Dr. Maulana Karenga – ThyBlackMan.com

Again, The Music and Magic of Blackness: The Centering and Sustaining Beauty of Soul.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:12:59 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) Closing out this month of celebrating Black Music, I would like to do some sankofa sharing of some essential sensitivities and thoughts about the meaning and magic of Black music. Although we celebrate June as Black Music Month, every day and hour is an open space for making and celebrating our music. We do it not only in writing, playing and performing of sounds and songs. But also, we do it in the way we live our lives, do our work and wage our daily struggles. And at the heart and center of these struggles is the overarching struggle to be ourselves and free ourselves and hold on to and constantly expand our humanity under the most inhumane and dehumanizing conditions. And this celebration of our music and ourselves is also in the righteous and upraising rhythms of our beautiful Blackness and in the melodies and harmonies of our togetherness, our loving and sharing good.

It is important to note that when we talk here of the beauty, music, magic and miracle of Blackness, we are using a synonym for our Africanness. For Black is a colloquial term for the color, culture and consciousness that speaks to our being African. And being African is actively appreciating and honoring our unique and equally valid and valuable way of being human in the world. It is the self-defining and particular cultural way we live our lives and open ourselves up to love; dance and do music; practice our faith traditions; cherish and challenge our children; fiercely fight for freedom; constantly seek justice; delight in doing good and walk gently in peace, but with dignified defiance in the practice of resistance.

For Blackness is not only an identity, but also a duty defined by that identity. Indeed, we are a soul people in radically evil oppression and righteous and relentless struggle to end it. Our identity, then, is also one born in struggle, a dignity-affirming, live-enhancing, world-preserving liberation struggle. Therefore, in the 1960s, we raised up the reaffirmation of the beauty of our humanity and Africanness in the declarations “Black is Beautiful” and “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” And we defiantly put forth the prophecy and pursued the promise and practice of freedom with the battlecry “Liberation Is Coming From A Black Thing.”

At the heart and center of the music, magic and miracle of our Blackness is this rich and generative notion and reality of soul. And we use the term in at least five basic ways: as a spiritual concept; a defining Black character trait and spirit; a category of cultural distinctiveness; an expression of the beauty and depthfulness of our being and becoming; and a measure and standard of African excellence. In the Sixties, I defined soul as an inner sense of ourselves defined by creativity, sensitivity and impulse. This speaks to our capacity to conceive and create magic and miracle, beauty and meaning in the midst of ugliness and meaninglessness, and to develop and defend free space in the midst of unfreedom. It speaks also to our depth of feeling, a sensitivity to others, to beauty and good, but also to human suffering and a will to end it. And the notion of soul speaks also to a creative and sensitive impulse also called improvisation. But I want to keep the word impulse which suggests a spontaneous urge and natural inclination to act in beautiful, creative and sensitive ways in art, love and life in general.

In other words, soul is an internal creative capacity, a centering and sustaining spirit and inner strength that undergirds our resilience and resourcefulness, our adaptive vitality and human durability in the face of the most radical evil, injustice and oppression. It is in this context that we recognize the Divine presence in and with us as our ancestors taught. And in the depth of our appreciation of the unbreakable spirit within us, we give it a spiritual interpretation. Thus, when we look back over all we encountered and overcame and rejoiced in it, we are amazed at the miracles and magic we’ve made and yet giving due honor to the Divine in us and with us, as the ancestors taught. This is the message and meaning of Sis. Clara Ward’s instructive sacred praise song, called gospel, “How I Got Over.” She says and sings, and we wonder with her: “My soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” And she thinks and thanks the Divine.

But soul is also and above all in its most definitive, distinctive and inclusive sense a cultural concept. It speaks not only to the depth of our spirituality, but is a defining Black character trait and spirit which undergirds, infuses and informs our being and constant becoming. We are again a soul people, soul men and women, soul sisters and brothers. We call our food – soul food, our music – soul music, our Sunday forums on life and struggle – Soul Sessions, and we designate as soulful our preaching, teaching and talking good. And Curtis Mayfield assures us that no matter what happens “We got soul and everybody knows, it’s all right.”

Thus, we see soul not only as defining us, our music and way of life, but as a distinctiveness of peoplehood and personhood. It is one of the characteristics that makes us distinct without needing to claim superiority. It is this special distinction of peoplehood and culture that we treasure greatly and defend against the imitations of our lives and the appropriations of our culture by others in exploitative and insensitive ways.

