"If we do not know our history then we do not know our personality.

And if the only history we know is other people's history then our personality has been created by that history."

Amos N. Wilson
The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness

“Discrimination is a hell hound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.”

Martin Luther King, Jr

“Afrocentricity and African nationalism disturbs the European status quo. It shatters their delusional self-image as civilized, highly evolved beings. The truth of the African origin of both humanity, civilization and high culture blasts the very foundation of Eurocentric white supremacist historiography.

That all humans came from black skinned Africans shocks and traumatizes the
sensibilities of most whites.”

Dr. Jacob Carruthers

"The global issues of poverty, overpopulation, unemployment, indebtedness and inequitable patterns of production and exchange are, after all, Caribbean problems. There was never any time in our history when global concerns did not affect us.

We became what we are as extensions of elsewhere."

Rex Nettleford
Inward Stretch Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean

So that we find in Cuba today more genuine interest in the African Revolution, more interest in the African plastic arts and in African drama than there exists in Jamaica, which is a place 95 percent black, because the black people of Jamaica are still involved [in,] and are dominated under, imperialist relations. So that is Cuba and that is Jamaica.

Now, it means that for the African historian in Cuba, he can go ahead and research and talk about African history in a new social context. But for anybody in Jamaica, he can't seriously talk about history divorced from revolutionary struggle. He isn't serious if he's doing that. You can't say that "African history will proceed as normal. We'll just teach it in the curriculum and that will be fine. Let imperialism proceed." In any event, the system doesn't even want you to do a simple thing like teaching African history.

The prime minister of Jamaica, a black man (you know he looks black anyway), was approached with a request to let African history and an African language, Swahili, be taught in the schools, and he said, "No, we can't have any of that." He gave some reason--a curious reason--something about there being so many different races in Jamaica. Very curious. I mean, 95 percent of the people are black but he can't teach an African language!

They teach Latin, French, Spanish, and everything else. A lot of different reasons don't seem to come into that!

But it shows that the colonial structure is itself aware of the fact you can't separate a new conception of self, which should spring from historical investigation with a new actuality, [from the] revolutionary process to change the situation that presently exists. So that for the Jamaican, the system makes it impossible for him to come to this new awareness of himself because it doesn't want him to be involved in a revolutionary process.

For any historian who seeks to reconstruct the African past, to reconstruct the past of black peoples in this continent, in such a context he cannot say that the revolution will wait until people are re-educated and that re-education reaches an advanced stage because he isn't even allowed to engage in that process of re-education. Consequently, the revolution is with us already. The history will have to be subsidiary to that, it will have to come during and after the revolutionary process. In other words, the Jamaican freedom fighter will have to be a man [who] will, perhaps in his spare time, read some African history. You know Che Guevara said the guerrilla should always carry something worthwhile in his knapsack. So the guerrilla fighter, the freedom fighter in Jamaica, would read some African history but he isn't waiting on that to move.

He has to move because the only way that he can establish a relationship with his own past is, in fact, by breaking the present bonds which restrict and constrain us.

Walter Rodney
African History in the Service of the Black Liberation
Montreal
Canada
12 October 1968

"The main fundamental doctrines that must underly our educational development are:

(i) That the greatness of a country is not only appreciated according to its economic power or the number of its inhabitants; but also by the level of its education.

(ii) That there have been given to each race certain talents, it is for the Blackman to find out his own best and strongest powers and make the most of them. He cannot by merely imitating the white man arrive at his fullest and truest racial development.

(iii) That it is an historical as well as a scientific fact that no people have ever risen to influence and power without a strong intellectual and moral class permeating and leavening the entire mass.

(iv) That education produces intelligence and unfolds to one his powers and capabilities and an intelligent people cannot be enslaved.

(v) That the history of the education of a people is the history of its civilization. Its civilization is not to be found in its material success nor in it achievements in arms; but its civilization is manifest in its intellectual, and moral development.

It follows, then, that the education of a nation is to be found in the characteristics of its civilization; this includes religion, politics, justice, art, and mode of thought. The history of education fully attests this fact.

G.K. Osei
The African Philosophy of Life

“The alienation of Africans from other Africans has enormous consequences. No matter where Africans are in the world, our circumstances are basically the same….The reality is that there is no chance that anyone other than Africans will act to move us from the bottom of the heap.”

Asa G. Hilliard
African Power: Affirming African Indigenous Socialization in the Face of the Culture Wars

"Most Afrikan people do not realize that these stresses, worries and strains, are not normal nor do they have to be lived with, despite the fact that we have endured them so long we see them as part of life or as necessary evils. We are often ignorant of what it means for everything to be okay, because our existence has been so troubled and our minds so manipulated that this current reality is all we know.

Many have no idea what it is like to live a life free of the additional stresses and strains that come simply because we are Afrikan people in this world.

Kofi Addae
Reality Revolution

"Any credible student of the Afrikan will look at the oppressor rather than the oppressed for the causes of the conditions of the oppressed."

Mwalimu Baruti
The Cultural Continuum