankofa movement: ReAfrikanization and the reality of war. Washington, DC: Oyoko Infocom.



Anderson, J. (1988). The education of Blacks in the south, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.



Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An afrocentric critique of European cultural thought and behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.



Apetheker, H. (1968). Slave guerilla warfare. In To be free.- Studies in American Negro history. New York: International Publishers.



Blassingame, J. (1979). The slave community: Plantation life in the antebellum south. New York: Oxford University Press.



Borishade, A. (1996). Re-aligning African heads: Yoruba curatives for maafa-related ailments. Jacksonville, FL: Sankofa Productions.



Clarke, J. (1991). Image and mind control in the African World: Its impact on African people at home and abroad. In Clarke, J. Notes from an African world revolution: Africans at the crossroads. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.



Farrakhan, L. (1993). A torch light for America. Chicago: FCN.



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Franklin, J. & Schweninger, L. (1999). Runaway slaves: Rebels on the plantation. New York: Oxford University Press.



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Hill, P. (1848). Fifty days on board a slave ship. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. [Reprint 1993].



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Katz, W. (1986). Black Indians: A hidden heritage. New York: Atheneum Books.



Lynch, W. (2000). Let’s make a slave: The origin and development of a social being called ‘The Negro’. In Akoto, K. & Akoto, A. The sankofa movement. Washington, DC: Oyoko Infocom.



Mellon, M. (1969). Early American views on Negro slavery: From the letters and papers of the founders of the republic. New York: Mentor Books.



Muhammad, E. (1965). Message to the Black man in America. Chicago: MMI.



Myers, L. (1988). Understanding an Afrocentric view: Introduction to optimal psychology. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing.



Nobles, W. (1986). African psychology: Toward its reclamation, reascension, & revitalization. Oakland, CA: The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture.



Nobles, W. (1990). The infusion of African and African American content: A question of content and intent. In Hilliard, A., Payton-Stewart, L., & Williams, L.(Eds), Infusion of African and, African American content in the school curriculum. Chicago: Third World Press.



Oakes, J. (1983). The ruling race: A history of American slave holders. New York: Vintage Books.



Parish, P. (1989). Slavery: History and historians. New York: Harper & Row.



Price, R. (Ed.), (1979). Maroon societies: Rebel slave communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.



Rotter, J. (1966). Generalized expectations for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Reprinted in J. Rotter et al. Applications of a social learning theory of personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.



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White, D. (1985). Ar’n’t I a woman?: Female slaves in the plantation south. New York: W.W. Norton.



Williams, C. (1974). The destruction of Black civilization. Chicago: Third World Press.



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Copyright © 2002

Kwame Ture Youth Leadership Institute



* See Robert Muhammad’s article, “Mind Wars: Attack of the Songs!� Final Call (June 11, 2002), for an insightful analysis of the use of behavior modification - or mind control - techniques in hip hop music.

[RecoveringAA]

Decolonizing the African Mind: Further Analysis and Strategy
by
Uhuru Hotep


The central objective in decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.
- Chinweizu


Introduction
This paper presents a framework for discussing the psychology of African liberation by using the political terms “colonialism,� “colonization� and “decolonization� as vantage points for contextualizing African American oppression. Over the past 500 years, European ruling elites perfected a method of psychological manipulation and control first discussed from an African perspective by the Nigerian scholar Chinweizu (1987) in his classic Decolonising the African Mind. I call this method “mental� colonization.

Introduced during the era of American slavery through a process 17th, 18th and 19th century English-speaking slaveholders called seasoning, today mental colonization is achieved through deculturalization. Deculturalization is the fuel that drives the engine of mental colonization; both processes turn on a companion process called “mis-education,� and all three are examined in this paper along with their instruments, agents and goals.

Because the African population born and bred in the United States is the classic example of a mentally colonized people, this paper references the 40 million people of African descent in the United States. However, much of what is discussed is applicable to African populations residing throughout the Atlantic diaspora and beyond.

This two-part essay begins with an overview of European colonialism, deculturalization and mis-education. And it concludes with a review of African centered liberatory practices and orientations such as reAfrikanization, sankofa, ma’at and intellectual disobedience. Internalizing these concepts is essential for decolonizing the African mind.

Part I

Typology of European Colonialism: 1645 BCE to Present
Around 3,000 BCE, Aryans (later known as Caucasians) began to settle in the region of Asia known to the modern world as Europe. Over the past 2,000 years, their descendants (today’s Europeans) have practiced consistently and have now perfected three basic types of colonialism. They are: territorial, intellectual, and mental. This section will cursorily address them all.

Perhaps the dominant feature of world history these past five centuries has been the “rise� to world dominance of the Caucasian peoples of western Europe, North America and Australia. In spite of their current “lofty� station, today’s undisputed “lords and masters� of the earth are from very humble origins. They first entered the pages of history as barbaric, nomadic tribes whose sole talent was warfare. Their only early accomplishment of note was the destruction of the Dravidian civilization of ancient India. Later their descendants plundered, pillaged and finally sacked the Roman Empire.

Possessed by demonic forces (Brown, 1998; Ickes, 2001; Mutwa, 2001), the Anglo-Saxons, Gauls and Teutons of England, France and Germany over the past five centuries developed the weaponry and logistics, the justifications and rationales and the strategies and tactics to conquer and colonize the land, knowledge and minds of the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, America, Australia and the Pacific. In the 20th century, to decide who would exploit this vast multitude, Europeans fought two devastating world wars – 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 – that squandered millions of their lives nearly destroying their civilization.

When we focus our attention on Africa, historian Chancellor Williams (1974) tells us that the first Aryans to colonize African territory were the Hyksos (Hebrews) who invaded Kemet (Egypt) in 1645 BCE long after the pyramids were built. Over the centuries, other Aryan/European invaders followed. The Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Germans and Italians all came to Africa as conquerors and colonizers with only one intent: to plunder African people of their wealth.

The European “scramble� to colonize Africa did not reach its zenith, however, until 1884-85 when German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck (1815-1898) organized the Berlin Conference. Attended by the French, British, Dutch, Germans and Portuguese, who over the course of several meetings, debated and then formulated the ground rules for conquering and colonizing the whole of Africa. These five, small European states “planned their work and worked their plan� so effectively that by 1915, all of Africa, save Ethiopia was a European colony.

In addition to colonizing African land, Europeans also colonized African knowledge not just to claim it as their own, but also to disconnect Africans from their heritage and culture. Why? Because people who are cut off from their heritage and culture are more easily manipulated and controlled than people who are not. Adisa Ajamu (1997) calls this “intellectual colonialism.�

Beginning with the Hyksos Invasion, the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans each during their period of African occupancy seized control of Kemet’s temple-schools and captured her priest-teachers. Then they plundered her libraries and archives and “borrowed� African philosophical and religious ideas, practices, beliefs and customs, which they later claimed as their own.

The Hebrews, for example, during their stay in Kemet adopted Kemetic names like Moses, customs like circumcision, and beliefs like monotheism. Plato (427-347 BCE), the “father� of western philosophy and tutor of the military leader Europeans call Alexander the Great, was a regular visitor at the great library at Rhakotis, later called Alexandria, from where he “borrowed� numerous books. And Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the father of European history, who actually traveled to Kemet, wrote that the Greek (and later the Roman) upper-classes sent their children to Kemet for higher education and “borrowed� many of their religious ideas from this African nation.

As a consequence of Europe’s successful colonization of African lands and African knowledge, she was able to successfully colonize African minds, and thereby complete the conquest of African people. The 20th century witnessed the globalization of European consciousness and the planetary-wide imposition of European worldviews and life styles as the human norm. No where has this imposition been more thorough than in Africa among the Christianized, western-trained, African intellectuals and other members of the ruling class. The same holds true for Africans in the Americas, and especially the United States.

Deculturalization and Black America: 1500 to Present
Deculturalization is a method of pacification and control perfected over the past 500 years by European ruling elites. This practice involves first the systematic stripping away of the intended victim’s ancestral culture and then systematically replacing it with European culture. According to educators Felix Boateng (1990) and Joel Spring (1997) Africans, Asians, Native Americans, (and I would add Native Australians and Pacific Islanders), have all been the victims of this form of psychological and spiritual abuse. Early American slaveholders called this practice seasoning. Today, the academic community calls it deculturalization, but the popular term is brain-washing.