The notion and expression of soul in our music or our lives in general also speaks of the depthfulness and beauty of our Blackness as both being and becoming, ever striving to come into the constantly expanding fullness of ourselves. I speak here of a centering and sustaining soulfulness as expressive beauty, a meaningful and moving beauty, revealing and reaffirming, eloquent, artistic and evocative, sensitive and suggestive of the good. And this soulful expressiveness can be shared with or without words or sounds or even symbols. It can reveal itself in the music we make in loving close or simply be naturally embodied in the goodness and sacredness of ourselves, as sites of witness and wonder.

When I talk of the centering and sustaining beauty of soul, it is to speak not only of what is aesthetically pleasing to our senses, but also what is ethically pleasing to our sense of the good. And thus, the beauty and Blackness of our soul and ultimately ourselves must always be demonstrated and reaffirmed in the goodness we do, share in righteous and relentless struggle for and achieve in the world. In this sense, soul is also ultimately a standard and measure of our excellence in every sense of the word.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Regaining the Audacious Assertiveness of African Liberation: Reflective Gleanings From Our Histories of Resistance.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:46:29 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) The month of May is the month of Haji Malcolm X and also the month of African Liberation Day (ALD), and it brings with it instructive histories and ever renewed commitments of continued and victorious struggle. Indeed, both the Black liberation struggle in the US and Haji Malcolm’s central role in it and the liberation struggles on the African continent offer us a rich and ongoing resource for reflective gleanings from our shared histories of righteous and relentless resistance. ALD is a day of gathering to reinforce the bonds between us. And it is a day of reflection, remembrance and recommitment, of discussion and decision-making that builds strengths for our continuing liberation struggles. And at the heart of all our struggles is the shared goal and the awesome responsibility of liberating Africa as a continent and world community, harness and control our human and material resources, uplift and enrich the lives of the masses of our people, and as Nana Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah urged, return to the stage of human history as a self-conscious and powerful “force for good in the world”.

Indeed, as Nana Mwalimu Julius Nyerere stresses, our central and sustained efforts must be for the liberation and upliftment of our people. Thus, he states that “all the reasons for African unity can be summed up in one phrase – the welfare of the people of Africa”. And this refers to all Africans everywhere, throughout the global African community, continental and diasporan Africans. And I note and reaffirm the goals and goods, as Mwalimu put forth, of freeing our people from oppression, poverty, internal war and conflicts, and creating a context of security and peace infused and undergirded with justice, are still to be achieved and enjoyed.

The 1960s were decades, as we say, when the fires of freedom raged with revolutionary intensity on the continent and in the diaspora and around the world. And we were confident that Nana Frantz Fanon was right, that we were morally compelled to dare achieve a new history for Africa and humankind, “set afoot a new human being” and create a new context for their flourishing. Certainly, we were conscious of the power, perversity and missing human parts of the oppressor, but we believed a people united and conscious of its enemy and itself could not be defeated. We reasoned that yes, a people in revolutionary motion could be interrupted, delayed, and even experience devastating setbacks, often interpreted as defeats. But ultimately, if they embraced a radical refusal to be defeated, they could not and would not be defeated and would eventually be victorious.

It is here that the concept and practice of audacious assertiveness is so essential and it is this spirit that we must recapture if we are, as Haji Malcolm said, “liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy” and build the good world we all want and deserve to live in. When we speak of audaciousness and audacious assertiveness, we mean being self-consciously daring, defiant, fearless, innovative, risk-taking, outrageously in opposition to oppression, and again irreversibly committed to a radical refusal to be defeated. And it means daring to believe in our people and their capacity to be themselves and free themselves, and create and share goodness in the world. It perhaps will seem more aspiration than reality to talk of defeating the international corporate system of oppression and predation involving various forms of anti-human activity, i.e., imperialism, enslavement, colonialism, settlerism, genocide, ecocide and the savagery that accompanies them. But this has been the nature of our struggle to defy all odds and refuse to be disarmed, dispirited or diverted from the ultimate goal of liberation and ever higher levels of human life.

Here, I think of Nana Harriet Tubman, her courage and commitment, her refusal to be deterred by the odds against her and our people, remembering and daring to regain the freedom of our people who supported her and the freedom struggle. I think of Nana Jacob Marenga of Namibia, master strategist and tactician, uniting the ethnic groups into a fighting force and liberation movement and defying and defeating the genocidal German oppressors whenever and wherever they could in over 50 battles. And I think of our mother and father and all our mothers and fathers who were not declared soldiers, but in countless ways, contributed to the liberation struggle, kept the faith and held the line on the good, the right and the possible.

