ahmaad

if i may be so bold?

yuneedfeslow downon the gunja smoking me bredder

if can recommend some fine jamaicanbush tea

it will make you feel great

your skin will glow with health

the women love the effects it has on the male body

and

it will keep your mind focused onquestions askedwithin a thread



peace

so it seems as though the consensus is

this is not our home (whiteland)

and that we should be forward planning and looking for our own (for us and our children)

but

how many of us are doing this?


if, which i am suggesting, africans dont feel at home in white majority lands

and know that political power is beyond them in these states

why are they not organizing or building in their homelands

with a serious intent for a powerful african future?



instead of

possibly spending a lifetime, laboring, developing racist nation states, which will terrorize our future descendants


ambivalence is the word which springs to mind




or just

lack of vision

this dynamic is used as ammunition by reactionaries (eeediats) against pan africanists


they say "blacks" are looking away from their current nation states and doing nothing where they currently reside

because they are day dreaming about africa, or some black nation.

according to this thread (posted in mainly by progressive africans) our people are doing this without even hearing or understanding the pan africanist argument





pan africanism states clearly we need to think about and implement ideas that will politically/economically empower our future

as a race

wherever we are

@Breadfruit greetings solidier. You know something brother. I am convinced and I don't know what the percentage is, but would put out my neck to say 50 and probably more percent of our people give no serious considerations to these issues. They are not unique because if you look at the political science literature that is about standard

It's like a lot of youth when they talk about ghetto this and that and locate their identies in this narrow world, that does not exist outside a couple of blocks in their neighbourhood. And they talk about this is life. Most of them ain't been anywhere out side that reality. Take them to the country somewhere nice for a week and see how quick they start coming with something else.

My view is this, with the exception of those who have white women and breeding them or people's whose age or family circumstances are fixed for a long period of time the black community is open as wide as the passage to the Panama Canal. Those who are organised and have a sophisticated agenda and strategy can clinch the deal.

Not this what I call reveloutionary berett talk which will only appeal to sections of the male youth population. Our community is more wider and diverse and complex in its make up than that. A bit like so called Pan Afircanist who spend all their time walking around in African style garb telling people how European they look in dress. Foolishness and cultish and no serious base for serious things.

But whoever comes with serious leadership around practical programmes has black people simple as. The black community is like young girls open to hard core experienced brothers. Simple as...there for the taking.

The issues is not lack of people who are willing. It is about leadership supply and calibrewhich is too small right now. You can't simply give a youth a six week training courre and put a gun in his hand. Madness. You need to have people who have proven their competenec in leading and organising small multi-dimenisonal activities, who can then be taken and futher developed to take on bigger more complex stuff.

You need an intellectual class who can inform people about the complexities of this society and apply that practically so leaders can implement etc. This country is complex in the issues it throws up and even more so when it impacts on black people and you can't go out there willy nilly without understanding how to tackle specific components of these problems.

Peace.

FBniceone.gif

@All I just remembered. There is one group who are organised of sorts and have deep commitment to this country, and that is the assimlationist and accommodationist black middle class. They are a very very dangerous breed at least in the short term, but not medium or long as they esssentially will disappear. The Dame Patricia Scoltands, Amoses etc.

But they have found their voice this year with Dr Tony Sewell, their ideological chieftain and Trevor Phillips and his consistent attacks on the black grassroot majority, which is unrelenting. In fact most of the drama around Stephen Lawerence and all the weight and resources thrown behind it was exactly about that, the iconisation of one of their own or an image they could make their own.

These people know they are going nowhere other than up white people's arse and prove Napolean's dictum that a man with a simple and narrow focus wiill nine times out of ten defeat a stary eye dreamer with too much complexity or theory. They know they have nothing in the Caribbean and have disassociated from it and people like Phillps probably spends more time in Spain than Guyana and allowing Indians to rule and bully his people there.

They are not liked by the majority of our people, and therefore their strategic options are nil. Hence they will be a force which will have to be dealt with our nuetralised. They only have to cough and get the white man's platform and powerful media.

So for Africans who are not of that oriienation and see their lives here .They better get off their hands and build a future for them and thieir children. Simple as.

FB

A view from an African psychoanalyst..........


"If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe."


Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent and resolute.

We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.

And yet it may be said that Europe has been successful in as much as everything that she has attempted has succeeded. Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever farther! Every one of her movements has burst the bounds of space and thought. Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness.

She has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?

That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.

Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.

Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed.

Yet it is very true that we need a model, and that we want blueprints and examples. For many among us the European model is the most inspiring. We have therefore seen in the preceding pages to what mortifying set-backs such an imitation has led us. European achievements, European techniques and the European style ought no longer to tempt us and to throw us off our balance.
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

The human condition, plans for mankind and collaboration between men in those tasks which increase the sum total of humanity are new problems, which demand true inventions.

Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.

Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? The West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity.

Yes, the European spirit has strange roots. All European thought has unfolded in places which were increasingly more deserted and more encircled by precipices; and thus it was that the custom grew up in those places of very seldom meeting man.

A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state, where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words. Yet some Europeans were found to urge the European workers to shatter this narcissism and to break with this un-reality.

But in general the workers of Europe have not replied to these calls; for the workers believe, too, that they are part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit.

All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them, which consisted of bringing their whole weight to bear violently upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and, finally, of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.

Today, we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connexions must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized.

Come, brothers, we have far too much work to do for us to play the game of rear-guard. Europe has done what she set out to do and on the whole she has done it well; let us stop blaming her, but let us say to her firmly that she should not make such a song and dance about it. We have no more to fear; so let us stop envying her.

The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.

But let us be clear: what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification, and the rhythm of work.

No, there is no question of a return to Nature. It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men towards mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and kill him.

No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan should not be stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see those who precede it; and men who no longer recognize each other meet less and less together, and talk to each other less and less.

It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity. And in the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the stratification and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men.

So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.

If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.

But if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.

If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.

Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened.

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.


Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth

“Our own self interest demands that we have somewhere to go when the going gets tough and we should look very seriously at recent European history as we witness the rise of fascism in France, Germany, Belgium and Britain.

There may be little point in us saying we were born here or that we are really British or French. German Jews protested as they were pushed into incinerators that they were German. This is a very bleak scenario and it is one that we hope will not arise but it would be foolhardy to imagine that it could not happen.

What are our options? And are we playing into the hands of fascists and racists by saying that we should leave Europe. We believe that there are sound pragmatic reasons why we should want to make Africa a place fit for Africans. firstly it would be an insurance policy against rising fascism. Secondly why should we not consider going to Africa if we can think of going to Canada or the USA. If as we believe we win the argument for financial compensation Africa would become a viable option for people of African origin to live and invest in. And when Africa is strong the standing of African peoples will also be strong.

We do not demand that all people of African origin should return to Africa what we seek instead is to make it a place of preference. Some of us because of family and friends will want to stay here, this must be a right one that will continue to fight for. But we also want to dispel the lies and myths that make the idea of all things African so negative. We did not come to Europe because of the weather we came because it was, we were told the motherland (or fatherland). We came because there were few economic choices for us if we wished to prosper.

Given our skills of survival and of creativity we can make Africa a place where all African peoples can be free to achieve our full potential.

Reparations starts with our self image.

Let us be proud to be African. “

Linda Bellos
Reparations For Africa

Reparations For Africa