As it affects Africans in the United States, decultualization is a three-stage process. First, African Americans are quietly taught to feel ashamed of so they will reject their African and Native American heritage. Next, they are taught in schools and churches to admire and respect so they will adopt and practice only their European heritage. And finally, if they obediently submit to this indoctrination, they are rewarded with opportunities to receive even more indoctrination. And ultimately once they have been effectively indoctrinated, they are allowed an opportunity to compete for a “professional� job in the “main stream.� And a rare, handpicked few of the most thoroughly indoctrinated (brain-washed) are allowed access to the inner sanctums of White power, prestige and privilege.

The American system of deculturalization has been an extremely effective process. It has successfully brain-washed the majority of African Americans to accept the dominance of Europeans and European institutions over their lives. History teaches us that African prisoners of war (POWs) were subjected to a vicious, European-orchestrated, three to four years of seasoning during which the most important expressions of their African heritage were brutally stripped away from them and brutally replaced with the European colonizer-slave master-oppressor’s cultural practices and beliefs.

Africans enslaved in the North American British colonies, for example, were forbidden to use their original African names, languages and religions. They were forced to use their European colonizer-slave master-oppressor’s names, language and religion. This is why most Africans born in the United States have European surnames, speak English and practice some form of Christianity. Slavery imposed these European cultural practices on their African ancestors and their descendants blindly continue them unless they take steps to open their eyes to and free their minds of all remnants of European slavery.

Both Boateng (1990) and Spring (1997) identified the public school as a major agent of African American deculturalization (brain-washing). I agree; however, I would add that nearly all American educational institutions – Black, White, public, private, day care to college – must be placed along side the public schools as agents of deculturalization. In fact, no aspect of American education is free of this curse except the African centered independent school whose sole mission if it is functioning properly is to decolonize or re-Africanize Black students and their families.

Mis-Education and Black America: 1933 to Present
The major 20th century instrument of deculturalization was and remains mis-education. Mis-education is the term coined by historian Carter G. Woodson (1933) to describe the destructive effects on the Black mind by schools that use a pedagogy and curriculum that deliberately omits, distorts or trivializes the role of African people in and their seminal contributions to world history and culture.

The American public school, as we previously noted, is a major mis-educator (brain-washer) of African people, and has been since its inception in the 1890s. But it is only one of three agents of mass mis-education used by the White ruling elite to manipulate and control African Americans over the past century. The other two carry equal weight. They are the popular media (print and electronic) and the traditional, mainstream Christian church that proclaims non-Africans as “God’s chosen people� and a White Jesus as its “personal savior.�

The end goal of mis-education is three-fold: First, to produce African people who identify with and embrace as their own European history, traditions and culture, but who are ambivalent or indifferent toward African history, traditions and culture. Second, to produce Black people who have been what political scientist Jacob Carruthers (1994) calls diseducated, meaning people who have had their intellectual development arrested by the public schools. And, the third and ultimate goal of mis-education is mentacide, a term linked to genocide and diseducation coined in 1984 by Bobby Wright as a label for the European-orchestrated campaign to destroy the African mind as a prelude to destroying African people.

Literally from birth to death, African Americans are awash in a sea of European-designed, mass media disseminated disinformation, misinformation, half-truths and whole lies about the people, history, culture and significance of Africa. This, of course, is no accident. It is part of a finely crafted, century-long campaign to stop African Americans from connecting with their rich ancestral homeland and developing a Pan African worldview. While at the same time, it serves as a cloak under which Europeans can hide from African Americans their plunder of Africa’s mineral and biological wealth. Our White rulers and their Black supporters clearly understand that Black mis-education is the backbone of White domination.

Careful analysis of Black institutions that uphold mis-education and Africans who have been crippled by it reveal a number of highly identifiable features. First, these institutions will favor and their patrons will embrace what psychologist Wade Nobles (1986) calls conceptual incarceration. Conceptual incarceration is the term for Black imprisonment in White belief systems and knowledge bases.

When it comes to defining themselves and the world, mis-educated Blacks restrict their range of thought (and action) by their habit of drawing exclusively from their European background. By limiting themselves to this one, small facet of their vast, tricultural heritage, they confine themselves to a tiny, narrow corner of the world where they sit locked in a mental prison (colony) with only one set of lenses (European) to see the world.

By embracing European perspectives exclusively, Africans cut themselves off from self-knowledge. And when that occurs, deculturalization claims another victim. Fortunately, Black conceptual incarceration in large measure is self-imposed. Africans in America can choose to expand their cultural frames of reference and consciously embrace their African and Native American heritages. And when this happens, their conceptual incarceration ends.

Another feature of Black institutions that mis-educate and mis-educated Blacks is what Mwata X (1996) calls learned indifference, which is a pervasive and self-destructive psychological disorder marked by disinterest in issues, causes and organizations that promote the political and economic liberation of African people. By this measure, most of our established Black churches and prestigious Black schools mis-educate, and nearly all of our multi-millionaire Black athletes and super-star Black entertainers are mis-educated, (right along with nine out of ten Black Americans). As causalities in a war they don’t even know is being waged, the Black elite have been captured with wealth and fame by the forces of deculturalization.

A third feature of Black mis-education is what I call utengano. Utengano is a Swahili word meaning “disunity� and refers to the deeply entrenched, intergenerational predisposition among Africans to accept dysfunctional divisions in the African family and community as normal. Utengano afflicts Black people who expect and tolerate teen pregnancy, absent fathers, inferior schools, run-down buildings, ineffective leaders and dirty, unsafe streets filled with illicit drugs, alcohol and x-rated music as normal and thus acceptable. But if they were truly educated, they would be outraged by these perversions and committed to changing these wretched conditions or die trying
Part II

Decolonizing the African Mind: Action Steps
In the American context, decolonizing the African mind means reversing the seasoning process. For those millions of African POWs who survived the horrors of the middle passage, seasoning was a three to four year period of intense and often brutal slave making at the hands and feet of their European captors and their agents. Because it capitalized on our innate, human fear of pain and death, seasoning was so effective as a pacification method that North American slave owners gladly paid a premium for “seasoned� Africans from the Caribbean. For enslaved Africans, seasoning, when successful, laid the foundation for a lifetime of faithful, obedient service to their master and his children.

Effective seasoning, therefore, was the key that opened the door for 350 years of mental colonization of the African American people. Moreover, it allows for present-day Black pacification, manipulation and control by the European ruling elite and their agents. But, if African POWs were taught to be Negro slaves, it is reasonable to believe (like Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) that a fair number can be re-taught to be free African women and men. Reversing the seasoning process is a constructive way to frame a psychoeducational approach for cleansing African minds of European or Arab cultural infestation.

Toward this end, beginning in the late 1960s, perhaps the first African Americans to initiate systematic decolonization were small groups of youth, awakened by the Maroon spirit resounding in the voices of Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka and host of others. These decolonizing youth initiated projects of self-discovery intended to remove the European mind set (colony) implanted in their psyches as a result of living in a European dominated society.

To effect sweeping change in their value and belief systems, these young truth-seekers practiced self-definition, self-determination and self-defense. As a way of liberating themselves and others from the shackles of mis-education and diseducation, many established independent schools dedicated to developing African centered curriculum and pedagogy while others established research organizations dedicated to recovering traditional African knowledge bases.

The Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) established in 1972 (www.cibi.org) and the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization (ASCAC) established in 1984 (www.ascac.org) are prime examples, indeed symbols, of this search for the deeper meaning of being African in the late 20th century. CIBI is an educational association and ASCAC is a research association. Both were established by this community of freedom seeking, culturally conscious, African men and women.

As CIBI and ASCAC founders quickly discovered, the first step toward decolonizing the African mind is to identify a re-placement worldview on which to frame a liberated African future. In other words, once the forces of mental colonization are defeated and their colonial government expelled, its infrastructure razed and the battle site cleansed, what type of structures do we install in this newly liberated space to unleash genius and thwart re-colonization efforts? The remainder of this essay will begin to answer this question.

Decolonization is a journey of self-discovery culminating in a reawakening and a reorientation. It involves a conscious decision to first uncover, uproot and remove all vestiges of slavery imposed European or Arab values and beliefs ingested over centuries of mis-education that are detrimental to present-day African family stability and African community empowerment. Next, as the colony is being dismantled, Africans must fill the liberated spaces with those life-sustaining social values, beliefs and customs that enabled their ancestors to establish stable, autonomous families and communities prior to the Arab or European invasions and conquest of their societies.

