A million reasons why black South Africans should destroy the apartheid economy and completely cut ties with the West - particularly US and Britain

Lecture by Dr Amos Wilson

When we say that we are being inculturated, it means a spirit is being implanted in us by the culture. It means our groups are instilling in our bodies, and in our minds, a possessing spirit, such that when our culture calls our name we respond to it.

When our culture is in need of defense and support, we then defend it and support it, because we are at one with it. In other words why does the Black man respond to the white man? Why does the Black man serve the white man?

Why does everything the Black man do benefit the white man? Why does the Black man say: “Freedom is doing what I want to do?” Yet everything he wants to do enriches a European? Lectures Dr Amos Wilson...

We aren’t as complicated as any other people. And one of the things we sometimes underestimate to the degree we must address ourselves as a people, and too often we have some that think that our issues and the things that we have to deal with can be described in 25 words or less.

So there are people who think we are small people … small minded people. So they don’t have to write sometimes some sizeable material. If other nations and other peoples require libraries to deal with their issues, so do we. The interesting thing coming up about the book is, with that eighteen hundred pages, it’s basically a survey, looking at various areas of life. If you recall, we titled it “Blueprint For Blackpower.” And we are essentially trying to lay out a blueprint, a prescriptive book.

Now we are coming into more and more prescriptive type of writing. Laying out very practical kinds of steps, and very practical methods for achieving what it is we must achieve as African people.

This means we have to cover a lot of territory. We’re covering Psychology, we covering History, Sociology, and a great deal of Political Science, a great deal of Economics and related fields, and Anthropology and so forth, because all of these have to be combined in the process of Nation building. And this is what we really have to be about, the process of building a Nation as a people.

If you are not thinking in terms of Nationhood, then I must say frankly, you are not thinking seriously of being liberated. Trying to integrate and merge with our enemies is not going to solve our problem, and it’s not going to happen, as a matter of fact. It is a fantasy that has kept us from taking care of business for far too long.

The idea that one day we’re going to be one with these people, that we’re going to merge into invisibility with these white folk is unrealistic. And even if that were possible, we should question our motives for wanting to do so. Why would you want to merge with the world’s greatest criminals and thieves, with the people who has had the worst values the world has ever known.

It amazes me sometimes how we can hear some of our parents telling our children we want to be just like them … yeah, it’s a joke. It’s an insult to hear Dan Quayle or to hear President Bill Clinton come and lecture Black folk on values….How dare we let these people into our Churches to try to lecture us, on values…un huh, un huh …it’s an amazing situation, to try to talk to us about “values.” [Side Note: As we publish this lecture, in South Africa these criminals and thieves are all over TV and radio trying to teach the ANC about values! Can you believe it!]

To try to talk to us about “population control,” another joke… The first thing we think about when they talk about population control, is the over production of African people, so called third-world people.

As I said, we can solve the over-population problem quickly … we could reduce the European population drastically.” 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 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 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,” [Side Note: In South Africa they have an audacity to call Black people corrupt, yet the only thing they brought here is the Bible and their hairy arses] 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.

For now we’re going to talk a little bit about African-centered consciousness, personality, and culture as instruments of power. Because ultimately, this is what this whole struggle is about. Power! Not loving one another and all those things we hear. 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’ve been made to even talk about it. We’ve been made to think that Power is sinful, and the pursuit of it is a sinful act, and that it’s wrong. But you can not 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. All we just need is to reorganize ourselves, recognise our potential, reorganize our consciousness and rearrange our personality and our culture and see them as instruments of Power. 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 behavior, to be used as an instrument, to measure reality as an instrument to test reality. A good theory then organizes the world, organizes 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. 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, saying, always being overwhelmed by events reported on TV and radio, and overwhelmed by the future, instead of creating events, setting up the agenda and creating the future, making the future.”

See when one has then a good theory, and a good concept, one is able to do lots of things. 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 being 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 say for instance, who become addicted, say to crack or something, and now enter into a whole new world and into a whole new social system, that before they became addicted, they hardly noticed, they didn’t know what it was all about, and they picked up new friends, and new relations, hold new ways of acting, hold new purposes in life, they lost old friends, broke 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 and new into perspective

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, 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 behavior and attitudes as a people. He can not 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 behavior, we will see that to a good extent, it is our behavior, our values, our consciousness, the kind of personalities we’ve established in ourselves, our taste, our desires and needs; that maintains the European in its position.

We talk about the Civil Rights Movement, and the Apartheid system of South Africa in the ‘50s, when Blacks decided to just get out of the buses and just walk, “Azikhwelwa izimoto zabelungu” they said and walked, 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.

                        1957 "Azikhwelwa" Bus Boycott, Alexandra, Johannesburg

When they decided to keep their monies in their pockets, when they set out on the streets and blocked the other people from riding them buses, and changed the nature of the interaction 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 can not 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, and analyzing them, because we can better appeal to our own sense of self, and our own consciousness, and 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. We are not destined to be the servants of white folk. That is not the destiny of Black folk, no way. And we have to change this idea, because many of us are still operating on that concept, as I said earlier, many of us go to these schools to become what, qualified, to work for whom, them.

Why do we assume that they going to have the jobs for us …yes, these people are having difficulty making jobs for themselves. The greatest problem that the European is facing today, and the European economies are facing today, is that they are not even generating enough jobs for their own people. And even though America is bragging about the millions of jobs it’s creating, those jobs are part-time jobs, the bulk of them are part-time jobs, low-wage jobs, and jobs that have little or no future.

So when people talk about creating jobs, you have to ask, what kind of jobs are being created. That is why of course the system is not investing in Black education. It no longer needs Black people for its employment structure. You see it bringing in people from outside of the nation to be employed. Already it has reached the point where its need for Black males is pretty much saturated. And it is literally then warehousing us in the jails and prisons and provoking us to kill each other and destroy each other out here in these streets. And yet we are still organizing the education of our children, as if the white man still has jobs waiting for them in multitudes.

How different our education would be, if we sent our children to school to create jobs for themselves. To create their economical and political systems. To see themselves as the major sources of their employment. As I remarked earlier today while we were in the radio station; I heard something about, some people out here … protesting for jobs, and pushing these other people for jobs and I ask the question: Do we know how many jobs we really create for other people. We are a job creating people. We don’t realize it because we don’t think in terms of nation, you see.

If we saw ourselves as a nation, you can see that we create jobs like any other nation. As I mentioned that today; how many jobs are created by Black music? Yeah! Look at the whole structure of the music industry, from promoters to manufacturers of the records and the tapes and what have you … to a whole entertainment field, to the sellers of music in the stores i.e. the Tower Records and the other great sellers of records and music and so forth.

