As I said, we can solve the over-population problem quickly … Yes! As I tell you, this world is always backwards you see, the ones who need to be reduced most drastically have the world thinking the other way around. Because a good deal of the problem sometimes is not the number of people in the world, but the number of “greedy” people in the world.
Where you have a so-called minority of people who consume the vast majority of the world’s resources. This large population that they talk about could eat better, if these minority of people weren’t eating everything up. And so to a good extent sometimes to have more for everyone to eat you have to get rid of the greedy ones. Ones who are over-consuming, who are taking the food out of other people’s mouths. But here you have a people that rob you and take everything you got and then say “you don’t have enough to support yourself, you’re a liability to the world” you know, this is the kind of a joke we got going out here. We’re going to come back to this issue of values.
But we’re going to talk a little bit about African-centered consciousness, personality and culture as an instruments of power. Because ultimately, this is what this whole struggle is all about; Power! Not loving one another and all those things we hear; Power! And to a great extent, the problems that we are confronted with today as African people flows from our “power-less-ness” or our inappropriate use of Power!
We have been made to even talk about it. We have been made to think that Power is sinful and to pursue it is a sinful pursuit. That it’s wrong to do so. But you cannot exist without Power. Without Power there’s no Life. A battery without power is dead.
You need Power to act, to behave in the world, to deal with the world, and consequently then we must interpret what we are about in terms of Power. And we have the Power ladies and gentlemen, we have the possibilities, we just need to reorganize ourselves, reorganize our consciousness and our personality, and our culture and see them as instruments of Power and use them as instruments of Power, to transform our situation.
So we shouldn’t look at consciousness as some abstraction. As I often tell people, the most practical thing you can have is a good theory, a good concept to guide your behaviour, to be used as an instrument, to measure reality as an instrument, to test reality.
A good theory then organises the world, organises one’s approach to the world. It permits one to be able to evaluate the world in terms of where one wants to go. In terms of what one wants to do.
To be without theory is to approach the world on an “ad-hoc” basis, you know just to meet it here and there, and to not approach it in a systematic form, to live “reactionarily,” always reacting to what other people are doing, always being overwhelmed by events and overwhelmed by the future, instead of creating events, and creating the future, and making the future and (setting the agenda).”
See when one has then a good theory, and a good concept, one is able to do that. Consciousness… without human consciousness there is no world. It is the presence of human consciousness that brings meaning into the world. Without human beings in this world, conscious human beings in this world, in effect there would not be a world. We bring the world into life through our consciousness.
And through our consciousness, we create the world we live in. Out of the totality of reality, our consciousness cuts our world at the fist itself. In other words, the kind of world you exist in reflects the kind of consciousness that you have. And notice if you change your consciousness or values and orientation, you enter into a different world. You interact with different people. People often you didn’t even know existed in the world. Social situations that you might not have even recognized until you entered into a new level of consciousness.
You see people, for instance who become addicted, say to crack or something, now enter into a whole new world, into a new social system that before they became addicted they hardly noticed. They didn’t know what it was all about. They picked up new friends, new relations, hold new ways of behaviour, hold new purposes in life. They lose old friends, break with old families and all kinds of things. In other words the consciousness, that addictive consciousness brought into the world a new foreground and put other things into the background.
Therefore, man’s consciousness is a creative act and the kind of consciousness you have will determine the kind of world you create. And consequently when you look at the world that we live in as African people we must recognize to a great extent that it is a world of our own creation. It is a world that has been generated with a type of consciousness we have been permitted to be instilled in us as a people.
As I told you earlier today on the radio, we talked about the white man as having power. And I want you to recognize that power ultimately has to do with a relationship between people, and that the white man’s so-called power is to a great extent based upon the nature of the relationship he has with the Black man. We empower him by the nature of our own behaviour and attitudes as a people. He cannot be what he is, as I said earlier, unless we are what we are, I’m telling you. To a good extent, the European is our creation … yes, un hunh, un hunh. If we look at our behaviour, we will see that to a good extent it is our behaviour, our values, our consciousness, the kind of personalities we have established in ourselves, our taste, our desires and needs; that maintains the European in his position.
Civil Rights Movements and the Alexandra Bus Boycott of 1957
We talk about the Civil Rights Movements, and the Apartheid system of the South (South Africa), when Blacks decided to just get out of the buses and just walk, the system changed, yeah, when they stopped sitting behind the white driver. Just changing that relationship changed the nature of power in that system. When they decided then to walk side by side, when they decided to walk abreast and line themselves up, because they had not walked that way before … for the ends to be fought, the relationship changed.
When they kept their monies in their pockets, when they sat on the chairs and blocked the other people from them and changed the nature of the interactions between themselves and Europeans; the nature of the system changed. So therefore we have tremendous Power. It depends upon how we align ourselves as a people, and how we decide to relate to other people in the world because they cannot have what they have unless we are who we are.
And that is why we don’t have to waste a great deal of time always appealing to them, analysing them because we can better appeal to our own sense of self and our own consciousness. However, we waste a lot of time trying to transform them. When through transforming ourselves they will be transformed automatically. The Power is in our hands.