Like all transforming, liberatory states, decolonization is actually a protracted process demanding constant vigilance and intense dedication to task. It cannot be achieved in a single evening by reading a single book or by attending a single lecture or even by taking a single course. However, reading, lectures, courses (along with study groups and conferences), are critical to the success of any decolonization project. Because it is an effort to recover and reconnect with the best of traditional African culture as a means of ending European dominance of the African psyche, for Africans in the Americas, decolonization is Re-Africanization.

Re-Africanization is a term popularized by President Ahmed Sekou Toure (1922-1984) of Guinea and PAIGC-founder Amilcar Cabral (1931-1973) of Guinea-Bissau to promote a return to traditional African values and institutions among their citizens. In the American context, reAfrikanization (Akoto & Akoto, 2000) is a long-term, transgenerational, family project. Among other things, it demands family-wide embrace of select African centered values, beliefs and practices regarding the family and how it organizes and allocates its financial and human resources. To pull all of this together takes years of immersion in traditional African cultural values and daily living in an African centered mental space practicing traditional and liberatory African values, beliefs, orientations and perspectives.

Over the past 30 years, CIBI and ASCAC activists and others seeking to reAfrikanize have found Maulana Karenga’s seven-part value system, the Nguzo Saba, to be a highly effectively decolonization tool. Other useful tools are Mukasa Afrika’s, five pillars of Afrikan spirituality, the Miamba Tano and my six jewels of African centered leadership, the Johari Sita.

Constant reAfrikanization undermines the colony’s legitimacy and weakens its infrastructure to the point where frontal attacks can be launched against its outposts and command centers. If successful, all external European trappings are discarded and the once deculturated Negro reemerges with an African name, speaking an African language, wearing African fashions and praying to an African God. Once this occurs, the lost child has found his/her way back home.

On a deeper, internal level, however, extreme individualism along with sexism, classism, racism, geocide and other European social practices and cultural orientations that give rise to aberrations like conceptual incarceration, learned indifference and utengano must be expunged from the value and belief systems. Selfish and divisive Europeancentric perspectives and behaviors must give way to wholesome, life affirming, Africancentric, communal values like community service, cooperation, and sharing.

The second step in the battle to decolonize the African mind requires dismantling the instrument of deculturalization and neutralizing the agents of mis-education previously discussed in this paper. In essence, this means rejecting the pro-European/anti-African teachings of the Christian church or Islamic mosque, disregarding the pro-European/anti-African messages conveyed by the popular media and deconstructing the pro-European/anti-African indoctrination of the public schools. It also means implementing the first of three five-year, comprehensive, African centered, self-education program designed to end one’s conceptual incarceration, learned indifference, and utengano. A starting point perhaps is the ideas presented in this paper and the books listed as Sources and Essential Readings.

Furthermore, African youth in the United States can rid themselves of time-squandering, resource-draining behaviors like conspicuous consumption of European produced goods and services, over reliance on TV, video games, sporting events and night clubs as entertainment and the other debilitating orientations discussed in this paper with sankofa. Sankofa is a philosophical principle and social custom among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire that holds that wisdom is learning from the past to both understand the present and shape the future. Implicit in sankofa is the deep study/reading of African history and the application of its lessons from 2 million BCE to the present. For 21st century Africans, sankofa is the first step on the road to mental freedom.

Sankofa practitioners understand that Black deculturalization is essentially Black mis-education. And the cure for Black mis-education is to read, discuss, study, learn and then use the lessons of African history along with the best of African culture as offensive weapons in the war against the European or Arab colonial outpost implanted in the African psyche.

To decolonize the African mind, African freedom-seekers must destroy their deeply rooted, interconnecting networks of internalized European or Arab values and beliefs. These are the invisible chains of mental slavery that for centuries have allowed Europeans and Arabs to manipulate and control them, first as slaves and religious converts, and now as pseudo-citizens. Sankofa practice is an indispensable weapon in the war to decolonize or re-Africanize the African mind.

Another powerful weapon against deculturalization-mis-education is to embrace through daily practice the Kemetic principle of ma’at. In ancient African metaphysics, ma’at was synonymous with righteousness. And, it was considered the most important spiritual principle because it sustains the cosmos. Righteousness was thought to permeate the universe as truth, justice, order, harmony and balance.

In the view of ancient Africans of the Nile River Valley, God’s will is that human society, as a microcosm of the universe, function in accordance with ma’at. Hence, to do ma’at is to wisely align oneself with the Divine Order. Because the European world order is rooted in isfet or lies, injustice, deception and manipulation, to do ma’at, (always speaking the truth, demanding justice, and bringing order, harmony and balance) eats away the soft underbelly of this wicked global system like steady rain eats away drought.

A fourth weapon in the struggle to reverse the seasoning process is what I call intellectual disobedience, which is the soul-deep belief that Africans have a moral imperative to resist all attempts by the dominant social order to constrict, restrict or regulate the content of their education. In other words, Africans have the divine right to resist all European efforts at mind control. Implicit in intellectual disobedience, which is the 21st century corollary to philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s (1860) notion of civil disobedience, is decolonization.

In the late 1950 and early 1960s, it was the notion of civil disobedience that emboldened Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968) and others to defy the White political establishment’s immoral effort to constrict, restrict and regulate African citizenship rights in this country. Similarly, in the 21st century, intellectual disobedience demands that freedom-seeking Africans defy the White educational establishment’s immoral effort to constrict, restrict and regulate our right to resist the imposition of Europeancentric worldviews as the norm. Intellectual disobedience is the ultimate act of decolonization. Moreover, it is the hallmark of a liberated mind.

The ultimate weapon, however, in the African liberatory arsenal is by far the simplest, but the most lethal. Its power lies in its demand that Africans financially support organizations that build African centered independent schools like CIBI and organizations that promotes African centered research like ASCAC. Each organization is a powerful ally in the collective struggle to decolonize the African mind.

Conclusion
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which freed millions of Africans from chattel slavery, perhaps more than any other presidential act, guaranteed the Union’s victory in 1865. By the end of the Civil War, the White ruling elite clearly understood that the time had come to end chattel slavery in the United States and assimilate African people into the lowest level of the American social order. So Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which on paper ended chattel slavery, made Africans citizens, and gave Black men the right to vote.

During the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) following the Civil War in the south, newly freed Africans used their newly won franchise as their saddle and the Republican Party as their horse to ride into to political office in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and other southern states. These Black elected officials improved southern life for all people. One example: they wrote and then enacted legislation that paved the way for the south’s first public school systems. This was the heyday of Black American political participation until the 1970s ushered in what historians call the “Second Reconstruction.�

Reconstruction One came to a violent, bloody end when President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) withdrew Union troops from Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877-78. This set the stage for the rise of White terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. And over the course of the next 20 years, they literally drove southern Blacks at gunpoint out of American politics and back into the cotton fields, thereby sparking a Black exodus from the rural south that continued until the 1970s. The U.S. Supreme Court drove the final nail into the coffin of Reconstruction in 1896. Its decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case to uphold racial segregation provided the legal rationale underpinning the American system of apartheid, 1896-1966.

Today, freedom-seeking Black youth must keep in mind that the brain-washing (deculturalization) of their people in this country has been in progress for the past 350 years. But, it has never been completely successful. There have always existed liberated minds within the African American intelligentsia. Jacob Carruthers (1999) calls these scholar-warriors “intellectual maroons.� Men like David Walker (1785-1830) and Martin Delany (1812-1885) in the 19th century and Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Malcolm X (1925-1965) in the 20th century are sterling examples of Africans who emancipated themselves from European mental bondage by decolonizing their minds.

It brings clarity (and inspiration) to know that Africans in the United States have a 350-year tradition of resistance to European domination and that deculturalization was only one dimension of a larger cycle of European and Arab aggression against African people. African centered historians call this larger cycle of Black destruction “The Maafa.� And for Africans in the United States, it includes 263 years of chattel slavery followed by 140 years of mental slavery.

More important, freedom-seeking African youth must stand up and declare total war on their own colonial thinking. They must attack mercilessly its instruments and agents, deconstruct its intellectual base, and thereby break out of conceptual incarceration. Jacob Carruthers (1999) calls this “intellectual warfare.� To win the war for their own minds, African youth must immerse themselves in the knowledge bases that gave rise to Kemet, Nubia and Axum as well as ancient Zimbabwe, Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. This will provide them with a solid foundation on which to construct a historically accurate and healthy sense of themselves as modern, 21st century people connected to the world’s first and finest civilizations.