Advertisers that are using our music and such. How many thousands of jobs are we creating as people? We’re creating them, but they have them, you see. We sing the music, they sell it. We sing the music, they market it. We sing the music, they promote it, you see. We sing the music, they produce great conglomerates like Sony, CBS Music, creating all kinds of jobs, we’re creating tremendous jobs for a lot of people. How many jobs are we creating just by buying from South Koreans … buying from other ethnic groups out here? How many people are we creating employment for in terms of our spending habits as a people, and our consummation habits? How many jobs are we creating going to jail? We’re creating all kinds of jobs and wealth. And we must come to understand this.

We are creating these jobs, yet we are begging for jobs. This means then somewhere, our consciousness has been impaired. We are begging for what we are making already. We cannot use our own creations as a source of our own wealth. I told you earlier today, the Creator could not have intended for us, as African people, to be a poor people, if the Creator implanted within our soils all the wealth that was planted there. We talk about the minerals, the oils and the golds, and the this, and the that, that’s implanted in African soil, so it seems as though the Creator blessed us from the very beginning with wealth and possibility.

Therefore, for us to be going hungry over this wealth, and to be starving in the midst of it, and to be perceived as a dependent, indebted people, while our wealth is being shipped out to other people, we’re actually selling a lot of it for pennies and nickels and dimes or less, means there’s something wrong with our consciousness. Because ultimately ladies and gentlemen we’ve said what, “that the wealth of a people is ultimately not in their land, but where is it, it’s in the mind,” the wealth of man is in his mind, in his consciousness, gotta look at it.

And we mentioned the example of Japan. No mineral wealth to speak of whatsoever, nothing at all, a nation by the way which is totally dependent, “of course we get things backwards don’t we,” we see ourselves as depending on Europeans, when the reality is the other way around, when they depend on us. We have to be backwards in order for this situation to be the way it is. Our reality has to be turned backwards, and we have to live in an almost permanent state of deception, in order to be used the way we are used.

The Japanese must depend on others for their vital resources, their oil, their timber, and all of these things they use to create their technology and so forth, is taken from the soils of other people and then sold back to them, and yet they are seen as rich and powerful, and the people whose wealth they take or buy are seen as poor and poverty stricken. Ultimately then, you can not rob, or take from, wealth from, a what, poor people. You can not get wealth from a poverty stricken people, people who have nothing, you can get nothing from.

So if you’re getting all your diamonds, and your gold, and your magnesium and all of this other stuff, from African people, that means that African people must be what? Wealthy and rich, and therefore if African people are poverty stricken with this material wealth, then it must be that our consciousness as a people must be impoverished.

Then we are suffering then, from an impoverishment of our mentality. As we have said before; if you have a good mind, you can con another joker out of his land, you can con him out of his diamonds and his gold, and this is what the other people have done. They have used their mind and their cleverness and taken from us what they did not have, originally. Therefore consciousness is not an abstract concept, it is not a theoretical concept, it is a concept that is directly related to the reality that one lives in, and to the reality that one experiences. It is directly related to the type of life one will live and does live. So I’m going to look at this for a minute, particularly the consciousness of Africans in America.

I’m often somewhat amused and taken aback, by the number of people in this society, who claim that slavery occurred somewhere back there, that … and you got some so called Black conservatives, who claim slavery no longer influences the nature of African people. [Side Note: In South Africa these Uncle Toms/New Negroes say we can’t blame the apartheid system 25 years into our democracy for our problems, when we are dealing with a 350 year old legacy of black oppression. Which proves the fact correct that before they are initiated into this House Nigger satanism to hate themselves, they undergo a ritual where they are made to eat white racist’s faeces. According to converted Satanist Emmanuel Amos; it is very much part of satanism ritual to eat human excreta]. 

I wonder what those people have to conserve in the first place! Are they conserving power? Are they conserving wealth? What does a Black conservative [Side note: aboma-BEEs in South Africa’s hustle lingo] conserve? You know, you gotta conserve something. And since they have very little, if anything, they must only be conserving the system that has created their poverty to begin with. And you see them ultimately justifying the poverty of African people, and justifying the political and socio-economic subordination of African people in the name of some kind of higher principle hoax.

So slavery is not supposed … the experience of slavery is not supposed to be operating in the mentality of Black folk. You hear a lot of our youngsters who say that as well. How do you talk about slavery … that was back there, or you hear whites talk about it, well that was back there, we don’t have anything to do with that anymore, you see. And this is an amazing situation because you have to remind them that you are still living off the interest of the wealth that your forefathers earned from slavery, you’re still enjoying the accumulated wealth that began with the enslavement of our people, and if you are going to enjoy the wealth that was generated by evil, then you must take the curse that comes along with it.

And therefore, even though you personally had nothing to do with it, but because you have received stolen goods [Side Note: in the context of South Africa you are still in possession of stolen land]; you must pay the price as well. And because you fight and struggle to protect those stolen goods, and you defend them, and you organize your society and your relationship with certain elements of our own people to maintain them, and to continue to enhance them, then you must pay the price. That’s why you live in terror. That’s why you get shot, stabbed and robbed in the streets and stolen farms. That’s why you’re going to suffer no matter how good you are, no matter how liberal you are, hunh unh hunh.”

Ladies and gentlemen, when we behave as adults, we must recognize that our behavior will be visited upon our children, and that our children will pay for our misbehavior. What we say and do does not end at the point of its occurrence, it continues to reverberate into the future, and down across the generations. And that’s why when you behave in a particular way, you have to think in terms of seven generations from your behavior as to how what you are going to do, is going to affect those generations later on.

And even though these white children may appear to be so-called innocent, they will still pay the price of your own misbehavior as a white parent. This country whose parents and adults have misspent its treasure, and while they have enjoyed that treasure, ultimately their children will have to pay the taxes and will have to pay the price.

So we have a bunch of people out here, who think they can rape and rob the world, who think they should enslave the world and sleep well at night. It doesn’t work that way. So we have some of our people in here, who think then that slavery was back then, and it had nothing to do with today’s situation … it had nothing to do with them. Ladies and gentlemen we’ve never escaped slavery!

