Matrix or Third Eye: Red or Blue Pill for African Socialization

[XXPANTHAXX]

Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III


“We have been handed down a vision of a slave man roaming the desert sands - a perfect image of our hollowed chiefs today. Language he had not, not ours, and not his own. It had been voided out of him, his tongue cut out from his mouth. He pointed to the gaping captivity. Thinking he still had a soul, even mutilated, we imagined he was after sympathy. We were mistaken - he was pointing to the hole with pride. They who had destroyed his tongue, had put pieces of brass in there to separate the lower from the upper jaw. The slave thought the brass a gift. Its presences made sweet to him the absence of his tongue. He communicated his haughty pride to us, indicating in the sand with precise remembrance when he had achieved each piece of brass, what amazing things he had been made to do in order to be given them.”— Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons




“Power is the ability to define reality, and to get others to respond to that reality, as if it were their own.”— Wade Nobles



‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ While this may be true, fiction may contain profound truths. The popular film, The Matrix, is a metaphor that can be read many ways. It appears that Sophia Stewart’s novel, The Third Eye, is the source of the story in the movie, The Matrix. Regardless of the final outcome of the copyright infringement trial, the matrix metaphor can be applied directly to the experiences of Africans, especially over the last four hundred or so years.

Monday, October 4, 2004 ended a six-year dispute involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart's allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow residing. Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator, and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood, as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars [ . . . ] Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing The Matrix, which she felt had been based on her manuscript, The Third Eye, copyrighted in 1981. In the mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works. According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in an attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that “credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers.” These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been "often used during preparation of the motion pictures.” The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success [ . . . ] The reason you have not seen any of this in the media is because Warner Brothers parent company is AOL-Time Warner [. . . ] this GIANT owns 95 percent of the media [ . . .] New York Times papers/magazines, LA Times papers/magazines, People Magazine, CNN news, Extra, Celebrity Justice, Entertainment Tonight, HBO, New Line Cinema, Dreamworks, Newsweek, Village Roadshow [ . . . ] They are not going to report on themselves. They have been suppressing [the] case for years. (Milbauer)

Milbauer reports that some of Sophia Stewart’s fans found a book about the Greek Goddess of wisdom, Sophia, in which it is written, "The black goddess is the mistress of the web of creation spun in her divine matrix." So here we have a modern, living, wise Black Goddess, Sophia Stewart, creator of a profoundly wise metaphorical story. Now the wise queen is engaged in battle with the behemoth of information control, including African information, a virtual modern matrix.

Stewart [ . . . ] suing Warner Brothers. The parent company of Warner Brothers is AOL-Time Warner. They have a lot of influence and control of media outlets directly and indirectly, which includes some of the largest Black media outlets. Even on the web their tentacles stretch over to one of the most popular destinations for Blacks, Blackplanet.com. The Matrix represents the second highest grossing trilogy behind Lord of The Rings. Simultaneously, while Ms. Stewart was in court fighting for her case to be heard, The Matrix sequel hit theatres. The Matrix Reloaded (2003) was released and according to the Internet Movie Database became the 24th highest grossing movie of all time at $281,492,479. Combine that with domestic receipts of The Matrix (1999) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), and The Matrix has grossed near a billion dollars domestically. Taking into account international box office receipts and merchandising, The Matrix movies surpass the billion dollar mark and may have no equal outside of Star Wars. (Milbauer)

Named for the Greek God of dreams and sleep, Morpheus, a central character in the film story, finds Neo, a less than conscious resident of the matrix environment, where a virtual reality computer, the matrix, cultivates human beings, by feeding them false sensory information to serve the purposes of the computer. For this, the cultivated humans must be kept ignorant of the real world, and must come to believe only in the false world, the incubator; the illusion that pacifies them and robs them of agency.