Predictably, African Americans under 25 years of age living in reAfrikanizing households and attending African centered schools are prime candidates to achieve permanent decolonization. From amongst their ranks will come the intellectual maroons of the 21st century. Regrettably, millions of African American teenagers and adults from all social classes and economic backgrounds have been so thoroughly and completely colonized (brain-washed) that nothing short of institutionalize deprogramming would pry loose the bars of their conceptual incarceration, learned indifference and utengano.

For our thoroughly seasoned African leadership class, only a long-term, intensive, decolonization procedure would cleanse them sufficiently to begin preliminary restructuring of their African personalities. And only precision weapons like sankofa, ma’at, reAfrikanization and intellectual disobedience will allow them to victoriously engage their internal enemy and decolonize their African minds.


Glossary of Terms
Aryans (Sanskrit) – Fair-skinned, nomadic, war-like people from southern Russia and Iran (Persia) who invaded much of Europe, southwest Asia and India, 2000-1500 BCE. In the 20th century, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis claimed descent from the ancient Aryans and embraced their passion for war and conquest. The White Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran as well as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morroco are the Semitic branch of the Aryan-Caucasian-European family (Rajshekar, 1987).

Deculturalization – Three-part process designed and perfected by Europeans that: (1) denigrates to alienate Blacks from their African cultural heritage, i.e., African languages, religions, customs, etc., (2) teaches them to value only the cultural orientations, i.e., languages, religions, customs, etc., of Europeans or Arabs, and (3) assimilates them into a European or Arab dominated social order as their faithful supporters and defenders. The public educational system, the Christian church and the mass media are the prime instruments of American deculturalization, And the Qur’an, the mosque, and Qur’anic school are the chief instruments of Arab deculturalization (Boateng, 1990; Spring, 1997).

European Colonization (1440 CE – Present) – 500-year-long competition among the Europeans (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, U.S. Americans, Germans, and Italians) to set up and maintain African bases of operations to better steal the human, minerals and biological wealth of the world’s richest continent for the development of European civilization. The Europeans have colonized successfully African land, institutions and minds.

Maafa (Swahili) – Term popularized by Marimba Ani to signify the 1300-year-long period (652 CE – Present) of African conquest, enslavement, domination, oppression, exploitation and genocide at the hands of Europeans and Arabs (Ani, 1994).


Goals of Mis-Education
Conceptual Incarceration (CI) – State of African intellectual imprisonment in European value and belief systems occasioned by ignorance of African and Native American philosophical, cultural and historical truths. CI is the goal of miseducation, the end result of deculturalization, and the major obstacle to innovative, creative and liberatory African thought and practice (Nobles, 1986).

Diseducation – Public school practice of arresting and undermining the intellectual development of African students resulting in “pervasive, persistent and disproportionate� academic under achievement. Diseducation is a strategy of deculturalization, the maafa and the source of the Black-White student achievement gap (Carruthers, 1994).

Education For All – Termed coined at a 1990 World Bank conference in Thailand to promote western-style primary education in Africa, which serves to “rob Africans of their indigenous knowledge and language� promoting what Dr. Birgit Brock-Utne calls the “recolonization of the African mind� (Brock-Utne, 2000).

Learned Indifference (LI) – Pervasive and debilitating African psychological state characterized by disinterest in issues, causes and organizations that promote the advancement of African people. LI is a function of conceptual incarceration and the end goal of deculturalizaton and miseducation (X, 1996).

Mentacide – Deliberate and systematic European-orchestrated process terminating in the destruction of the African mind with the ultimate objective the extirpation of African people. End goal of deculturalization, miseducation and the maafa (Wright, 1984).

Utengano (Swahili) – Deeply entrenched, intergenerational African American predisposition to accept disunity, division and disorder in the African community as normal. Utengano is an expression of learned indifference, an outgrowth of deculturalization, and a strategy of the maafa (Hotep, 2002).

Liberatory Practices
Decolonization – Process of overthrowing and then removing the Europeancentric or Arabcentric value and belief systems (colonies) implanted in our minds by our public school mis-education, our Christian or Islamic indoctrination and mass media manipulation that keep us psychologically, emotionally, materially and spiritually tied to Europeans or Arabs as their victims or servants. To decolonize the African mind is to cleanse and liberate by re-Africanizing the African mind (Chinweizu, 1987).

Intellectual Disobedience – Twenty-first century corollary to Henry David Thoreau’s (1860) notion of civil disobedience that holds that African people have a moral imperative to resist all attempts by the European dominated educational hegemony to constrict, restrict or regulate the content of their education (Hotep, 2000).

Ma’at (Mdw Ntr) – Seven thousand-year-old Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) term for the divine law of truth, justice, order, harmony, balance, in short, righteousness. The restoration, maintenance and preservation of ma’at was considered the highest social ideal by the ancient Africans of the Nile River Valley civilizations. Today, it is the motive and goal of all conscious, African freedom fighters (Karenga, 1986;Hilliard, 1994; Carruthers, 1995; Ashby, 1996).

Re-Africanization – Intergenerational, family-based process of reclamation, revivification and reincorporation of African cultural knowledge and values as the prerequisite for establishing a 21st century African social order rooted in the traditional wisdom of African people (Akoto & Akoto, 2000).

Sankofa (Twi) – Akan concept, symbol and social practice adopted by late 20th century Pan African nationalist scholars and activists, which refers to the practice of learning from the past to build for the future. For African people, this means having the desire to not only to understand the worldview of our ancient African ancestors, but also the wisdom to adopt or adapt their social practices and philosophical beliefs when they will help us establish financially independent, emotionally wholesome and nurturing families and autonomous, sovereign, self-sufficient communities. Sankofa practice demands confronting the Maafa by respecting life, nature and the wisdom of our African ancestors, establishing viable extended families, supporting African centered institutions and organizations, and creating social and economic ties throughout the African World Community (Wase, 1998; Akoto & Akoto, 2000).


Sources and Essential Readings
Afrika, M. (2002). The redemption of African spirituality: An African-centered historical critique of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Philadelphia: Afrika Publications.

Ajamu, A. (1997). From tef tef to medew nefer: The importance of using African terminologies and concepts in the rescue, restoration, reconstruction, and reconnection of African ancestral memory. In J. Carruthers & L. Harris. (Eds.), African world history project: The preliminary challenge. Los Angeles: ASCAC.

Akoto, K. & Akoto, A. (2000). The sankofa movement: ReAfrikanization and the reality of war. Washington: Oyoko InfoCom.

Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Asante, M. & Abarry, A. (Eds.) African intellectual heritage: A book of sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bennett, L. (1984). Before the Mayflower: A history of Black America. New York: Penguin Books.

Boateng, F. (1990). Combating the deculturalization of the African American child in the public school system. In Lomotey, K. (Ed.). Going to school: The African-American experience. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Borishade, A. (1996). Re-aligning African heads: Yoruba curatives for maafa-related ailments. Jacksonville, FL: Sankofa Productions.

Bradley, M. (1978). The iceman inheritance: Prehistoric sources of western man’s racism, sexism and aggression. New York: Kayode Publications.

Brock-Utne, B. (2000). Whose education for all?: The recolonization of the African mind: New York: Falmer Press.

Brown, T. (1998). Empower the people. New York: William Morrow.

Carruthers, J. (1994). An African historiography for the 21st century. In J. Carruthers & L. Harris (Eds.) African world history project: The preliminary challenge. Los Angeles: ASCAC.

Carruthers, J. (1999). Intellectual warfare. Chicago: Third World Press.

Chinweizu. (1987). Decolonising the African mind. Lagos: Pero Publishers.

Davidson, B. (1964). The African past: Chronicles from antiquity to modern times. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Glendinning, C. (1994). My name is Chellis & I’m in recovery from western civilization. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

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Williams, C. (1993). The re-birth of African civilization. Hampton, VA: U.B. & U.S. Communications.

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Wilson, A. (1993). The falsification of Afrikan consciousness: Eurocentric history, psychiatry and the politics of white supremacy. New York: AWIS.

Woodson, C. (1933). Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington: Associated Publishers.

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Copyright © 2003
Kwame Ture Youth Leadership Institute

Akpe for sharing AK and allowing me to share

[Akyeame Kwame]

Akpe for sharing and taking the time to do the research for this follow-up to this thread, Recovering Aa...i had posted this one earlier as a separate thread but it's all Black...the two are related...stay BlackNificent!!!