We still share the slave consciousness of our great-great grandparents. We are of the same mind to a great extent that they were. We have not advanced beyond these people. How can I say that? I generally ask a series of questions. You say slavery has nothing to do with you, that slavery was back there, and I ask you the question then: “What language do you speak?” When did you learn that language? Was that the language African people were speaking when we were taken into slavery in America? In other words, the language we speak, the language we speak at this moment, is what? A slave language! The language our enslaved ancestors were forced to learn, and we still speak it, and you can still hear, the Pigeon, the Creole, and the other kinds of stuff in our language right at this moment that they had to go through.

That language with its words defined by history and by an experience is the language we use today to guide our behavior, is the language we use today to talk to ourselves, is the language we use today to learn about ourselves and to learn about the world, is the language we use today to try and understand ourselves. No wonder then that we are still confused. So we have not escaped slavery because we are still using a slave language, and we speak the language of slaves.

What kind of food do you eat? You say soul food. Was that the food of African people? It was slave food. The food that we find most satisfying, the food we find sticks to our ribs, the food that we call down home, a food that we learned to eat in the quarters, and yet we dare say that we have escaped slavery, that we have nothing to do with those people back there, that, that was back there.

When our whole very social life and social relationships, our very definition of ourselves as a people, our very attempt to commune with ourselves is mediated by the food of slaves, you understand what I’m trying to get at, and how can you say you exist in a different consciousness from another people. What kind of uniforms are we wearing, huh? What kind of clothes are we wearing? Huh? Were these the clothes of African people? Huh? This is what we gotta look at. Yes. What is this? To say that we have escaped slavery. What kind of names do we respond to? Yes… Tameka and all these other things we’ve got going out here. What kind of names do we identify with? Why is it that African names sound strange to us now as a people? And yet we dare say that we have a different consciousness, from our great slave grandparents. How can we say that?

We are still of the same consciousness. And we’re still in the same position because we are still servants of the white man, and our reason for being in America is to serve white folk, and to generate wealth for them, and there has been no change at all, in terms of our relationship to these people. [Side Note: In South Africa 25 years into democracy, Blacks are still working for white people, yet they claim they are free!]

The values that we pursue are slave values and the values of servants. The social relations that we create and interact with, were built and developed during the periods of slavery. We have not escaped it at all. But now it is time for us to change this slave consciousness. This consciousness of servitude, that is still too much with us today. And ultimately we ask the question that’s close to home for a lot of people, when we’ve claimed that we’ve escaped slavery, and that slavery was something back there, which has nothing to do with us today.

Somnambulistic Possession

It’s interesting. You look at the literature on possession, we have a couple of types of possession; one is called a somnambulistic possession, somna having to do with in this instance, sleep, you hear it in the word somanex; ambulistic, to move around, ambulatory, right. So we are talking about people who are what, sleep-walking.

They not awake but their walking around. The body is moving, and it is walking in an organized fashion, and walking systematically, but the person is still asleep. And in Somnambulistic possession then, the individual’s original self has been repressed and displaced, and he identifies with the spirit that possess him. And his eye, and the spirits eye, are one and the same.

We have a lot of that here today. We have the spirit that has been implanted into us, we have taken it to be us and we’ve identified with it. That is why in defending ourselves, we end up defending the people who rule over us. In defending our ego, we end up maintaining the social structure that has destroyed our ego to begin with. And you see it in our youngsters, who will fight and kill in the name of respect, and fight because their egotistic orientation has been insulted, and therefore in defending their ego, they do not kill the people who destroy their ego, they kill each other, and maintain the ones who destroyed them in the first place in power.

And that’s why the subtitle of my book, Black on Black Violence, which is “The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation In Service of White Domination,” we are dealing with the subject of killing each other, in order to maintain this system. We have let ourselves become possessed by a spirit, such that when we become aggressive, we aggress against the self, instead of those who are the source of our aggressive orientation.

We talk a lot as a people about self-hatred, self-hatred is a personality configuration. It is a form of personality organization. It is an organization towards the world and towards one’s self. Self-hatred then is the white man’s greatest protection against being destroyed by the Black man, to a good extent, self-hatred, is the white man’s defense mechanism. It is the white man’s form of self-defense.

How can we say that?

To a great extent, one function of the personality is to direct energy, to direct aggression, to channel aggression, and energy, and wishes and impulses in particular directions. To organize feelings, to organize, to organize energy to achieve certain ends. Those things that we hate, when we often then are angry or hostile we aggress against them. Don’t we? We attack them often. We destroy them.

But then we have a problem, don’t we? If we attack the things we hate, if we attack the things towards which we hold hostility, when we are overly frustrated and we are angry, then what happens if that thing we hate is ourselves. It means that ladies and gentlemen that when we become frustrated and angered as a people, when we are overwrought with feelings of hostility; when our self-hating personality seeks to channel that hostility, that aggression, it’s going to channel it right back on to the self, because that’s the thing we hate most.

So consequently, Black anger then becomes a conduit for Black self-destruction, for Black self-defeat. The object of our hostile aggressive feelings becomes ourselves. And you can see then how the white man is protected by that personality structure. Right? While he stokes our anger. While he stokes our hostility. While he stokes our frustration and when we get mad and want to strike out - when we decide to strike out and aggress, we strike out and aggress against the self, and by doing so, he is left untouched and unscathed. And therefore, our self-hatred becomes his principle means of defending himself and maintaining himself.

One of the things that frighten him most about the Collin Ferguson case, [A black man who went into a train in America and mowed down a number of white people in the mid ‘90s], was that the Ferguson self-hatred mechanism broke down. Unlike many deaf, dumb and blind negroes, [Side Note: Like Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa] he knew who his enemies were. And so when he got angry and hostile, instead of going out to drink himself to death, instead of going out to smoke crack and destroy himself, instead of going out to kill someone who looks like himself, instead of going out to commit suicide and put himself in the place to be destroyed by somebody else, he went directly to the source of his frustration and killed him.

And this is what frightened these white racists. They were wondering how many more are out there conscious like that. Are they increasing? Yes. So you can see why the seed of self-hatred is planted in the minds of the Black man. We spend a lot of time speaking about what it does to us, but we gotta look at it closely, because as I have told you before, every male adaptive characteristic, in the Black Psyche, is there for white folk’s manipulation.

I tell people when you analyze the so-called aberrations (a departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome) in the Black personality, you must always ask the question: What are the social functions and roles, who benefits from these aberration in the Black man’s mind? What is the social, political, and economic benefits. And for whom? Who gains from this particular orientation in our minds? Then you begin to see why it’s there and what its function is. And so every complaint we have about ourselves has a political, economical and social intent beneficial to white folk and detrimental to ourselves.