Morpheus offers Neo a chance to break free from the matrix into reality, by offering Neo the choice of two pills, one red and one blue. With the red pill, Neo will come to understand how he and others are being cultivated and “played;” but this means that the “comfortable” routine environment of steady and reliable expectations will be gone, as reality sets in. Offering the red pill, Morpheus tells Neo, “Remember, all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.” On the other hand, by taking the blue pill, Neo can retreat to the externally controlled virtual reality matrix environment, where he will not know the truth, not have to take risks, not have to be vulnerable, and not have to be responsible. Morpheus also tells Neo, "You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged [from the matrix ] and many of them are so immured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
The parallels between the story in the movie, The Matrix, as derived from Sophia Stewart’s original story, The Third Eye, are compelling, even as are the parallels between Stewart’s struggle with the real world matrix of global multinational control and exploitation of humanity through the manipulation of information and communication. There is much to be said about the shaping of a virtual reality in general. However, my task here is to examine the socialization of African people today. It is my contention that this matrix story is not fictional, and that African people, globally, are in the clutches of virtual reality forces that are in the final stages of their project that began with the global enslavement of African people more than four hundred years ago.
The brutality of the terror of enslavement, colonization, and the creation of the controlling ideology of white supremacy is horrendous enough. Collectively, they constitute a matrix, a global matrix in the attempt to impose white supremacy on Africans, and others. Yet, even though the visible parts of these processes have diminished, the fact of white supremacist terror and domination has never been more real. These structures have morphed into quite different forms, and their delivery systems are clothed in new garments and described in new language. The chains, the whites only signs, apartheid enshrined in laws, segregated schools and public accommodations, even segregated cemeteries, etc. Are no longer visible, in general. Yet inside the domination matrix, Africans have settled into more or less comfortable routines, with challenges to the structures of control and domination disappearing at an alarming rate. We have claimed victory, as the overt rules, structures and symbols of apartheid have faded.
For the first time in the history of African people, our children are all but totally beyond our control, being raised inside global structures of domination and exploitation. This is the greatest single horror, as the normal human chain of African intergenerational cultural transmission has been, or is being, broken. Like true matrix dwellers, there is no panic among the inmates, little outrage, little fear, little resistance, and above all, no awareness of being in lockdown. Hence, there are no serious structures for mobilization for strategic information for strategic action to get out of the matrix and recover control over the socialization of our people. Our children have turned away from us toward the matrix for approval, legitimation, sustenance, and affection. The African family becomes more and more remote and less influential within the matrix, until neutered, our people lapse into a humdrum struggle for a meager existence. There can be no greater form of genocide than this - cultural AIDS.
Africans raised their own children for thousands of years before enslavement and colonization on the continent and in the Diaspora. Even during these twin terrors of domination actions, Africans retained a modicum of control and interconnection, even under the noses of slave and colonial masters. In the United States, Africans created independent schools at the supposed end of enslavement; struggled for a voice in segregated schools; struggled for community control of schools in “integrated school systems;” and struggled for the infusion of African content in school curricula and departments of African Studies or Black Studies on the campuses of higher education institutions.
Gradually African demands for a legitimate African-oriented education shifted towards demands for “compensatory education,” “un-tracking education,” “inclusion,” “social justice,” and “closing the gap” in education. At the same time, cultural socialization, which included schooling, but was not limited to it, declined. This meant that the goals of formal schooling beyond community control reached no higher than minimum competency in basic school subjects. Traditional matters of character, values, purpose and nurturing of spirit were moved farther toward the periphery, if indeed they remained at all. Finally, the schools that serve our children now are controlled almost exclusively by those outside of our communities, who almost universally hold low expectations for our children and low regard for our communities. The forms of deteriorating African control over socialization and schooling under colonial domination have differed, but the substance of control by colonizers remains. Mission schools, “government” schools, have crowded out the traditional systems, such that venerable indigenous systems are all but destroyed.
By considering a few simple things, the structure of domination and control of our schooling process can be seen very easily. By default, the schooling process is the largest part of the socialization process, which is shared by entertainment, the mass media and the culture of materialism and mass consumption. The current structure of matrix domination through schooling is reflected in numerous interlocking pieces in the United States, and to some degree in the whole western world:

*
* Institutions of higher education where teachers are trained
* Academic disciplines that create and legitimize the curriculum
* Agencies for certification of professionals in education
* Public policy makers
* Corporations that produce invalid standardized “intelligence” and “aptitude” tests that determine access to knowledge, and invalid standardized tests of “achievement” that confirm the legitimacy of knowledge
* Philanthropies that operate to set priorities, legitimize processes and leadership through grants, and position papers
* Think tanks that prepare and support scholars, consultants, models, advocates, and agendas
* Invalid standardized achievement tests
* Invalid standardized tests of “intelligence”
* Minimum competency “managed” instruction, mainly for low income ethnic minority populations
* Ideology that drives language, definitions, assumptions, models and structures rooted in materialism, industrialism, individualism, greed and injustice