AK

Originally Posted by RecoveringAA

Decolonizing the African Mind: Further Analysis and Strategy
by
Uhuru Hotep


The central objective in decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.
- Chinweizu


Introduction
This paper presents a framework for discussing the psychology of African liberation by using the political terms “colonialism,� “colonization� and “decolonization� as vantage points for contextualizing African American oppression. Over the past 500 years, European ruling elites perfected a method of psychological manipulation and control first discussed from an African perspective by the Nigerian scholar Chinweizu (1987) in his classic Decolonising the African Mind. I call this method “mental� colonization.

Introduced during the era of American slavery through a process 17th, 18th and 19th century English-speaking slaveholders called seasoning, today mental colonization is achieved through deculturalization. Deculturalization is the fuel that drives the engine of mental colonization; both processes turn on a companion process called “mis-education,� and all three are examined in this paper along with their instruments, agents and goals.

Because the African population born and bred in the United States is the classic example of a mentally colonized people, this paper references the 40 million people of African descent in the United States. However, much of what is discussed is applicable to African populations residing throughout the Atlantic diaspora and beyond.

This two-part essay begins with an overview of European colonialism, deculturalization and mis-education. And it concludes with a review of African centered liberatory practices and orientations such as reAfrikanization, sankofa, ma’at and intellectual disobedience. Internalizing these concepts is essential for decolonizing the African mind.

Part I

Typology of European Colonialism: 1645 BCE to Present
Around 3,000 BCE, Aryans (later known as Caucasians) began to settle in the region of Asia known to the modern world as Europe. Over the past 2,000 years, their descendants (today’s Europeans) have practiced consistently and have now perfected three basic types of colonialism. They are: territorial, intellectual, and mental. This section will cursorily address them all.

Perhaps the dominant feature of world history these past five centuries has been the “rise� to world dominance of the Caucasian peoples of western Europe, North America and Australia. In spite of their current “lofty� station, today’s undisputed “lords and masters� of the earth are from very humble origins. They first entered the pages of history as barbaric, nomadic tribes whose sole talent was warfare. Their only early accomplishment of note was the destruction of the Dravidian civilization of ancient India. Later their descendants plundered, pillaged and finally sacked the Roman Empire.

Possessed by demonic forces (Brown, 1998; Ickes, 2001; Mutwa, 2001), the Anglo-Saxons, Gauls and Teutons of England, France and Germany over the past five centuries developed the weaponry and logistics, the justifications and rationales and the strategies and tactics to conquer and colonize the land, knowledge and minds of the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, America, Australia and the Pacific. In the 20th century, to decide who would exploit this vast multitude, Europeans fought two devastating world wars – 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 – that squandered millions of their lives nearly destroying their civilization.

When we focus our attention on Africa, historian Chancellor Williams (1974) tells us that the first Aryans to colonize African territory were the Hyksos (Hebrews) who invaded Kemet (Egypt) in 1645 BCE long after the pyramids were built. Over the centuries, other Aryan/European invaders followed. The Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Germans and Italians all came to Africa as conquerors and colonizers with only one intent: to plunder African people of their wealth.

The European “scramble� to colonize Africa did not reach its zenith, however, until 1884-85 when German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck (1815-1898) organized the Berlin Conference. Attended by the French, British, Dutch, Germans and Portuguese, who over the course of several meetings, debated and then formulated the ground rules for conquering and colonizing the whole of Africa. These five, small European states “planned their work and worked their plan� so effectively that by 1915, all of Africa, save Ethiopia was a European colony.

In addition to colonizing African land, Europeans also colonized African knowledge not just to claim it as their own, but also to disconnect Africans from their heritage and culture. Why? Because people who are cut off from their heritage and culture are more easily manipulated and controlled than people who are not. Adisa Ajamu (1997) calls this “intellectual colonialism.�

Beginning with the Hyksos Invasion, the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans each during their period of African occupancy seized control of Kemet’s temple-schools and captured her priest-teachers. Then they plundered her libraries and archives and “borrowed� African philosophical and religious ideas, practices, beliefs and customs, which they later claimed as their own.

The Hebrews, for example, during their stay in Kemet adopted Kemetic names like Moses, customs like circumcision, and beliefs like monotheism. Plato (427-347 BCE), the “father� of western philosophy and tutor of the military leader Europeans call Alexander the Great, was a regular visitor at the great library at Rhakotis, later called Alexandria, from where he “borrowed� numerous books. And Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the father of European history, who actually traveled to Kemet, wrote that the Greek (and later the Roman) upper-classes sent their children to Kemet for higher education and “borrowed� many of their religious ideas from this African nation.

As a consequence of Europe’s successful colonization of African lands and African knowledge, she was able to successfully colonize African minds, and thereby complete the conquest of African people. The 20th century witnessed the globalization of European consciousness and the planetary-wide imposition of European worldviews and life styles as the human norm. No where has this imposition been more thorough than in Africa among the Christianized, western-trained, African intellectuals and other members of the ruling class. The same holds true for Africans in the Americas, and especially the United States.

Deculturalization and Black America: 1500 to Present
Deculturalization is a method of pacification and control perfected over the past 500 years by European ruling elites. This practice involves first the systematic stripping away of the intended victim’s ancestral culture and then systematically replacing it with European culture. According to educators Felix Boateng (1990) and Joel Spring (1997) Africans, Asians, Native Americans, (and I would add Native Australians and Pacific Islanders), have all been the victims of this form of psychological and spiritual abuse. Early American slaveholders called this practice seasoning. Today, the academic community calls it deculturalization, but the popular term is brain-washing.

As it affects Africans in the United States, decultualization is a three-stage process. First, African Americans are quietly taught to feel ashamed of so they will reject their African and Native American heritage. Next, they are taught in schools and churches to admire and respect so they will adopt and practice only their European heritage. And finally, if they obediently submit to this indoctrination, they are rewarded with opportunities to receive even more indoctrination. And ultimately once they have been effectively indoctrinated, they are allowed an opportunity to compete for a “professional� job in the “main stream.� And a rare, handpicked few of the most thoroughly indoctrinated (brain-washed) are allowed access to the inner sanctums of White power, prestige and privilege.

The American system of deculturalization has been an extremely effective process. It has successfully brain-washed the majority of African Americans to accept the dominance of Europeans and European institutions over their lives. History teaches us that African prisoners of war (POWs) were subjected to a vicious, European-orchestrated, three to four years of seasoning during which the most important expressions of their African heritage were brutally stripped away from them and brutally replaced with the European colonizer-slave master-oppressor’s cultural practices and beliefs.

Africans enslaved in the North American British colonies, for example, were forbidden to use their original African names, languages and religions. They were forced to use their European colonizer-slave master-oppressor’s names, language and religion. This is why most Africans born in the United States have European surnames, speak English and practice some form of Christianity. Slavery imposed these European cultural practices on their African ancestors and their descendants blindly continue them unless they take steps to open their eyes to and free their minds of all remnants of European slavery.

Both Boateng (1990) and Spring (1997) identified the public school as a major agent of African American deculturalization (brain-washing). I agree; however, I would add that nearly all American educational institutions – Black, White, public, private, day care to college – must be placed along side the public schools as agents of deculturalization. In fact, no aspect of American education is free of this curse except the African centered independent school whose sole mission if it is functioning properly is to decolonize or re-Africanize Black students and their families.

Mis-Education and Black America: 1933 to Present
The major 20th century instrument of deculturalization was and remains mis-education. Mis-education is the term coined by historian Carter G. Woodson (1933) to describe the destructive effects on the Black mind by schools that use a pedagogy and curriculum that deliberately omits, distorts or trivializes the role of African people in and their seminal contributions to world history and culture.

The American public school, as we previously noted, is a major mis-educator (brain-washer) of African people, and has been since its inception in the 1890s. But it is only one of three agents of mass mis-education used by the White ruling elite to manipulate and control African Americans over the past century. The other two carry equal weight. They are the popular media (print and electronic) and the traditional, mainstream Christian church that proclaims non-Africans as “God’s chosen people� and a White Jesus as its “personal savior.�

The end goal of mis-education is three-fold: First, to produce African people who identify with and embrace as their own European history, traditions and culture, but who are ambivalent or indifferent toward African history, traditions and culture. Second, to produce Black people who have been what political scientist Jacob Carruthers (1994) calls diseducated, meaning people who have had their intellectual development arrested by the public schools. And, the third and ultimate goal of mis-education is mentacide, a term linked to genocide and diseducation coined in 1984 by Bobby Wright as a label for the European-orchestrated campaign to destroy the African mind as a prelude to destroying African people.

