“But, whiles I must make this physical departure, spiritually,

I will not leave you and God will take care of you. When you

feel a cool breeze blow across your face every now and then,

just know that it comes from the deep reservoir of love that I

hold for you. Oh, by the way, Christ is Black; I see him walking

at a distance with Nkrumah. I think they are coming over to greet

me.”

 

“My feet have felt the sands

Of many nations,

I have drunk the water

Of many springs.

I am old,

Older than the pyramids,

I am older than the race

That oppresses me.

I will live on…

I will out-live oppression.

I will out-live oppressors.

DETERMINATION”

 

John Henrik Clarke

July 16, 1998

1. People rise and fall within the context of the nation institution. When they lose the ability to master and control the nation institution they lose their freedom. This is where we are: a nation within a nation, searching for a nationality.

2. Now, as a result of the Europeans’ rise to power, a revolution began in the world, one we must now revolt against. To revolt against it, we must understand how it began. How then did we lose our Africanness? What will we have to do to regain it? How did we lose the concept of nationness and develop a concept of dependency?

3. The most dangerous of all dependencies is to depend on your powerful oppressor to free you and share power with you, because powerful people never train powerless people to take power away from them.

 

4. Here is something we do not understand today: the nature of oppressed people preying on other oppressed people in order to resist oppression.

 

5. When we use the term “Third World,” we better use it carefully. Because there are a whole lot of people in the Third World who, in order to ingratiate themselves to the oppressor, would gladly become an “honorary” oppressor where we are concerned.

 

6. Because we have not learned to practice, figuratively speaking, the essential selfishness of survival, we should give no piece of the pie until every member of our family has a piece of the pie.

 

7. When we began to lose these nation lessons we began to move deeper and deeper into a trap, into a trap of dependency. And yet into that same trap came the ingredients of liberation. We have not studied enough how the slaves in the Caribbean took advantage of the poor quality of the British craftsmanship.

 

8. This is where the revolt will begin, this is where the whole concept of “let us be a nation again, let us be a people again, let us build institutions again,” began in Jamaica. We need to draw some impetus on what we have already done in order to understand what we still must do.

 

9. After the Civil War and after the British emancipation, when they discovered it was a phony, when they discovered they hadn’t been emancipated— the Black people had no jobs, had no housing, and they still had to go back to the same plantations.

 

10. Freedom is something we must take with our own hands and serve it with our own hands. If other people’s hands serve it for us, other people’s hands can take it away.