And that means then somewhere along the way we became possessed by these wayward orientations as they were implanted in our personalities. We have come to identify with them, as our natural selves, as our natural orientation. We have assumed they represent who we are, and we have now then found many ingenious ways to defend the demons that possess us. And ultimately then; those demons destroy us, they have us destroy others who look like ourselves.

Lucid Possession

There’s another form of possession. We call it lucid possession. In this sense; the person at least has a sense of self. They have the sense that there’s another spirit in them and they wrestle with that spirit, sometimes losing the battle. Every now and then they become obsessed with their struggle with the spirit, and in a sense then, are disenabled by that struggle. So some of us are in that state. Neither coming nor going. We’re not quite satisfied with the identity we have. We know somehow that there’s a deeper African self in us. We are also aware that there’s a “eurocentricity” implanted demon in us, and we wrestle with it daily.

There’s another type of possession we talk about here, and that’s Spontaneous. What has sort of occurred spontaneously against our will. This is in contrast to one we talk about as artificial. One deliberately created. What do we mean by that? When we go into a particular social setting, such as a church, or such as a rock concert or the like, and we go through a set of rituals and behavior, we then go through these behaviors, rituals and songs and dance as a means of deliberately being possessed, by what, the spirit, and having our bodies taking over, and being possessed and then say we feel what, the spirit. We feel the spirit living within us, and so consequently much of our likes, is about provoking through artificial means, spirits which take over us, and assume control of our behavior.

Split Personalities and European demons

Then there is Latent possession, which means when we are possessed, we don’t even know that we are possessed. I think that defines a lot of us, although we are not even aware, and those are the hardest ones to break through, because they don’t sense any kind of split within the personality. In their possessing spirit they are one and the same. And when you try to exorcise their possessive spirit, they feel as if you are attacking them personally. And in defending their person, they defend the spirit that possesses them. [Side Note: This is the spirit that possesses a House Nigger.]

Let’s be a little bit more concrete. And I want to just give you an example of what I mean by this. In literature we talk about these spirits as what we call the incubi and the succubi. The spirit lies in the body, or on the body; the incubi (A male demon believed to lie on sleeping persons and to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women). But the one that lies under the body is the succubi (A female demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men). When we talk about this spirit though, that possesses us, when we talk about the spirit that the European implanted in us, in terms of the language, in terms of the food, in terms of the religion, in terms of the values, in terms of the social relations, in terms of the name, we are talking about a spirit that is not just a “spookish” entity in ourselves, it actually incarnates in us.

What are we talking about when we talk incarnate? We are dealing with the Latin root carnatus, which has to do with what; meat, flesh, i.e. the spirit comes to dwell within our very flesh, and comes to scout our very bodies, and therefore the spirit is a physical thing as much as it is a psychological thing. The bodies we have tonight ladies and gentlemen, are bodies that have been created by the European experience, and are not our natural bodies as African people. Just as the surface of our bodies reflect the influence of another people, the very internal nature and the physiology of our bodies reflect those people as well.

That’s why when you get rid of them, you gonna have a healing experience, and your whole body will change. I have read some of this before, but let me read it again. This is most dramatic, and the things I am talking about is more dramatic when we study the so-called multiple personality, and let me read you a description here that was oriented in The Times, and those that might be familiar indulge me here because I think it points out to something. It begins, “When Timmy drinks orange juice he has no problem, but Timmy’s just one of close to a dozen personalities who alternates control over a patient with multiple personality disorders, and if those other personalities drink orange juice, the result is a case of hives.”

What are we saying here? We got one body, but depending on what consciousness possesses that body, that body will react to the drinking of orange juice with or without hives. It will breakout in blisters, so it drinks orange juice when one of the other personalities are possessing it, whelps and hives will breakout right there. If Timmy comes back, if the new consciousness comes back and takes over that body, the hives will disappear, almost on the moment.

In other words then, there’s a different body for a different consciousness. It goes on to say then, that medical disorders that are found to differ from one sub-personality to another, in other words, even though these so called personalities possess the same so-called body, each personality has a different order of illnesses associated with it. Each personality is vulnerable to a particular type of ailment, one way or the other.

So what are we talking about? We’re saying that each consciousness, which is represented by each personality, creates its own body, creates its own physiology, and thereby creates its own vulnerability, to various ailments, and so forth. You see you get people in medical school, that dis-ease only occurs as the result of some kind of viral syndrome, or some kind of entry into the body, of some bacteria, or other thing, and certainly that is a part of it, and certainly there’s reality there. But the body must interact with the viruses, and must interact with the dis-ease entity, and this is what we talk about when we talk about the immune system, that health is not necessarily the absence of the dis-ease, but the capacity of the body to resist the dis-ease, to stand-up against the disease.

And so consequently then, when these bodies are taken over by different personalities, these personalities apparently change the nature of the immune system of those bodies, making them vulnerable to dis-eases, when one personality is present, and not so when another is present. Which means ladies and gentlemen then, that the nature of the consciousness which possesses us as persons, will to a degree determine the illnesses for which we are vulnerable, as a person and as people. And a lot of the illnesses, physical and other dis-eases that we suffer then are mediated by the nature of the consciousness we have permitted to possess us as a people.

So to a great extent, the defeat of disease, the maintaining of health, must not only be pursued in terms of discovering new drugs and these kinds of things, but must involve self-discovery and self-knowledge. It goes on to state, that in people with multiple personalities, there is a strong psychological separation between each sub-personality. Each will have its own name and age. Does that strike a bell? What did we say earlier? “To what names do we respond? Are they the same names we responded prior to slavery?” So in other words, as we got the new slave personality, we got what? New names … yes, yes, yes … and we were changed.

To a good extent, our names were given us, to designate our new consciousness, and our new situation. “Each will have its own name and age and often some specific memories and abilities.” In other words each personality has its own history, has its own biography, has its own memory. And you look at House Negroes when they have a certain consciousness, and look at the history they remember, look at the things they keep in their memories, and look at the history they study and identify with. Look at them fight “African History,” yes, look at them want to identify with the history of Europeans, look at them wanting to define themselves in terms of that history, and look at them having memories only for that history.

Look at those Africans who are still under the possessive influence of the European implanted spirit, and know that they have little or no knowledge of African History, and therefore little or no knowledge of their own history and self, as a person and as an individual. So there’s a consistency between the consciousness and the history that a person has and the memory that an individual has.

They often have … they are frequently for example, as personalities differ in hand-writing, artistic or even skilled in knowledge of foreign languages, speak a different language depending on the personality that’s in there. Multiple personalities typically develop in people who were severally and repeatedly abused as children, apparently as a means to protect themselves against the pain of abuse.” Does that strike another note in you?