These are but a few of the instrumentalities that are virtually without competition in the matrix, setting the direction for schooling, and by default, socialization. It must be said that the schooling/socialization molding of character, shapes students to master minimum competency skills, to be compliant, and to seek matrix-controlled approval.
We would be hard pressed to find anything in contemporary African communities remotely approaching the size, scope, legitimizing mechanisms, and dissemination vehicles represented by the list above. It is not so much that African communities cannot overcome challenges, even lacking fiscal and other resources; the most serious aspect of our condition is our lack of awareness of the matrix itself, and of its dehumanizing nature. We tend to accept what is as reality. The question of challenge is so remote as to be virtually nonexistent. Africans generally have come to see our struggle as one of gaining free access to all parts of the matrix, and not getting free of the matrix. Our family identity has weakened; our solidarity has as well. In fact, it is a demand of the matrix that we surrender family identity and solidarity.
While many of the forces that I have described above are more prevalent in the United States and in other predominately western countries, it is the whole African world that suffers from the cultural genocidal assault on African people. When the loan condition from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund imposed on a nation like Ghana, for example, is that it privatize the higher education system, or sterilize young women, even a semi-conscious African can see that the private corporations taking over the higher education system are culturally alien. This means effectively cutting the head from the body of the nation in the long run, and a de facto installation of purposes and values which Africans have no part in creating or choosing willingly. It is a blatant move to control African life, not aid.
In a mere two generations out of four hundred years of enslavement, stretching from the segregated systems of southern United States apartheid, to the “desegregated” or “integrated” (read disintegrated African communities) schools of today, from that perspective, nothing is more pitiful to witness than the rapid rate of the loss of the control over our children’s socialization. As a veteran educator, I recall vividly the sense of efficacy, independence, responsibility, commitment, vision, and determination of the vast majority of my teachers and school administrators. I recall vividly the intensity of community engagement and connections in and with schools on many levels. I remember schools in my segregated communities in Texas as engines of community solidarity and training grounds for leadership, in spite of their location in a white supremacist system. The bitter struggles for community control of schools during “school desegregation” or “school integration” provide examples of community identity, solidarity and supreme self-confidence, and grave suspicion toward those who dominated us. Now, I am saddened when I hear the new crop of African teacher/leaders who have known little to nothing of these communities, and who have been raised in the matrix, as they imbibe the language, theories, philosophies, labels, and structures of schooling:

1.
2. “School reform programs”
3. “Research based instruction”
4. “Data driven instruction, administration and leadership”
5. “Multiple intelligences”
6. “Brain-based” learning
7. “Diagnostic and prescriptive teaching”
8. “Implementing” fragmentary lessons from “staff development”


Yes, there can be some benefits from some of these efforts, minimal so far, but such benefits are far from assured. In fact, one of the greatest failures in the matrix is that those who use such language and set public policies based upon these models, rarely if ever have connected these intangibles to the production of outcomes in real life. In fact, some of the same think tanks that produce the content and structure of schooling in the matrix are the ones whose associates have produced the literature, such as The Bell Curve, and Culture Matters, arguing that excellence is impossible for Africans, whether continental or in the Diaspora. Yet Africans in the matrix, as true dwellers at home, not only do not challenge these structures of domination, but many actually defend these structures and become the advocates of these structures, placing all their faith in these destructive structures.
The real terror of the matrix is less the brutality of domination than the loss of knowledge of the greatness that we left behind; the knowledge that there is a valuable alternative to what is in the matrix; and the knowledge that “equal opportunity” within the matrix is not a worthy goal. An example from Sobonfu Somé illustrates the contrast:

A child is born. S/he comes into the world of nature, perhaps in a simple structure where bird song can be heard. The breath of life is blown into her nostrils by the midwife, and the child draws into herself this new world. A loving and supportive embrace of mother and family surrounds her from the first moment—there are more people who want to hold her than there are hours in the day. She hears the singing of women as they work around the lodges; she hears the singing of men in the fields or forest. The people around her in the community know how to get along well, and she learns these ways of relationship with ease. Love fills her days before she has a word for it. Often she is with her grandparents and other elders who share the stories of her family and the wisdom of her people. She grows up never knowing what separation means. She runs, plays, and explores among the living things around her, while the old ones tell her what they are—a healing plant, a herd animal, and a bird of great beauty. Her elders watch her and give her a tantalizing array of experiences and choices, so that her natural tendencies and gifts begin to show themselves. They look deeply into her spirit with their wise, Spirit-filled eyes. What she loves and who she is becomes clearly evident, and the uniqueness of her contribution to the people is seen and named and nurtured. The only code of the village is to support the highest intention and finest being of each person. Spirit is honored in the child and in all things. She becomes masterful at what she loves, and offers a great gift to her people, from her heart through her hands. (Sobonfu ix)

