Greetings family.
We often talk about
“not being free”. I happen to agree with this and my pondering of
this issue leads me to a singular conclusion for our current state as
a people. The reason we are not free is because, like children, we
are way too dependent on the goodwill of others in our endeavours to
survive and make a proud living in today's world. What we need is
complete economic freedom even though fighting, or working towards
this end can be dangerous as you shall see below.
Let me explain why.
Freedom is nothing
unless, and until, you become completely economically
independent and thus become able to take complete control of your own destiny and to shape it positively for both yourself and your family, as well as for
your community. Having the fetters of slavery and colonialism removed
from you doesn't make you free. Economic independence though does, as
it releases you from all the shackles that hold you back in life both
as an individual and, for the purposes of this blog, as a people It
instils in you a sense of achievement and grows your confidence as a
human being. It also makes you proud of who, and what, you are.
Affirmative action,
civil rights legislation; self-governance in some instances, and the
evolving of racial tolerance have all played a positive part in
raising us out of our past impoverished and feeble position compared
to other races but that is only on the outside. As a people the
truth remains that we are still the ward of someone else in the
broader sense.
You see, being given
good jobs on merit does not necessarily make us, as a collective,
free. Sure, it improves our financial well being but the fact
remains that we remain dependent on the good graces and kindness of
those of the dominant races who make those jobs available to us. True
freedom for us as a people can only come through ownership of the
mode of production and using that ownership to provide jobs and the
corresponding economic security for our own.
It pains me to see us,
as a race, always negatively portrayed in Oxfam and Red Cross adverts
whenever they appeal to people to donate to provide clean water,
decent food, and so on, to deprived regions of Africa, or decent
housing in the “inner cities” (euphemism for impoverished, often
black, neighborhoods) in the developed world. The filming always
seems to take place in some grim backwater in the worst places of the
given area - which is then promoted as the true representation of how
we all live and propagates the theory that we can not survive without
the kindness of others.
The harsh truth is that
we should be able to survive and progress on our own and in fact we,
as as a people, should be doing all of that charity fund raising for
ourselves by developing ourselves economically. To do this, and to
improve our own areas and countries we need to focus on ourselves as
a collective to do so. Not everyone will become rich but what we can
certainly do to raise ourselves a notch or two upwards on the
economic charts is to pool resources and create viable companies, and
firms, and partnerships, that will create job opportunities for our
children and spare them from the indignities of being denied
employment on the basis of the names and of course, on their skin
texture.
Trickle down economic
improvement based on community support and unity, and a sense of purpose and drive amongst
our own is how I would describe this in a nutshell.
People will always
respect, and often times adore, an independent man or woman. More so
if they know that that man or woman requires nothing from his
admirers to get ahead in life. This, in a sense, is why whenever a
black man preaches economic emancipation, the current global economic
powers at the given time will do whatever they need to do to remove
them as an influence as they understand very well the consequences of
no longer being able to dictate terms to those that they consider to
be beneath them. The control factor dissipates.....
This is something that
has been preached about for ages by luminaries of the black cause
like Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and more
recently, by people like Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and so on. So
important is economic freedom some of our former rulers resorted to
the facilitation of murder and the creation of false criminal charges
to suppress its rise within the black community. The last two
leaders mentioned, Lumumba and Nkurumah were toppled at the behest of Western Intelligence
agencies due their eagerness to reduce their peoples dependency on
the master upon the attainment of independence of their respective
countries. Garvey was imprisoned in 1923 on what are widely believed
to be trumped up mail fraud charges, and Malcolm was gunned down in February 1965 as
he gave his final speech in a ball room in Harlem New York with, it is believed, the complicity of the FBI under its leader, J Edgar Hoover - the same man believed to have been behind the downfall of Garvey
These examples given
above, for me, serve to illustrate the power and importance of economic freedom as well as the importance of securing it for our children and for their
children afterwards.
I will leave you first with a
link to one the first tangible efforts at developing economic freedom
for black folk which was funded via modest contributions from within
the community. It failed in the end but it remains as an excellent
example of what can be achieved via unity.
Marcus Garvey's BlackStar Liner company.
I will also leave links
to some modern day success stories below; people who not only have, through innovation and dogged determination succeeded but who have also done something to improve our embattled community. Stories that should serve as inspirational and as a push towards a better life and condition for our people.
Just think about
it..... and act!
In love of Pan
Africanism
Afritude.
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