“Often only one or two of the sub-personalities will be conscious of the abuse, while others will have no memory or an experience of the pain.” To a great extent the personality of the “African American” today has been shaped by our desires to escape the memory of the slave experience, to deny its existence.

We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to come in terms with it. We don’t want to re-experience it psychologically. We don’t want to know about it and therefore our lives becomes defined by eternal escape and avoidance of reality and denial of a history, and of a knowledge of who we are, and how we came to be who and what we are. And consequently we cannot act upon the reality of our history, and we guide our behavior and define ourselves in terms of a fantasy as history, and a misinterpretation of reality.

This is what it is, yes!

How did we get this Religion we talked about earlier? I talk about Star Trek, and we talk about what the time warp that Star Trek depicts quite frequently, of how people move from one state of consciousness and one world and are suddenly flipped into a new world. They go through a phase and all of a sudden, everything that they used to use to guide themselves no longer counts. The language that they used to speak can no longer be understood in the new world. The values that use to guide their behavior are no longer workable, in fact it gets them into trouble. The gods, the culture, the nature of the social relations, and all of the things they used prior to meeting the warp, no longer suffice.

[Side Note: A child going to a multiracial school spends more time with an enemy than his parent, who goes to work in the morning and return home at 5 o’clock in the evening. That parent has only about 4 hours with their kid after hours before they go to bed and sleep while Television programs will make sure that out of these few hours perhaps a parent dedicates a single hour or so to assist their child with homework. The question is: What is the enemy instilling in your child for 8 hours at school while you are busy at work? Malcolm X said: “Only a fool lets his enemy teach his children.”]

Now they must learn new values and new behaviors, and new orientations in order to adapt themselves to the new universe they live in. We are in that kind of a position today. Think about the African world the African lived in prior to being brought across the oceans. Think about the gods we praised. Think about the organization of our society. Think about the languages that we spoke. The food that we ate. The dress code. The music. The song. The dance and all of those things that defined us as African people. Think how horrendous it must’ve been for us to be thrown into this world (within a snap), where there’s a whole new language, a whole new social hierarchy, a whole new set of authorities. People pushing you around. Strangers you don’t understand. People who are putting strange tools in your hand. People who are trying to get you to relate to them. To relate to each other and in a very different kind of way from what you’re used to relating to.

Think about the stress and the confusion. Think about the abuse. Think about the horror of that situation our parents and great grandparents were put in.

And I find that interesting when further on as I read here, of what happens when the personality moves from one personality to another, when the body is possessed by one personality, and that personality is replaced, and another comes in. It says, “during the switch (the time warp), there is typically a period of seconds or even minutes, when a heart rate, a breath rate, and other physiological markers show a disorganization that is followed by a new pattern, typical of the personality that is emerging. In other words then, we go through a period of disorganization and stress, and then the personalities reorganized to fit into the new circumstances.

We can persist to pursue this, but it’s interesting to look at the changes in blood pressure, that each personality brings about, the other kinds of changes, physical changes that are representative of the personality. So what are we saying here then? That each personality has its own name, its own history, its own memory, biography, way of speaking, language, way of thinking, way of perceiving itself, its own vulnerabilities.

Each personality generates its own life space and generates its own type of social relations, each personality has its own taste and appetites and its own morality. So to a great extent then, if we look at the problems and issues that confront us today as African people, and see those issues in terms of the consciousness, we would recognize, that we must rid ourselves of the consciousness that has been implanted in us by our European masters.

One other thing I want to bring about in this situation, we notice that if you engage people in behavior therapy, and you scan their brains, and look at how their brains metabolize energy, there’s a relationship between the areas of the brain that are rapidly using energy and the type of mental activity a person is undergoing, and a type of physical behavioral activity the person is undergoing.

Each personality, each type of orientation has a blueprint in the brain in terms of various areas of the brain that are functionally relating one to the other. And it’s interesting to note for instance that we look at something called the Obsessive Compulsive Personality.

Self-destructive spirits

The person who cannot stop repeating a particular behavior, no matter how irrational it may prove to be [Side Note: Like Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, who worships Western white racists as his gods although Bantustan leaders of yesteryear followed the same political strategy and failed black people miserably]. The person who must wash their hands every thirty minutes even if they are not dirty, but who are compelled to the point that they wash their hands to the point of rawness, because they cannot stop doing so [Side Note: Every advice Ramaphosa is taking from Western white racists is fast destroying South Africa as a country, but Obsessive Compulsive Personality demon tells him to keep on following a bad advice like a robot. The personality is heavily ingrained in his sub-conscious like an impacted wisdom tooth due to years of social conditioning by his apartheid handlers. As a result he can’t see South Africa thriving beyond Western imperialists].

This person is absorbed by a particular type of image, by a particular kind of thought or orientation that they cannot get out of their minds. This is what we are talking about when we talk about obsessive compulsive personality, a rigid, repetitive personality.

We note then, if you scan the brains of these personalities, you will find that certain areas in their brain are intensely active. For instance, we talk about their frontal lobes, the so-called orbital lobe of the brain … the orbital cortex of the brain, the part of the cortex that is above the eyes, the part of the cortex that concerns itself with intentionality, and purpose, and direction, and motivation, and the connection of that cortex to the lower brain, to what we call the corte nucleus. That part of the lower brain that deals with repetitive behavior, that deals with monitoring, modulating

behavior, that deals with its connection with the hypothalamus, with the thalamus which functions with the distribution of the senses, and with organizing the senses.

When we look then at the compulsive personality, we notice that these areas are intensely active, and active in a way they maintain the symptoms of that personality. It has been shown that when these people take a drug such as Prozac, the intensity of the drug… and they respond to them in a way that their symptoms are relieved, the intensity of the interaction between these three brain areas is decreased or delayed. It has also been noted then, that you can put these same types of people through behavior therapy. That is by changing the nature of the social relationship, between the therapists and the patient, changing the nature of the rewards and punishments that the patient undergoes in an effort to change the patient’s behavior.

By changing the way the patient thinks about what is in their mind, thinks about the problem that they are in; and when you can successfully then reduce the symptoms of the compulsive disorder through this social conditioning, we note too, that the same kinds of physiological brain changes that incurs with the intake of the drug occurs with the intake of social training. Now what are we saying then? What we are saying ultimately is that the nature of the consciousness, and the nature of the spirits of the individual, physically transforms the brain, and physically changes the way the brain operates.