Clearly, we must love and serve our people, especially if we emerge as leaders. For as Nana Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune taught us, “the measure of our progress as a (people) is in precise relation to the depth of faith in our people held by our leaders”. Nana Amilcar Cabral teaches us that “We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect” of our lives, i.e., shared power, inclusive participation, respecting each other, each other’s work and our shared responsibilities. And in doing the work and waging the struggle for liberation, he says, we must “Mask no difficulties; tell no lies; and claim no easy victories”.

As I have maintained since the 60s, following Nana Fanon, everything depends above all on the consciousness, capability and commitment of the masses of our people and our relationship with them. So all programs for African liberation must place their needs at the top of any agenda worthy of the name. And always and everywhere maximum participation of the people in building their own lives and future and choosing their ways and movement forward is indispensable. For the needs of the people are real and they deserve and have a right to a good, meaningful and fulfilling life.

In addition, we must continue to demand and achieve from our former enslavers and colonizers and current oppressors: long overdue reparations; debt cancellation; the end of resource robbery by corporations through predatory proxy armies, dictators and corrupt officials; return of riches stolen and compensation for those unrecoverable; and the end of violation of the sovereignty and self-determination of the countries of Africa, Haiti and throughout the world African community.

Also, we must continue to build and expand global pan-Africanism, stand in solidarity with all African peoples and other oppressed and struggling peoples of the world. Especially must we oppose the genocidal war armed by the UAE and others in Sudan; the savage imperialist oppression of Haiti; the genocide, ecocide and land theft by Israel against the Palestinian people; the wars of aggression against Lebanon and Iran by Israel and the US, in criminal partnership; and the Trump regime’s immoral and illegal blockade and its gansta threats to Cuba’s welfare, sovereignty and self-determination.

These positions are rooted in our self-understanding and resultant self-assertion as a world encompassing people who know themselves as a key moral and social vanguard in the world. Our task, then, is to know our history and honor it, as our ancestors, in any ways we can in this our time and place and dare to lay the basis for a future worthy of the name and history African.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Uplifting and Linking Mother’s Day and May Day: Living the Legacy of Labor Struggles for Inclusive Good.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Sat, 09 May 2026 02:50:52 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) As I think lovingly and appreciatively of my mother on this coming Mother’s Day and reflect on this past May Day, I remember that it was my mother and father who taught me the dignity and duty of work and worker, and the role of work and workers in serving our community and humanity, and in making and remaking the world. And they taught me also the equally important meaning of work as a self-defining, self-developing and self-affirming activity. I speak here, then, not of toil, the exhausting and demeaning drudgery engaged in to eke out a living and provide for the bare necessities of life. Rather, I speak of work, an activity essential not only to our making a living but also to our conceiving and making a life, an activity vital to our self-understanding and the way we engage and build our world and thus, certainly worthy of respect and demanding of justice.

Nana Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mother and father, of the same spiritual faith and a similar generation as my mother and father, taught him the dignity and worth of work in its service to humanity, as my mother and father taught us, drawing from a long and honorable tradition of work. In his classic speech on this topic in Memphis, supporting the strike and demands for decent wages and working conditions of the sanitation workers, Dr. King reaffirms this position, saying to the striking workers and their supporters, that they are rightfully “demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor”. And he noted that “So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But…whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth”. Thus, in the best of our ethical sensibilities, thought and practice, all workers deserve respect, just pay, appropriate conditions of work, and the right to organize and assert their interests.

We stood and stand in active solidarity with the millions in this country and around the world who participated in marking May Day (International Workers’ Day) in demonstrations, deliberations and resolute commitment to continue the struggle against war, ICE, genocide, injustice, fascism and all forms of oppression. For at the heart of all these labor and other struggles must be, and is for us, the collective and collaborative commitment to achieving a shared and inclusive good for everyone, everywhere and the sustained well-being of the world and all in it.