Literally from birth to death, African Americans are awash in a sea of European-designed, mass media disseminated disinformation, misinformation, half-truths and whole lies about the people, history, culture and significance of Africa. This, of course, is no accident. It is part of a finely crafted, century-long campaign to stop African Americans from connecting with their rich ancestral homeland and developing a Pan African worldview. While at the same time, it serves as a cloak under which Europeans can hide from African Americans their plunder of Africa’s mineral and biological wealth. Our White rulers and their Black supporters clearly understand that Black mis-education is the backbone of White domination.

Careful analysis of Black institutions that uphold mis-education and Africans who have been crippled by it reveal a number of highly identifiable features. First, these institutions will favor and their patrons will embrace what psychologist Wade Nobles (1986) calls conceptual incarceration. Conceptual incarceration is the term for Black imprisonment in White belief systems and knowledge bases.

When it comes to defining themselves and the world, mis-educated Blacks restrict their range of thought (and action) by their habit of drawing exclusively from their European background. By limiting themselves to this one, small facet of their vast, tricultural heritage, they confine themselves to a tiny, narrow corner of the world where they sit locked in a mental prison (colony) with only one set of lenses (European) to see the world.

By embracing European perspectives exclusively, Africans cut themselves off from self-knowledge. And when that occurs, deculturalization claims another victim. Fortunately, Black conceptual incarceration in large measure is self-imposed. Africans in America can choose to expand their cultural frames of reference and consciously embrace their African and Native American heritages. And when this happens, their conceptual incarceration ends.

Another feature of Black institutions that mis-educate and mis-educated Blacks is what Mwata X (1996) calls learned indifference, which is a pervasive and self-destructive psychological disorder marked by disinterest in issues, causes and organizations that promote the political and economic liberation of African people. By this measure, most of our established Black churches and prestigious Black schools mis-educate, and nearly all of our multi-millionaire Black athletes and super-star Black entertainers are mis-educated, (right along with nine out of ten Black Americans). As causalities in a war they don’t even know is being waged, the Black elite have been captured with wealth and fame by the forces of deculturalization.

A third feature of Black mis-education is what I call utengano. Utengano is a Swahili word meaning “disunity� and refers to the deeply entrenched, intergenerational predisposition among Africans to accept dysfunctional divisions in the African family and community as normal. Utengano afflicts Black people who expect and tolerate teen pregnancy, absent fathers, inferior schools, run-down buildings, ineffective leaders and dirty, unsafe streets filled with illicit drugs, alcohol and x-rated music as normal and thus acceptable. But if they were truly educated, they would be outraged by these perversions and committed to changing these wretched conditions or die trying
Part II

Decolonizing the African Mind: Action Steps
In the American context, decolonizing the African mind means reversing the seasoning process. For those millions of African POWs who survived the horrors of the middle passage, seasoning was a three to four year period of intense and often brutal slave making at the hands and feet of their European captors and their agents. Because it capitalized on our innate, human fear of pain and death, seasoning was so effective as a pacification method that North American slave owners gladly paid a premium for “seasoned� Africans from the Caribbean. For enslaved Africans, seasoning, when successful, laid the foundation for a lifetime of faithful, obedient service to their master and his children.

Effective seasoning, therefore, was the key that opened the door for 350 years of mental colonization of the African American people. Moreover, it allows for present-day Black pacification, manipulation and control by the European ruling elite and their agents. But, if African POWs were taught to be Negro slaves, it is reasonable to believe (like Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) that a fair number can be re-taught to be free African women and men. Reversing the seasoning process is a constructive way to frame a psychoeducational approach for cleansing African minds of European or Arab cultural infestation.

Toward this end, beginning in the late 1960s, perhaps the first African Americans to initiate systematic decolonization were small groups of youth, awakened by the Maroon spirit resounding in the voices of Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka and host of others. These decolonizing youth initiated projects of self-discovery intended to remove the European mind set (colony) implanted in their psyches as a result of living in a European dominated society.

To effect sweeping change in their value and belief systems, these young truth-seekers practiced self-definition, self-determination and self-defense. As a way of liberating themselves and others from the shackles of mis-education and diseducation, many established independent schools dedicated to developing African centered curriculum and pedagogy while others established research organizations dedicated to recovering traditional African knowledge bases.

The Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) established in 1972 (www.cibi.org) and the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization (ASCAC) established in 1984 (www.ascac.org) are prime examples, indeed symbols, of this search for the deeper meaning of being African in the late 20th century. CIBI is an educational association and ASCAC is a research association. Both were established by this community of freedom seeking, culturally conscious, African men and women.

As CIBI and ASCAC founders quickly discovered, the first step toward decolonizing the African mind is to identify a re-placement worldview on which to frame a liberated African future. In other words, once the forces of mental colonization are defeated and their colonial government expelled, its infrastructure razed and the battle site cleansed, what type of structures do we install in this newly liberated space to unleash genius and thwart re-colonization efforts? The remainder of this essay will begin to answer this question.

Decolonization is a journey of self-discovery culminating in a reawakening and a reorientation. It involves a conscious decision to first uncover, uproot and remove all vestiges of slavery imposed European or Arab values and beliefs ingested over centuries of mis-education that are detrimental to present-day African family stability and African community empowerment. Next, as the colony is being dismantled, Africans must fill the liberated spaces with those life-sustaining social values, beliefs and customs that enabled their ancestors to establish stable, autonomous families and communities prior to the Arab or European invasions and conquest of their societies.

Like all transforming, liberatory states, decolonization is actually a protracted process demanding constant vigilance and intense dedication to task. It cannot be achieved in a single evening by reading a single book or by attending a single lecture or even by taking a single course. However, reading, lectures, courses (along with study groups and conferences), are critical to the success of any decolonization project. Because it is an effort to recover and reconnect with the best of traditional African culture as a means of ending European dominance of the African psyche, for Africans in the Americas, decolonization is Re-Africanization.

Re-Africanization is a term popularized by President Ahmed Sekou Toure (1922-1984) of Guinea and PAIGC-founder Amilcar Cabral (1931-1973) of Guinea-Bissau to promote a return to traditional African values and institutions among their citizens. In the American context, reAfrikanization (Akoto & Akoto, 2000) is a long-term, transgenerational, family project. Among other things, it demands family-wide embrace of select African centered values, beliefs and practices regarding the family and how it organizes and allocates its financial and human resources. To pull all of this together takes years of immersion in traditional African cultural values and daily living in an African centered mental space practicing traditional and liberatory African values, beliefs, orientations and perspectives.

Over the past 30 years, CIBI and ASCAC activists and others seeking to reAfrikanize have found Maulana Karenga’s seven-part value system, the Nguzo Saba, to be a highly effectively decolonization tool. Other useful tools are Mukasa Afrika’s, five pillars of Afrikan spirituality, the Miamba Tano and my six jewels of African centered leadership, the Johari Sita.

Constant reAfrikanization undermines the colony’s legitimacy and weakens its infrastructure to the point where frontal attacks can be launched against its outposts and command centers. If successful, all external European trappings are discarded and the once deculturated Negro reemerges with an African name, speaking an African language, wearing African fashions and praying to an African God. Once this occurs, the lost child has found his/her way back home.

On a deeper, internal level, however, extreme individualism along with sexism, classism, racism, geocide and other European social practices and cultural orientations that give rise to aberrations like conceptual incarceration, learned indifference and utengano must be expunged from the value and belief systems. Selfish and divisive Europeancentric perspectives and behaviors must give way to wholesome, life affirming, Africancentric, communal values like community service, cooperation, and sharing.

The second step in the battle to decolonize the African mind requires dismantling the instrument of deculturalization and neutralizing the agents of mis-education previously discussed in this paper. In essence, this means rejecting the pro-European/anti-African teachings of the Christian church or Islamic mosque, disregarding the pro-European/anti-African messages conveyed by the popular media and deconstructing the pro-European/anti-African indoctrination of the public schools. It also means implementing the first of three five-year, comprehensive, African centered, self-education program designed to end one’s conceptual incarceration, learned indifference, and utengano. A starting point perhaps is the ideas presented in this paper and the books listed as Sources and Essential Readings.

Furthermore, African youth in the United States can rid themselves of time-squandering, resource-draining behaviors like conspicuous consumption of European produced goods and services, over reliance on TV, video games, sporting events and night clubs as entertainment and the other debilitating orientations discussed in this paper with sankofa. Sankofa is a philosophical principle and social custom among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire that holds that wisdom is learning from the past to both understand the present and shape the future. Implicit in sankofa is the deep study/reading of African history and the application of its lessons from 2 million BCE to the present. For 21st century Africans, sankofa is the first step on the road to mental freedom.