Alternatively:

A child is born. S/he comes into glaring brightness in a room with no windows, surrounded by the smell of chemicals. Her basic instinct is to be frightened, for her mother’s heartbeat has changed and the baby senses her stress. When she has passed through that challenging canal into the light of her own day, she is taken from her mother when she most needs the assurance of lying on that familiar heartbeat. Something stings her eyes. She is alone. Her crying brings no response, and she finally falls into an exhausted sleep, to wake up again alone in a crib. When she finally goes home with her mother, she is still alone much of the time. Her mother is alone and often exhausted, overwhelmed with caring for her and the rest of the family. There is no one there to help her [ . . . ] left all day in a strange place with a stranger who is busy with many other stressed and crying children [ . . . ] She adjusts. She draws into herself in a certain way. Her wishes feel like demands that are not being met, and hurt and anger enter before she has words for them. No one has time to watch her closely, to give her attention and individual experiences, to watch her response, to let her show what she loves. Home at night is full of tired people, still busy with chores at home after a long day of work. Television entertains her. Finally the whole family is together—around the TV, where someone else’s life or fiction or violence is being portrayed. None of the family stories or wisdom have been given her, and she grows up not knowing who she is. An adult has to drive her everywhere she goes, down busy streets and highways, and she is frightened to go outside alone. In school, she is asked to sit still, to be quiet, to control her natural tendencies and interests—her aliveness is dampened into obedience. She is molded to the structure around her, made to be a good little worker. Her rhythm is tuned to someone else’s needs. A bell rings and she has a small taste of freedom. Then back to her seat. She tries to pick some job she would like to do in her life. It doesn’t work out so well, because her days are dead and dull. Loud music and stimulants—coffee and the stronger things—help sometimes, but not for long. Sometimes she can’t even relax at night, and must take something to quiet herself and the dull ache in her head. So many current events, including the violence in our children’s schools, tell us clearly that we must pay more loving attention to our children, and to the community in which they are raised. No longer can we delude ourselves that a “prosperous” home, a “good” school, a “community” of non-relating individuals, and the TV can assure our children’s future. The way we live our lives is filled with loss—we are losing our greatest asset in not devoting ourselves to our upcoming generations; we are losing the true joy of life in having no real community; and we are losing tremendous help for our daily lives when we forget our ancestors. (Sobonfu ix-xiii)

Clearly, what we see reflected here are deep contrasting differences in how the world is viewed, our place in the cosmos, our connections to our communities and to our ancestors, and to our Creator. Cultural genocide and the fueling of ethnic cleansing is dehumanization and despiritualization by those who have no respect for Africans, perhaps even for humanity itself. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Identified materialism, racism, and militarism as the “triple evils” driving the western world. Africans everywhere have experienced these triple evils in enslavement, colonization, segregation/apartheid, and under the ideology of white supremacy. It is these evils that have produced and maintained the matrix. “Freedom” inside the matrix is an interesting notion to ponder indeed.
Harvard University associate professor Caroline Elkins has authored a telling story of the history of the Mau Mau, a liberation movement in Kenya that began with the Kikuyu resistance to the British colonizers. Elkins suspected the usual histories of the period were incomplete, at a minimum, and possibly incorrect. As Elkins observes, her research yielded documents that “told a seductive story about Britain’s civilizing mission during the last years of colonial rule in Kenya [ . . . ] According to the British colonizers, the Mau Mau were portrayed as a barbaric, anti-European, and anti-Christian sect that had reverted to tactics of primitive terror to interrupt the British civilizing mission in Kenya” (Elkins B 9).
The documents showed: “ [ . . . ] the detention camps were meant not to punish the rebellious Kikuyu but rather to civilize them. Behind the barbed wire, colonial officials were reportedly giving the detainees civics courses and homecraft classes; they were teaching the insurgents how to be good citizens and thus become capable of running Kenya sometime in the future. The colonial government did report some “one-offs” or “incidents,” as it called them, of brutality against the detainees (Elkins B 10).
So we see the construction of a matrix, and we see why. The Kenyans were colonized by the British and became “insurgents” and “terrorists.” They needed “civilization” and the British were prepared to give it, including formal instruction. The myth was spread about the hordes of Mau Mau attacking the British victims. However, as Elkins research proceeded, she discovered that the real story had never been told.