Therefore, when we talk about consciousness, we’re talking about something that is real. We’re talking about something that transforms both the psyche and the body. One of the things that you note when the individual is possessed, is that his facial muscles change, and the body itself changes, in a way that it literally incarnates and represents the nature of the spirit that is now possessing the individual.

So to a good extent then, if you’re in certain religions, you can tell what particular spirit is possessing the person by the very nature of the behavior that the individual is exhibiting, and by the very shape of their very physiological body, and their face. In other words ladies and gentlemen, once we get the spirits of these demons that the Europeans have implanted into our bodies, our faces and our bodies themselves will be transformed.

To a great extent then, a lot of the ways we look and love, the way we have organized ourselves physically is the result of the type of consciousness that we have. To a great extent … and I will begin to wrap it up here ... to a great extent the kinds of consciousness that inhabits us, reflects the kind of culture that we live in, the nature of the culture that we are a part of. Recognize ladies and gentlemen that culture cannot exist outside of our minds, and of our bodies.

Culture does not exist out there, history does not exist out there, history and culture can only exist in the minds and bodies of people. If there were no people in the world, there would be no history in the world, no culture in the world. Culture does not stand outside and direct us, it is where? Inside of us, and it directs us from the inside. Culture is instilled in our bodies, and in our minds, and we have to keep that in mind, because sometimes we tend to see it as something separate from ourselves. We reflect our history and we reproduce our history, when that history becomes a part of us, and is one with us. We tend to see culture in terms of music, in terms of the kinds of dance moves we do, in terms of the songs we sing, and that is a part of culture.But ultimately culture is deeper than that. Culture is a way of thinking. Ultimately culture is a conspiracy, that is, it is a means by which a group of people organize the way they think, organize the way they believe, organize the way they see the world so as to create a consciousness by which they can cooperate in achieving certain ends. So that they can mutually aid each other and gain ends that they cannot gain as separate individuals.

So culture is an instrument of power. The individual through culture extends his power and the culture extends the power of the group. When we talk about music and song and dance, what we are talking about then here is, how culture ultimately comes to be implanted in our bodies. You see we tend to look at song and dance and music as entertainment, and this is our serious mistake. We have a lot of our youth out there looking at music as mere entertainment.

Why is it that our youth say, that they are being free, and that they are doing what they want to do, and that they are expressing themselves, and that involves buying hundred dollar pair of sneakers from white folk? Yes, yes, all of this kind of stuff. Why? Because the spirit that is implanted in the human mind and in the human psyche, is there to only respond to its creator, and to its master. And therefore, when you let another people generate a spirit in you, when you let another people generate certain values in you, when you let another people generate a certain reality for you, when you let another people see you in a particular sort of way, and see your own people in a particular sort of way, they have implanted a spirit, and that spirit has been created by them, and that spirit only responds to them, and it only responds to them in terms of furthering their interest to work against the interest of the body it possesses.

And this is why there’s that self-destructive spirit in us. Because the demon that possesses a body, is not there for that body, it is here for the creator that placed it there. And if necessary, to obey its creator, it destroys that body, it will destroy the body it inhabits. The taste that that spirit has, is a taste that can only be satisfied from buying from its master creator. The values that that spirit wishes to satisfy and realize, can only be realized by going through the agents of the masters that created it.

That is why every value, and every taste, and every desire, every need that provokes us, every one of these things that we seek to desire, end up having us going through white folks, and that’s why we think we need them. And every time we satisfy them, they in some way benefit in our seeking satisfaction because of that demon that we call ourselves is answering to the call of its master.

So a culture creates its own possessing spirits, ad inculturates and inculcates those spirits into the bodies of its members. So that those members in defending their own egos, in defending their own interest, in defending what they perceive as their own needs, and satisfying their own taste, in satisfying their own values, satisfy the need of the culture. Enrich the culture. Empower the culture. Defend the culture and advance the interest of the culture.

Conveyor belts of culture

And how then, does the culture implant its spirit into its members? It does it in a very strong and primordial way. It uses vehicles, and one of the major vehicles that is used is music, rhythm, song, dance. A culture involves a people moving what? Together, in tandem, in rhythm. It involves them having the same temporal sense, the same kind of time clock, so that they can move in synchrony, one with the other. And music is about synchrony. Poetry is about synchrony. Song is about synchrony.

Music is about symbols. And you see ultimately it is through symbols that you evoke behavior from people. So when a culture creates symbols, those symbols are designed to evoke particular types of reactions and feelings and moods in its members. And the culture establishes the potency of those symbols, through ritual, through song, and through dance. And one of the best ways then, to inculcate cultural values or cultural spirit, is through entertainment. It’s while the members are being entertained, while they are feeling good, that the song carries the cultural values into the mind, and into the body.The lyrics that represent the cultural interest, the lyrics that represent cultural values, are being carried on the vehicle of the music. Carried through the vehicle of the poetry. The togetherness, the cooperativeness, the mutual movement together, and the synchrony of the culture is being entrained through the music, and through the rhythm of the dance. Therefore you see, when you let another people take over your music, when you let another people take over your dance and attach their content to it, they will use your own music, and your own dance, and your own rap lyrics, and your own poetry, and your own cultural symbols to carry their message into your body, and into your mind, such that you can only respond then, to their beckon and call, and to their wishes.

And you see then, yes, you see then, that they get you to buy those sneakers, and they get you to buy all of those things by what? Associating them with what? Your music, with your cultural symbols, you see, with your poetry, with your rhythms, and so they attach their content to our rhythm, their content to our song, yes. But in a way, they take our own instruments and turn them against the self. Notice how quickly, when one of our youngsters was rhyming “kill the police,” that kind of content was washed right out immediately, yes.

But what wash out occurs when they sing about shooting each other, with their glocks, and the other things, when their contents of self-destructiveness ride on the rhythm of their song and of their dance, and when the symbols are loaded then, with self-destructive elements and content. So what are we saying here then? That inculturation is a process of building up responsivity and ultimately responsibility, the ability to respond to a particular call. And we then have appropriately inculturated ourselves, when we can respond to our own culture and our own values, and to our own needs. One other thing here then, as we rapidly bring these things to a close.

Personalities

We have to look at personality in this light as well. We think our personality is ours. You must recognize ladies and gentlemen, that the human being is a social animal, we exist in societies, we exist in groups, we are born dependent, not independent. We have long periods of dependency, and it is the social relationship between ourselves and our mothers, and our self and our group, that protects us, during our long periods of dependency. And in a sense we never quite get over our dependency and need for one another, and so consequently, we are social animals, and we must then respond to social situations.