Sankofa practitioners understand that Black deculturalization is essentially Black mis-education. And the cure for Black mis-education is to read, discuss, study, learn and then use the lessons of African history along with the best of African culture as offensive weapons in the war against the European or Arab colonial outpost implanted in the African psyche.

To decolonize the African mind, African freedom-seekers must destroy their deeply rooted, interconnecting networks of internalized European or Arab values and beliefs. These are the invisible chains of mental slavery that for centuries have allowed Europeans and Arabs to manipulate and control them, first as slaves and religious converts, and now as pseudo-citizens. Sankofa practice is an indispensable weapon in the war to decolonize or re-Africanize the African mind.

Another powerful weapon against deculturalization-mis-education is to embrace through daily practice the Kemetic principle of ma’at. In ancient African metaphysics, ma’at was synonymous with righteousness. And, it was considered the most important spiritual principle because it sustains the cosmos. Righteousness was thought to permeate the universe as truth, justice, order, harmony and balance.

In the view of ancient Africans of the Nile River Valley, God’s will is that human society, as a microcosm of the universe, function in accordance with ma’at. Hence, to do ma’at is to wisely align oneself with the Divine Order. Because the European world order is rooted in isfet or lies, injustice, deception and manipulation, to do ma’at, (always speaking the truth, demanding justice, and bringing order, harmony and balance) eats away the soft underbelly of this wicked global system like steady rain eats away drought.

A fourth weapon in the struggle to reverse the seasoning process is what I call intellectual disobedience, which is the soul-deep belief that Africans have a moral imperative to resist all attempts by the dominant social order to constrict, restrict or regulate the content of their education. In other words, Africans have the divine right to resist all European efforts at mind control. Implicit in intellectual disobedience, which is the 21st century corollary to philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s (1860) notion of civil disobedience, is decolonization.

In the late 1950 and early 1960s, it was the notion of civil disobedience that emboldened Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968) and others to defy the White political establishment’s immoral effort to constrict, restrict and regulate African citizenship rights in this country. Similarly, in the 21st century, intellectual disobedience demands that freedom-seeking Africans defy the White educational establishment’s immoral effort to constrict, restrict and regulate our right to resist the imposition of Europeancentric worldviews as the norm. Intellectual disobedience is the ultimate act of decolonization. Moreover, it is the hallmark of a liberated mind.

The ultimate weapon, however, in the African liberatory arsenal is by far the simplest, but the most lethal. Its power lies in its demand that Africans financially support organizations that build African centered independent schools like CIBI and organizations that promotes African centered research like ASCAC. Each organization is a powerful ally in the collective struggle to decolonize the African mind.

Conclusion
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which freed millions of Africans from chattel slavery, perhaps more than any other presidential act, guaranteed the Union’s victory in 1865. By the end of the Civil War, the White ruling elite clearly understood that the time had come to end chattel slavery in the United States and assimilate African people into the lowest level of the American social order. So Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which on paper ended chattel slavery, made Africans citizens, and gave Black men the right to vote.

During the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) following the Civil War in the south, newly freed Africans used their newly won franchise as their saddle and the Republican Party as their horse to ride into to political office in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and other southern states. These Black elected officials improved southern life for all people. One example: they wrote and then enacted legislation that paved the way for the south’s first public school systems. This was the heyday of Black American political participation until the 1970s ushered in what historians call the “Second Reconstruction.�

Reconstruction One came to a violent, bloody end when President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) withdrew Union troops from Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877-78. This set the stage for the rise of White terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. And over the course of the next 20 years, they literally drove southern Blacks at gunpoint out of American politics and back into the cotton fields, thereby sparking a Black exodus from the rural south that continued until the 1970s. The U.S. Supreme Court drove the final nail into the coffin of Reconstruction in 1896. Its decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case to uphold racial segregation provided the legal rationale underpinning the American system of apartheid, 1896-1966.

Today, freedom-seeking Black youth must keep in mind that the brain-washing (deculturalization) of their people in this country has been in progress for the past 350 years. But, it has never been completely successful. There have always existed liberated minds within the African American intelligentsia. Jacob Carruthers (1999) calls these scholar-warriors “intellectual maroons.� Men like David Walker (1785-1830) and Martin Delany (1812-1885) in the 19th century and Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Malcolm X (1925-1965) in the 20th century are sterling examples of Africans who emancipated themselves from European mental bondage by decolonizing their minds.

It brings clarity (and inspiration) to know that Africans in the United States have a 350-year tradition of resistance to European domination and that deculturalization was only one dimension of a larger cycle of European and Arab aggression against African people. African centered historians call this larger cycle of Black destruction “The Maafa.� And for Africans in the United States, it includes 263 years of chattel slavery followed by 140 years of mental slavery.

More important, freedom-seeking African youth must stand up and declare total war on their own colonial thinking. They must attack mercilessly its instruments and agents, deconstruct its intellectual base, and thereby break out of conceptual incarceration. Jacob Carruthers (1999) calls this “intellectual warfare.� To win the war for their own minds, African youth must immerse themselves in the knowledge bases that gave rise to Kemet, Nubia and Axum as well as ancient Zimbabwe, Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. This will provide them with a solid foundation on which to construct a historically accurate and healthy sense of themselves as modern, 21st century people connected to the world’s first and finest civilizations.

Predictably, African Americans under 25 years of age living in reAfrikanizing households and attending African centered schools are prime candidates to achieve permanent decolonization. From amongst their ranks will come the intellectual maroons of the 21st century. Regrettably, millions of African American teenagers and adults from all social classes and economic backgrounds have been so thoroughly and completely colonized (brain-washed) that nothing short of institutionalize deprogramming would pry loose the bars of their conceptual incarceration, learned indifference and utengano.

For our thoroughly seasoned African leadership class, only a long-term, intensive, decolonization procedure would cleanse them sufficiently to begin preliminary restructuring of their African personalities. And only precision weapons like sankofa, ma’at, reAfrikanization and intellectual disobedience will allow them to victoriously engage their internal enemy and decolonize their African minds.


Glossary of Terms
Aryans (Sanskrit) – Fair-skinned, nomadic, war-like people from southern Russia and Iran (Persia) who invaded much of Europe, southwest Asia and India, 2000-1500 BCE. In the 20th century, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis claimed descent from the ancient Aryans and embraced their passion for war and conquest. The White Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran as well as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morroco are the Semitic branch of the Aryan-Caucasian-European family (Rajshekar, 1987).

Deculturalization – Three-part process designed and perfected by Europeans that: (1) denigrates to alienate Blacks from their African cultural heritage, i.e., African languages, religions, customs, etc., (2) teaches them to value only the cultural orientations, i.e., languages, religions, customs, etc., of Europeans or Arabs, and (3) assimilates them into a European or Arab dominated social order as their faithful supporters and defenders. The public educational system, the Christian church and the mass media are the prime instruments of American deculturalization, And the Qur’an, the mosque, and Qur’anic school are the chief instruments of Arab deculturalization (Boateng, 1990; Spring, 1997).

European Colonization (1440 CE – Present) – 500-year-long competition among the Europeans (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, U.S. Americans, Germans, and Italians) to set up and maintain African bases of operations to better steal the human, minerals and biological wealth of the world’s richest continent for the development of European civilization. The Europeans have colonized successfully African land, institutions and minds.

Maafa (Swahili) – Term popularized by Marimba Ani to signify the 1300-year-long period (652 CE – Present) of African conquest, enslavement, domination, oppression, exploitation and genocide at the hands of Europeans and Arabs (Ani, 1994).


Goals of Mis-Education
Conceptual Incarceration (CI) – State of African intellectual imprisonment in European value and belief systems occasioned by ignorance of African and Native American philosophical, cultural and historical truths. CI is the goal of miseducation, the end result of deculturalization, and the major obstacle to innovative, creative and liberatory African thought and practice (Nobles, 1986).

Diseducation – Public school practice of arresting and undermining the intellectual development of African students resulting in “pervasive, persistent and disproportionate� academic under achievement. Diseducation is a strategy of deculturalization, the maafa and the source of the Black-White student achievement gap (Carruthers, 1994).

Education For All – Termed coined at a 1990 World Bank conference in Thailand to promote western-style primary education in Africa, which serves to “rob Africans of their indigenous knowledge and language� promoting what Dr. Birgit Brock-Utne calls the “recolonization of the African mind� (Brock-Utne, 2000).