Over time I developed a certain sense that told me when something just didn’t seem right. For instance, given the sheer number of detainees referenced in the files, the official number of 80,000 detained began to seem more and more suspicious. Upon closer scrutiny it was clear that the British had provided misleading detention numbers, giving “daily average” figures that did not take into account all those detainees who had already entered and exited the camps. The number of Africans detained was at least two times and more likely four times the official figure, or somewhere between 160,000 and 320,000. Something else nagged at me about those numbers. Except for a few thousand women, the vast majority of the detention-camp population was composed of men, despite several files discussing the steadfast commitment of Kikuyu women to Mau Mau and their role in sustaining the movement. I soon realized that the British did detain the women and children, though not in the official camps but rather in some 800 enclosed villages that were scattered throughout the Kikuyu countryside. Those villages were surrounded by spiked trenches, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and were heavily patrolled by armed guards. Once I added all of the Kikuyu detained in those villages to the adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually detained some 1.5 million people, or nearly the entire Kikuyu population [ . . . ] Almost a decade after I started my research, I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau War, British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that portrayed a perverse colonial logic: Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people, and physically and psychologically atomizing its men, women, and children, could colonial authority be restored and the civilizing mission reinstated. To this day there has never been any form of official reconciliation in Kenya. There are no monuments for Mau Mau, children are not taught about that part of their nation’s past in school, few speak about it in the privacy of their own homes, and, with the exception of the relatives of the Hola Massacre victims, (the 11 detainees whom the British government acknowledged were beaten to death in Hola Camp in March 1959), there has certainly never been any kind of financial consideration given to those who lost family members in the camps and villages or property to the local loyalists. Some men and women lost the use of their limbs, others their minds, as a result of the years they spent behind the wire, though neither the former colonial government nor the new independent government did anything to help them piece their lives back together. (Elkins B 10-11)

What is interesting is that the Mau Mau struggle was in the 1950s and even years later up to today, Elkins found very few people in Kenya willing to talk openly about the Kikuyu liberation struggle. Without the kind of documentation that Dr. Elkins has provided, how else could we have a valid assessment of the roles of the colonizers and the colonized? This kind of scholarship is critically needed.

The final, lasting image of Britain’s moral war in the empire was not going to be revealed by thorough investigation into the torture, murder, and starvation of Kikuyu men, women, and children. Instead there was a great deal of sympathy, if not admiration, for the professional soldiers, British colonial officers, and ordinary settlers who had fought the terror of Mau Mau, even if that terror pushed them into casual brutality and violence. In the end, it was those representatives of the British colonial government who would be remembered as the victims of the battle to save civilization, not the “savage” Mau Mau adherents, not the Kikuyu people. ( Elkins B 11)

This same colonial story can be told all across the African continent. The point is that the greed that produces domination through colonization or enslavement also produces falsehood, an essential component of the matrix. Any honest reading of the record will show that barbarism is the handmaiden of the dominators, not its victims. The truth is that Africans outside of and prior to the matrix produced thousands of years of excellence in schooling and socialization, and later kept much of it going under terroristic conditions, and even achieved despite the virtual “supermax” [maximum security] lockdown. The truth is that the genius of Africans has never been destroyed. If Africans “take the red pill,” choosing self-determination outside the matrix, the severe disadvantages that we suffer may be overcome. Well-planned strategic action can be enormously successful, even in the face of the behemoths of global control. The greater the unity of African people, and the greater their commitment to African purposes and values, the more likely we will be able to make the sacrifices that are required for self-determination, such as curbing our waste of resources in uncritical consumerism.
The challenge to Africans who choose the red pill is straightforward. We must begin by a return to our traditional cultural foundation, and build from there. Any departure from that should be made only as a result of study and consensus. We do not come to this time as empty vessels. There is no matrix that serves human ends. We are people of spirit, values, and destiny. This must be our point of departure. Those who take the blue pill will never know wholeness. We must bow to no other people, and depend on no others. We need no more centuries of mindless habits. We must vow not to be played.
Ironic, is it not, that Sophia Stewart, a Black woman, conceived of the matrix metaphor, and was herself victimized by a real matrix led by the masters of illusion. The Third Eye, Stewart’s work, from which the ideas for the movie, The Matrix were apparently stolen, is understood to be the center of the deepest vision. The third eye is an African eye. In ancient Kemet [Egypt], Tehuti is that aspect of God who gives Asar’s son, Heru, the eye back that had been taken from him by his evil uncle Set, who had crucified Asar. Tehuti healed. For us today, it is healing time. If the choice is to stay inside the matrix by taking the blue pill, or self-determination, by leaving the matrix to its creators by “taking the red pill,” what sane African would choose the matrix? — Baffour Amankwatia II (Asa G. Hilliard III), March 2005

“It is impossible to continue to oppress a consciously historical people.” — Dr. John Henrik Clarke Maa Kheru




SOURCES
Armah, Ayi Kwei. Two Thousand Seasons. Chicago: Third World
Press,1979.

