The absolute worst thing to happen to the African (every African, even those Africans who are not aware that they are Africans), is the loss of our imagination. The African Imagination is what laid the foundation for the first tool, the first shoe, the first piece of art, and the first act of scientific inquiry. The African Imagination, in fact, created the first God. The African imagination allowed for self-awareness, and the ascent of humanity from prey for wild animals to sculptors of the very planetary landscape.
Today, we lack the imagination to look beyond what’s possible in this world constructed by brutal, omnicidal, high-tech barbarians, who used our land, labor, and resources to construct a world so dysfunctional that it leaves half of humanity starving, and all of humanity contaminated with toxic man-made pollutants. Today, even them most talented and gifted Africans are reduced to laboring to buy goods, that are manufactured in miserable places, using materials and processes that scar and pollute the land.
There was a time when thoughts of how to govern entire continents occupied the minds of the African Elite, when refinement of all forms and motion was our pastime. A time when the textures and colors of the natural world would provide hours of intellectual stimulation of our children, and mothers would use the same techniques to govern our empires that they developed in governing multi-generational households.
The African Imagination was so vivid and productive that we’d create civilizations, universities, gods, spiritual systems, ways of being, and social relating that other nation would mimic to the best of their ability. Non-African cultures would fight over the cultures and monuments we had already discarded for new and more innovative cultural creations.
Even today, in our degraded and powerless state, billion dollar industries are created from cultural products that we create in Third World shantytowns, and the slums of America’s inner-cities. We don’t maintain control of, or profit form them, however. Just a few of us enjoy the superficial riches and glamor, but most of the richest Blacks fail to sustain their wealth more than one or two generations before their descendants are back in the slums with the rest of us. Those Blacks who do hold on to their riches longer than that must, by design, act against the interest of all other Africans, and ally with our ‘eternal, bitter, enemies,’ they never gain institutional power, control over basic resources, or build their own independent (economic, political, or military) power ; they just get to buy a lot more shit than the rest of us can.
So, for centuries, we play this game. Africans who created dynasties that lasted 10s of thousands of years are now clinging for their lives to a system that is already showing signs of collapse after just 1400 or so years of dominance, and the seat of it’s imperial power, the United States is rotting from within after less than 300 hundred year of existence, and just over 50 years at the top. Shame.
We had better start to learn and employ the art of State-Craft. We’d better get very comfortable with seizing and holding on to Power. We’d better pool the all of the resources we have in this system and create African institutions. We need to create African enclaves in this nation, in South Chicago, right now, where we put aside all petty squabbles, fruitless activities, and delusional solutions, and focus on independent, sustainable and collective development. (When I say ‘independent,’ I’m not fucking talking about personal independence and individualism, I’m talking about independence from the State, and racist institutions that forced our dependence upon them in the first damn place; interdependence among Africans is needed and should be intensified.)
Let’s reawaken the African Imagination, and bring about a humane world, a vibrant world where we don’t destroy and pollute in order to derive a living from the world. Only the African Imagination will bring us to this, we’ve already seen that a bunch of money, and advanced degrees are not nearly enough, we need to conceptualize a better world, then build a pathway to that world that is rooted in our unique mentality and personality, our wondrous imaginations.
Forward.
