On Thursday, July 16, 1998, Dr. John Henrik Clarke made his transition into eternity. Dr. Clarke was one of our greatest African deep thinkers, historians, and educators in the history of the African world.

The following is Dr. Clarke speaking in his own words prior to his transition. This will be followed by a review of his book, Notes For An African World Revolution: Africans At The Crossroads, written by me in 1991.

Thousands and thousands of books are published each year, but very few contain any wisdom that will help African people, throughout the world, in our on-going liberation struggles. However, this is not the case in the newly released book by our renowned African scholar, researcher, and writer, Dr. John Henrik Clarke. Dr. Clarke’s new book, Notes For An African World Revolution: Africans At The Crossroads, is full of the rich wisdom of his more than 55 years of active participation in the worldwide African Liberation Movement.

This is the kind of book that will have to be read, over and over again, to decipher all of its rich “source of wisdom.” For example, Dr. Clarke states:

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The above points of wisdom I extracted from this most profound book by Dr. Clarke are just a few examples, among many, of lessons he presents to us through his many years of struggle.

There have been few African American men or women since our forced capture and introduction into the western hemisphere, who have dedicated their entire lives to study, research, writing, and teaching about the history of the world. In reading this book, the dedication and insights of Dr. John Henrik Clarke come through loud and clear.

BlackCommentator.com columnist Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.