Our personalities, because they may be our personalities, do not mean that they are not inculcated with a social spirit, and they are not designed for a social end. In other words then, the individual exist for the social unit, not for himself. We see individuality as something that is just for ourselves, why are we individuals? We’re individuals to a great extent because when our culture, and our culture confronts problems, we want to maximize the possibility that we will solve those problems. Solve them by the fact that different individuals, look at those problems in different ways and they can contribute their particular perspective to the groups, and those perspectives can be used as a means to the solution to the problem of the group.

So even individuals are there, to strengthen the group, you see. If all the people in a society thought alike, and saw the world alike, they thought no differently, one from the other, the society would soon be defeated. Because it would be uncreative. It would not be innovative. It would not be able to change its perspective of a problem in a way so that it can solve it. So what does it do then? It creates individuals. It’s like the reasons why we have genetic variation, we say no matter how intense a plague may be, in a nation or a people, there are always one or two people left standing, because in some way or another, their genetic structure has permitted them to withstand the plague. And as long as we have a few of those survivors left, and as long as they can reproduce, the race continues, and thrives on.

But if the race had all the same genetic structure, then a plague would wipe out the total race and the species would cease to exist. And the same thing then operates in terms of different personalities. We differ in personality ultimately because these differences contribute to the survival of the species, and therefore our differences adhere, to maintain the whole.

So the main problem of a society is to maintain enough cohesion, so people can act together, and behave together and act in synchrony one with the other and cooperate with each other but not be to overly organized so that they cannot bring their own creative perspectives to problems and issues, you see. And this becomes the problem of society. So there must always be that tension between being in the society and obeying its rules, but being a little bit off, so that we can say hey, maybe if you look at it this way we can work it out, and we can deal with it this way.

So the personality itself must carry the element of society within itself. But the things we must note; is that personality, consciousness, and culture are cultural creations. And the type of culture that people exhibit, and the type of consciousness that we exhibit, and the type of personality we exhibit reflects the type of history and experience we have undergone as people.

Do not let foreigners write your own history

When you let another people then be the determiner of your history and experience, they then become the determiners of your consciousness, of your personality, and of your culture. Ultimately we must recognize that we use consciousness to deal with the world. Culture is an adaptative tool, it’s an instrument by which we deal with reality, by which we adapt to reality, and by which we adapt reality to ourselves.

The kind of consciousness we have will determine how we deal with reality. Consciousness will…by fact that it determines how we are going to deal with reality, how we change reality, become Power. Because ultimately, Power is about enabling something to take place, the ability to do something, the ability to change something, the ability to adapt, the ability to defend oneself, the ability to change oneself in order to solve a problem. This is what culture is about. Culture is not static, culture is not stuck in one place. Culture itself must reconstruct itself if the system in which it exists is rearranged. That is why some of us get in trouble because we want to find an African culture, stuck somewhere back in the thirteenth-century and want to apply it to ourselves at this point in a different context.

African culture is not a culture stuck in place and time. African culture is constantly changing and evolving, because the context in which African people live, changes and evolves. What makes it African culture? It’s a fact that it operates in the interest of African people. It is designed to advance African people. And therefore the consciousness must be measured in terms of the degree to which it maintains our survival, and advances our interest, and puts us at the center of our concern, and at the center of our purposes.

Reactionary Culture

When we then talk about Black culture, make sure then we are not talking about a reactionary culture, a culture that has been generated by our reaction to our abuse by white folk, and to our control and domination by white folk. Because it is a good part of what we call black culture that we need to exercise from our psyches, so that we can evolve a culture, an African centered culture to advance our interest as a people.

Another very important aspect of consciousness is what we call values. Those things that we prefer. Those things that we see as right. Those things that we think we should need. Those things in pursuit of which they determine our behavior. Values are what I call the directional factors of consciousness. What are we talking about here?

When you value something, and that value is implanted in your brain, the brain call forth all of its resources, all of the contents it has, the knowledge it has available to it, the behavioral skills it has available to it, the cognitive skills, the thinking skills and things like that it has available to it, and organizes those things, and relates those things one to each other in such a way that the value can be achieved. When we then think about something that we value and we want to realize something that we value, we consciously or unconsciously assess our minds and say: “Do I have the relevant knowledge? Do I have the relevant skills? Do I have the relative thinking and cognitive skills so that we can organize this knowledge and skills in a way we can achieve those values?

If we believe we have those skills. If we believe we have the contents. If we appropriately organize those substances through thought, then we pursue those values, and chances are we may realize those values. If though we have those values and we assess ourselves, we recognize that we don’t have the appropriate skills, we don’t have the appropriate knowledge and content, we don’t have the appropriate thought styles and so forth, we then say: “Well, maybe we should develop the requisite skills, maybe we should learn the requisite knowledge, maybe we should develop the means of thinking.” And once we do this we will then organize them in a way to achieve our values.

Values

Once we then have values and are guided by values, and those values guide those skills and content and so forth we are empowered to realize those values, and therefore values are a type of Power. Where am I going with this? I’m going with this to say this, if values are a type of power, if values are things that guide our behavior, if culture is a type of power, and consciousness is a type of power, and personality is a type of power, if we let

another people determine the nature of our consciousness, our personality, and our values, they then gain power over us.

If consciousness, culture, personality, and values are instruments of power, they then use our consciousness, our values, our culture as their instruments of power. How does this work out in reality?

They take our cultural products, our music, our songs, and use them as their instruments of power. Yes, and benefit from them. So what then is an African-centered consciousness? An African-centered consciousness is one that is based on African centered content, based on African centered knowledge, based on African centered values, based on an African centered consciousness. To the degree that our consciousness is based on African centered values and so forth, we are empowered, as African people. To the degree those values and consciousness are determined by other people, we become their instruments of power. And they use us against ourselves.

So consequently, if we are to be empowered, and if our power is to work in our interest, then our consciousness must be an African consciousness, our values must be African values, our personality must be an African based personality, if not, we may suffer, first ethnocide, then genocide. What are we saying?

It means that our culture will not be functional in a way that it protects our interest. We must then as people develop a new African consciousness, an African centered consciousness and that means we must develop it based on an African history, African culture, and African values. Most of all, we must develop an African sense of Nationhood. To a great extent; many of the problems we suffer today are as a result of the fact that we do not see ourselves as a Nation, and yet we complain about how we are separated from everybody else.