Connah, Graham. African Civilizations: Precolonial Cities and
States in Tropical Africa: An Archaeological Perspective.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic
Anthropology. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.
—. African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Westport:
Lawrence Hill and Company, 1974. (See especially
Chapter 3: The Modern Falsification of History, pp. 43-84.)
Elkins, Caroline. “A ‘Civilizing’ Mission in Late Colonial
Kenya.”The Chronicle of Higher Education. B 9-11. 21.
January 2005. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Complete Contents

Fu-Kiau, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki. African Cosmology of the
Bantu Kongo: Tying the Spiritual Knot, Principles of Life
and Living. New York: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001.
Milbauer, Gil. “Black Author Wins Matrix Copyright
Infringement.” April 3, 2005. A Reasonable Man
Ngubane, J. K. Conflict of Minds: Changing Power Distribution in
Southern Africa. New York: Books in Focus, 1979.

Obenga, Theophile. African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period:
2700-330 BC. Popoguine: Ankh Books, 2005.
(www.perankhbooks.info)

Saad, Ellis. The Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim
Scholars and Notables 1400-1900. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Somé, Sobonfu E. Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African
Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community. Novato:
New World Library, 1999.

[I_ziz]

Originally Posted by XXPANTHAXX

Yet Africans in the matrix, as true dwellers at home, not only do not challenge these structures of domination, but many actually defend these structures and become the advocates of these structures, placing all their faith in these destructive structures.
The real terror of the matrix is less the brutality of domination than the loss of knowledge of the greatness that we left behind; the knowledge that there is a valuable alternative to what is in the matrix; and the knowledge that “equal opportunity” within the matrix is not a worthy goal.

The truth is that the genius of Africans has never been destroyed. If Africans “take the red pill,” choosing self-determination outside the matrix, the severe disadvantages that we suffer may be overcome. Well-planned strategic action can be enormously successful, even in the face of the behemoths of global control. The greater the unity of African people, and the greater their commitment to African purposes and values, the more likely we will be able to make the sacrifices that are required for self-determination, such as curbing our waste of resources in uncritical consumerism.
The challenge to Africans who choose the red pill is straightforward. We must begin by a return to our traditional cultural foundation, and build from there. Any departure from that should be made only as a result of study and consensus. We do not come to this time as empty vessels. There is no matrix that serves human ends. We are people of spirit, values, and destiny. This must be our point of departure. Those who take the blue pill will never know wholeness. We must bow to no other people, and depend on no others. We need no more centuries of mindless habits. We must vow not to be played.

Beautiful words my brother. Truly inspirational. I give thanks for the time u took to write this post.

I have recently met a bredda born and raised in The Gambia who has recently come to live inthe UK. He told me when he first arrived and saw the homeless people and beggars on the streets of London- he broke down and cried.

He cried because all his life he had been lied to and told that there were no homeless people in the west and that there was no poverty. The British colonisers are telling Afrikans that people in the west have everything - food, clothes ,shelter, education etc. Sickening.

Keep distributing the "red pills" XXPanthaXX. Big up yourself. Raaspect.

[sadin eroz]

No words to respond, that was very enlightening and a joy to read thank you.

[Jacuma]

Originally Posted by I_ziz

Beautiful words my brother. Truly inspirational. I give thanks for the time u took to write this post.

I have recently met a bredda born and raised in The Gambia who has recently come to live inthe UK. He told me when he first arrived and saw the homeless people and beggars on the streets of London- he broke down and cried.

He cried because all his life he had been lied to and told that there were no homeless people in the west and that there was no poverty. The British colonisers are telling Afrikans that people in the west have everything - food, clothes ,shelter, education etc. Sickening.

Keep distributing the "red pills" XXPanthaXX. Big up yourself. Raaspect.

All praise belong to Ancestor Baba Asa Hillard