Revolutionary Daily Thought

[Baba Ahmed]

"Behind the horrid crimes of the West lies a narcissism which brooks no other image but that of its face in the mirror of the world.

It is a narcissism which suffers acute pain in the face of human variety, which feels insecure over diffrences which would make sane cultures rejoice in the bounteous variety of creation.

It is a narcissism which drives the West on a mission of cultural homogenization, a mission to reduce all cultures to replicas of its own. Whatever that narcissism cannot destroy it seeks to dishonor, despise and devalue under contemptuous hierarchies of creed, culture and color."

Chinweizu
The West and the rest of us

[Baba Ahmed]

Those Africans who are so eager to flee into any of these allegedly universal, colour blind communities (Christendom, Dar el Islam, the world proletariat) tend to cower at the thought of being accused of anti-racist racism by their white friends


Chinweizu (1986). Decolonising the African mind; p.168. London, England: SUNDOOR

[Im The Truth]

"The idea of the Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country's prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustrations of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people. "

--Assata Shakur

[Baba Ahmed]

"A national consciousness is a political consciousness in which members of a group understand themselves as sharing a common destiny, based on a shared cultural history and racial origin.

An African national consciousness exists when we identity with Africa, as a symbolic point of origin, a mothering or creative principle, which determines our collective being. We want what is best for our people (Afrocentricity) and we 'think' with an African mind."

Marimba Ani
"The African Aesthetic and National Consciousness"

[Baba Ahmed]

"It is, consequently, through our ability to critique and refute destructive and erroneous ideas that we are able to defend ourselves from the behavior and conditions which are the consequences of those ideas.

Similarly, it is through our ability to create and develop ideas conducive to our own growth and development that we are able to reinforce those behaviors and conditions which affirm and protect our well being."

Wade W. Nobles
Africanity and The Black Family

[Baba Ahmed]

"Only when the lie is accepted as truth, only when a false projection is seen as a fact by virtue of its having been put forth by the ultimate validators of truth and reality...can it be internalized and utilized by targeted African Americans to accordingly structure their personalities and interpersonal relations in ways that permit White American projected expectations to fulfill themselves."

Amos N. Wilson
Black-on-Black Violence

[Baba Ahmed]

"Moreover, the Afrikan educator must be a Pan-Afrikanist, making students understand that all peoples of Afrikan descent have a common heritage that bonds us and that all Afrikans are responsible for liberating Afrika and Afrikans.
To do this, the educator must encourage students to return to our Afrikan roots spiritually, historically, psychologically and, ultimately physically. This is the key to Afrikan liberation.

We, as a people, must become Afrikan again and reclaim both the legacy and land of our ancestors.

We must realize that we are the children of the same people who founded civilization, built the pyramids, defined science, and gave the world religion, medicine, and other human essentials. When we can tap into our spiritual life-force, no force on this planet can prevent us from self-determination.

Students must learn this.

The educator must also make students understand the universal struggle between Afrikans and the European power-structure."

Zak A. Kondo
His-storical Lies and Myths that Miseducate Black People

[Baba Ahmed]

"The European American community's drive to disguise and conceal their culpability and guilt in the destruction and oppression of Africans through their collective-societal institutional arms requires American society (both Whites and it's Black victims as well) to operate in a kind of 'collective psychosis.' Everyone appears to operate in a blatant denial of the true history of Africans in America and the continuing contemporary legacy of that history, which allows Whites to feel secure and positive about themselves, and to project themselves to the world as the apex/standard of civility and high culture (with the implied beneficial psychological, economic, political, spiritual, etc., outcomes for everyone). Thus, maintenance of the psychological comfort level of European supremacy in American society requires (or demands, in fact) this kind of collective denial or 'psychotic' behavior and functioning among Africans in virtually every aspect of American life.
Consequently, the Black race in America is literally forced to, and is reinforced (rewarded/applauded, etc.) for functioning in a state of collective/mass psychosis. Within this context, Africans in America are reinforced for suppressing and/or denying their true racial-cultural identity and history (i.e., their integrity as human beings), for remaining ignorant of their true history and culture in the world, and for internalizing as much as possible of a Eurocentric consciousness.

This is, in my view, the ultimate statement of psychological-cultural oppression which is illustrated by the African psychological predicament in America and throughout the world."

Kobi K.K. Kambon
Cultural Misorientation

[Baba Ahmed]

"When you're still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have always been these silly little fragments....Forgetfulness helps the diseased cross over the time of greatest pain....In that case forgetfulness works towards health. But when the period of forgetfulness is prolonged unnaturally, then it doesn't work towards health. It works towards death."

Ayi Kwei Armah
The Healers

[Baba Ahmed]

"The true nationalist not only educates the wounded egos of adults, but also educates its young. We see many of our nationalist organizations concerning themselves weekend after weekend with the education of grown people. That's fine and is a part of the education and advancement of the race. But we must recognize that we have to educate our young as well and that the true survival of the race must couple the education of the parents with the education of the children.

Nationalist organizations that are concerned almost exclusively with the education of adults and not with the education of children are practicing a nationalism that is incomplete."

Amos N. Wilson
Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus The New World Order. Garveyism in the Age of Globalism

[Baba Ahmed]

"One is fully conscious when he or she is the result of having been informed and instructed by the experience of his or her ancestors and use that knowledge to master, understand and become able to create institutions that allow him or her to live in harmony with the rest of nature and the universe."

James Small

[Baba Ahmed]

"Any effort on the part of the powerless to take power is criminal....Any effort by the powerful to hold the powerless in bondage and oppression is the preservation of law and order....The difference between a criminal act and an acceptable act lies only in whether you win or lose."

Albert B. Cleage, Jr.
The Black Messiah

[Baba Ahmed]

"In any serious attempt at African renaissance it would be necessary to dig through that debris, down to the cultural bedrock of pre-European Africa, and there inspect our cultural foundations so we can reconnect with suitable strands of our cultural trajectory....it is a template against which the realities we inherited at independence could be tested for gains and distortions."

Chinweizu
The West and the rest of us

[Baba Ahmed]

"Black people who want above all things not to be black are the most pitiable and comical people in the world."

Gwendolyn Brooks

[Baba Ahmed]

"It is very important to understand this breach between word and deed, as it were, since people from other cultures often make costly political errors because of the lack of this rhetorical and hypocritical component in their own culture. They misinterpret European language and fail to predict European behavior. They are always therefore shocked by the intensity of the hostility and aggressive nature of that behavior."

Marimba Ani
Yurugu