We complain about how we are not a part of the mainstream. How we are not a part of the economy. How we are shut out of the government and the political process. If we are not a part of these things, and yet these things are what define a Nation, then we are not a part of the American/African nation. That nation is a white nation. We are then in fact a defacto Nation, but we are afraid to recognize it. If we looked at ourselves as a Nation, we would see many of the reasons why we are where we are as a people. Why, because if we looked at ourselves as a Nation, we would see why we have the problems we have.Why do we have a lot of the problems we have? For the same reason other African nations have the problems they have. Why? Because we permit our resources, human resources, and material resources to be used by another people, we export them. We are like any other African nation. We are an indebted nation. We are over indebted. When we talk about the African nation suffering of being over burden by debt, we don’t recognize that we’re talking about ourselves. When I ask you tonight, how many of us owe another Black institution, another Black person major debt, we would get very few hands. But if I ask how many of us in the audience tonight, owe a white person, a white institution, a non-African institution great debt, we probably would all have to raise our hands.

If you recognize that then, and you add this up in terms of a nation, not just yourself as an individual, but if you look at all of us as individuals in terms of a nation, then as a Nation we owe an enormous debt to another people. And one other reason why we are poverty stricken, is not because we don’t have money. It is because all of our money is being used to service the debt that other nations own, that the white nation in America owns. And because we waste so much time paying our installment plans, and paying our money out to these other nations of people, we cannot save our monies, we cannot accumulate our monies, and create wealth so that we can employ ourselves as a people.

So that we can support our families as a people, so that we can build the schools we need to build to educate our children the way we need to educate them, as a people. And consequently we have a similar problem that all African nations have almost, where they cannot build highways or build schools or build hospitals, build institutions, communication systems and other systems because all of the wealth that they are generating is being exported out to European nations and nations to whom they owe debt.

But you can only see this when you look at yourself as a Nation. And when you look at yourself as a nation then, you can see that you can change this problem, by changing the debt relationship you have to other people.

I was looking at an issue here the other day, when we were talking about looking at African nations, and we talk about the African nations as mono-cultures. Meaning that they often exist by shifting out one or two major products. Cocoa or cocoa beans or oil or gold or something like that, and they ship these products out to what we call a buyer’s market, that is the people they sell these products to. These people set the prices that they are going to pay for their products and yet these nations that buy their products, and lower the prices on their products, are selling them back those products in processed form, and selling them back their own products that have been manufactured here at higher and higher prices.

Selling Labour

And then we wonder why Africa is in debt, and why Africa is impoverished. But that is the result of the fact that they are caught up in an impoverishing system. But we need not talk about the continental African, because we are in the same situation here today. Africa, the African American nation is a mono-culture. What is the commodity we sell? Labour. We are not selling much in manufacturing, we are not selling much of other products. The major commodity that we have to sell, is a commodity that we were brought over here for in the first place, and what was that? Labour.And now we are selling our labour in a buyer’s market. Meaning that the people who buy our labour are buying it at the prices they set. And they keep devaluing the price that they are willing to pay for our labour. On top of devaluing the price, they are no longer even demanding the labour. So after a while we want to be able to sell our labour at any price. And we will then be totally deprived as a people. And therefore, we are caught in a similar position, and just as there are social disorganization in our African nations, there’s social disorganization in the American nation.

Protect your own markets

You cannot have your wealth flowing out of your nation, you cannot enrich other people at the expense of yourself and not have social disorganization. And that means then, if we look at ourselves as a Nation, the African American nation must do what all African nations must do. We must capture our own internal resources. We must gain control of our own internal markets. We must trade within ourselves as a people and a group and generate wealth within our own nation. As a means of counter-balancing our dependence upon Europeans and upon the white nation itself.

But in order to do this, we must have a nation consciousness. We must organize and relate to ourselves as a Nation of people. When we look at our relationship we say to the Koreans as a nation, we see the same relationship that Japan as to America as a nation, you notice that they are bargaining right now, negotiating, right. Japan is building up its resources, it is blocking a U.S. industry from its nation. Yet it is entering into the American markets and selling there, and taking out the wealth out of the American

markets.

If we look at our relationship to Koreans, to Dominicans, to other groups, we’ll see the same relationship, where those groups can enter into the African American nation, set-up shop, ship out its wealth day by day, night by night, and yet the African American entrepreneurial nation is not permitted to set-up shop in their midst. Is not permitted to carry wealth from their nations. And they then grow fat on the surface, that they gained from the African American nation. This means then, if we think of ourselves as a Nation, we must protect our internal market from the intrusion of outsiders, we must not permit entry into our nation.

Do not feed children of other people before you feed your own

As I look down and I see the 125th street, yes, and look at our people locked outside there on the outside, and some people claim that they are protesting this kind of thing, I agree with our vendors there, that if Black men and Black women cannot make a living on that street, then no other people should be permitted to make a living on that street. We are not obligated in any type of way to feed the children of other people before we feed our own.But its only if you think in terms of Nationhood, that you can resolve this kind of problem. We have tremendous possibilities as a Black nation. You can see these white boys over there pursuing China, don’t you? Right? They are all over in China knocking over each other to get to it. What is the China market worth to the European? You know what the China market is worth to the Europeans? $500 million at this point. Do you know what the Black market is worth to the European here in America? $400 million. Our market is almost worth as much as the Chinese market.

The Mexican market, which they have drawn up to bring in NAFTA, is open on one condition that in order for these people to have a presence in our country, you’re gonna leave money in the institution. You are going to contribute to our schools. You are going to contribute to our recreational centres. You are going to contribute to the employment of our people and to the stability of our families. If you cannot contribute to these things, if you cannot create jobs, if you’re not going to contribute to the education of our people, then we cannot permit you to operate within our borders. This is the way a nation runs. You don’t let another people walk in and have their way, and walk out and leave the country in poverty, in the people’s name of a free market, there’s no such thing as a free market. Yeah, that’s white folk propaganda, “free and open market.” There is no free market.

They force people into their market. Castro was not free to say I don’t want to be a part of it. When he said I don’t want to be a part of it they did what? Embargoed him and locked him out. There’s no such thing as free markets. We got to create our own markets like Fidel Castro. And choose our own trading partners and cut loose the Western vultures. In fact we do have our own markets and trading partners who will treat us like partners instead of charity cases. But we are not taking advantage of this phenomenon.

We have gotten ourselves into a situation where we are locked out of other people’s markets [Side Note: Through draconian rating agency shenanigans], yet we permit them into our own, such that we are locked out of our own market. Then we wonder why we suffer the way we do. It is not because we are poor. If we were that poor and impoverished, then why do these people come to us to earn their living and accumulate their own wealth? It means then we must be a wealthy people.