Learned Indifference (LI) – Pervasive and debilitating African psychological state characterized by disinterest in issues, causes and organizations that promote the advancement of African people. LI is a function of conceptual incarceration and the end goal of deculturalizaton and miseducation (X, 1996).

Mentacide – Deliberate and systematic European-orchestrated process terminating in the destruction of the African mind with the ultimate objective the extirpation of African people. End goal of deculturalization, miseducation and the maafa (Wright, 1984).

Utengano (Swahili) – Deeply entrenched, intergenerational African American predisposition to accept disunity, division and disorder in the African community as normal. Utengano is an expression of learned indifference, an outgrowth of deculturalization, and a strategy of the maafa (Hotep, 2002).

Liberatory Practices
Decolonization – Process of overthrowing and then removing the Europeancentric or Arabcentric value and belief systems (colonies) implanted in our minds by our public school mis-education, our Christian or Islamic indoctrination and mass media manipulation that keep us psychologically, emotionally, materially and spiritually tied to Europeans or Arabs as their victims or servants. To decolonize the African mind is to cleanse and liberate by re-Africanizing the African mind (Chinweizu, 1987).

Intellectual Disobedience – Twenty-first century corollary to Henry David Thoreau’s (1860) notion of civil disobedience that holds that African people have a moral imperative to resist all attempts by the European dominated educational hegemony to constrict, restrict or regulate the content of their education (Hotep, 2000).

Ma’at (Mdw Ntr) – Seven thousand-year-old Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) term for the divine law of truth, justice, order, harmony, balance, in short, righteousness. The restoration, maintenance and preservation of ma’at was considered the highest social ideal by the ancient Africans of the Nile River Valley civilizations. Today, it is the motive and goal of all conscious, African freedom fighters (Karenga, 1986;Hilliard, 1994; Carruthers, 1995; Ashby, 1996).

Re-Africanization – Intergenerational, family-based process of reclamation, revivification and reincorporation of African cultural knowledge and values as the prerequisite for establishing a 21st century African social order rooted in the traditional wisdom of African people (Akoto & Akoto, 2000).

Sankofa (Twi) – Akan concept, symbol and social practice adopted by late 20th century Pan African nationalist scholars and activists, which refers to the practice of learning from the past to build for the future. For African people, this means having the desire to not only to understand the worldview of our ancient African ancestors, but also the wisdom to adopt or adapt their social practices and philosophical beliefs when they will help us establish financially independent, emotionally wholesome and nurturing families and autonomous, sovereign, self-sufficient communities. Sankofa practice demands confronting the Maafa by respecting life, nature and the wisdom of our African ancestors, establishing viable extended families, supporting African centered institutions and organizations, and creating social and economic ties throughout the African World Community (Wase, 1998; Akoto & Akoto, 2000).


Sources and Essential Readings
Afrika, M. (2002). The redemption of African spirituality: An African-centered historical critique of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Philadelphia: Afrika Publications.

Ajamu, A. (1997). From tef tef to medew nefer: The importance of using African terminologies and concepts in the rescue, restoration, reconstruction, and reconnection of African ancestral memory. In J. Carruthers & L. Harris. (Eds.), African world history project: The preliminary challenge. Los Angeles: ASCAC.

Akoto, K. & Akoto, A. (2000). The sankofa movement: ReAfrikanization and the reality of war. Washington: Oyoko InfoCom.

Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Asante, M. & Abarry, A. (Eds.) African intellectual heritage: A book of sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bennett, L. (1984). Before the Mayflower: A history of Black America. New York: Penguin Books.

Boateng, F. (1990). Combating the deculturalization of the African American child in the public school system. In Lomotey, K. (Ed.). Going to school: The African-American experience. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Borishade, A. (1996). Re-aligning African heads: Yoruba curatives for maafa-related ailments. Jacksonville, FL: Sankofa Productions.

Bradley, M. (1978). The iceman inheritance: Prehistoric sources of western man’s racism, sexism and aggression. New York: Kayode Publications.

Brock-Utne, B. (2000). Whose education for all?: The recolonization of the African mind: New York: Falmer Press.

Brown, T. (1998). Empower the people. New York: William Morrow.

Carruthers, J. (1994). An African historiography for the 21st century. In J. Carruthers & L. Harris (Eds.) African world history project: The preliminary challenge. Los Angeles: ASCAC.

Carruthers, J. (1999). Intellectual warfare. Chicago: Third World Press.

Chinweizu. (1987). Decolonising the African mind. Lagos: Pero Publishers.

Davidson, B. (1964). The African past: Chronicles from antiquity to modern times. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Glendinning, C. (1994). My name is Chellis & I’m in recovery from western civilization. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Gray, C. (2001). Afrocentric thought and praxis: An intellectual history. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Hamilton, P. (1996). African peoples’ contributions to world civilizations: Shattering the myths. Denver, CO: R.A. Renaissance Publications.

Hilliard, A. (1997). SBA: The Reawakening of the African mind. Gainesville, FL: Makare Publishing.

Hilliard, A., Williams, L & Damali, N (Eds.), (1987). The teaching of Ptahhotep: The oldest book in the world. Atlanta: Blackwood Press.

Hotep, U. & Hotep, T. (Eds.).(2003). Dictionary of African centered knowledge. Pittsburgh, PA: KTYLI.

Ickes, D. (2001). Children of the matrix. Wildwood, MO: Bridge of Love Publications.

Jacques-Garvey, A. (Ed.). (1980). Philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey. New York: Atheneum.

Keto, C. (1994). An introduction to the Africa centered perspective of history. Chicago: RAST Publications.

Kotkins, J. (1992). Tribes: How race, religion and identity determine success in the new global economy. New York: Random House.

Lemelle, S. (1992). Pan Africanism for beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing.

Meyers, L. (1988). Understanding an Afrocentric world view: Introduction to an optimal psychology. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing.

Nobles, W. (1986). African psychology: Toward its reclamation, revitalization and reascension. Oakland, CA: Black Family Institute.

Oakes, J. (1982). The ruling race: A history of American slaveholders. New York: Vintage Books.

Spring, J. (1997). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated groups in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Wase, G. (1998). Maat: The American African path of sankofa. Denver, CO: Mbadu Publishing.

Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: J. Currey Ltd.

Watkin, W. (2001). White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865 – 1954. New York: Teachers College Press.

Williams, C. (1974). The destruction of Black civilization: Great issues of a race 4500 BC to 2000 AD. Chicago: Third World Press.

Williams, C. (1993). The re-birth of African civilization. Hampton, VA: U.B. & U.S. Communications.

Wilson, A. (1998). Blueprint for Black power: A moral, political and economic imperative for the 21st century. New York: AWIS.

Wilson, A. (1993). The falsification of Afrikan consciousness: Eurocentric history, psychiatry and the politics of white supremacy. New York: AWIS.

Woodson, C. (1933). Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington: Associated Publishers.

Wright, B. (1984). The psychopathic racial personality and other essays. Chicago: Third World Press.

X, M. (1996). Sakhu sheti-ists: The illuminators of the divine Afrikan spirit. In K. Addae (Ed.), To heal a people: Afrikan scholars defining a new reality. Columbia, MD: Kujichagulia Press.

Copyright © 2003
Kwame Ture Youth Leadership Institute

Akpe for sharing AK and allowing me to share

[RecoveringAA]

Cool...glad it was ok to post this lenghty article BE~hind yours. When I saw your article, I went to my files..(on puter) cause I knew I'd seen it BE~fore. I think I have the article you posted as well.

This re~search, I had done some years ago while working on BE~coming a "Dr" in my field of study

Yeah..a for a moment I panicked thinking it was the SAME article...yet I see the Bredren did a follow up (my re~sponse).....to the original one (your post)

All in the name of BlaCkNifiIEnt Love of Afrikans home and abroad

[Akyeame Kwame]

Originally Posted by RecoveringAA

Cool...glad it was ok to post this lenghty article BE~hind yours. When I saw your article, I went to my files..(on puter) cause I knew I'd seen it BE~fore. I think I have the article you posted as well.

This re~search, I had done some years ago while working on BE~coming a "Dr" in my field of study

Yeah..a for a moment I panicked thinking it was the SAME article...yet I see the Bredren did a follow up (my re~sponse).....to the original one (your post)

All in the name of BlaCkNifiIEnt Love of Afrikans home and abroad

It's all Black $) stay BlackNificent!!!

AK