What I want to do here, then, in uplifting and linking Mother’s Day and May Day is to center the legacy of labor struggles in our history, especially those led by Black women that form a core of our larger struggle for freedom, justice and a shared and inclusive good and those that are caringly attentive to the overlooked, undervalued and vulnerable, as my mother and father taught. Let us first pay rightful homage to our ancient ancestors, the original world builders, working their will on the world to extract and share good from the earth – the early gatherers, farmers and fishermen and fisherwomen, herbalists and healthcare workers, the builders of houses and temples and all other workers who worked to bring a shared good in the world. We pay homage also to the workers who launched the first strike in recorded history at a worksite in ancient Egypt called Set Ma’at, the Place of Justice c. 1170 BCE. Indeed, artisans and ordinary workers stopped work, sat in, marched, petitioned and disrupted the regular order of things. They told the officials that they were not only striking because of the late wages and the hunger that this caused for them and their families, but also because “There is injustice in this place”. Their concern was beyond the essential need for wages and centered the issue of the dignity of the worker and the respect and just compensation due to them.

We pay rightful homage also to the women and men free of mind and heart who did not accept their status in enslavement and resisted being objects of labor, sex and entertainment by striking, breaking tools, destroying crops, escaping and returning to free others, and exercising the right and responsibility to revolt and be free. And we pay homage to the Black washerwomen or launderers who built a labor union, the Washing Society, and organized a strike in Atlanta, Georgia in 1881 to win higher and uniform wages; and to Nana Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator and organizer, who founded the National Association of Wage Earners in 1921; and to Nana Rosina Corrothers Tucker, labor organizer, civil rights activist, and educator who worked as a union organizer for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and served as the first president of its International Ladies Auxiliary, 1938. Also, we pay homage to Nana Dorothy Bolden, founder of the National Domestic Workers Union of America in 1968; to Nana Clara Day who co-founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974; and to all other labor and life waymakers and bridges who carried us over and led us forward.

Finally, we pay homage to the labor leader and activist Nana Fahari Jeffers who with her husband, Ken Seaton-Msemaji, co-founded the United Domestic Workers of America in 1977. They were grounded in Kawaida philosophy and its organizing thought and practice and linked their work to the United Farm Workers movement given that both were primarily composed of women, people of color and immigrants and not rightly valued by the larger labor movement. Indeed, Nana Fahari said in being inducted into the San Diego County Women’s Hall of Fame, “It’s an honor as a woman and it’s an honor as an African-American woman. There are many women who make groundbreaking, enormous contributions to our community that we will never meet or hear of, and I want them to know that their work is valued and recognized and that it has made a difference”.

Here she reaffirms the dignity, centrality and sustaining character of Black women’s labor and our need to recognize and respect them, their work and their role in bringing good into the world. And I thought here of how my mother was both a domestic worker and a farmworker, and I remembered and rejoiced in the many other roles and responsibilities she joyfully assumed for our family and our community. And I reflected again about our moral obligation to seriously and joyfully honor and live the legacy of our foremothers and forefathers by continuing the sacred work and struggle for freedom, justice and a shared and inclusive good for all of us and for all the earth.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Genuinely Sensing the Sacredness of the World: Seriously Engaging Another Us-On-Earth Day.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 03:49:23 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) As we celebrate Us-On-Earth Day again this year, I want to raise again the urgent and ongoing need for us to understand this day and our approach to it as not simply concerns about the earth, but also about us on the earth and what it means to us as well as to the earth and all in it. For this day and month of marking, reminding and reflection offer us an ongoing invitation and opportunity to actually become meaningfully engaged in personal and social practices that recognize and respect our relationship and responsibility to the health and well-being of the natural world. For we realize and respond to the inescapable fact that the health and well-being of the world is interdependently and inseparably linked to that of our own and that of the whole of humanity. Indeed, the Kawaida Maatian ethical imperative of serudj ta requires that we link well-being with right doing and good doing in the world in order to repair, renew and remake the world. In a word, we are to relate rightly, act justly and walk gently in the world.

Central to our relating rightly, acting justly and walking gently in the world is seeing and sensing the world and all in it as sacred. This does not mean we don’t or can’t also have special sacred places, but it means that we should recognize and respect the fact that the special sacred space is located in and part of a larger sacred space, the world. In our earliest sacred texts, the world was seen and sensed as sacred for several reasons and all of them were interrelated and central to the transcendent respect they had for the spiritual, natural and social worlds of humans. In the Kawaida Maatian ethical tradition rooted in ancient Egyptian sacred teachings, humans are part of an interrelated reality of concentric circles of relatedness. In their identity as images of God, they are spiritual beings; in their embeddedness in nature, they are natural beings; and in their lives, work and struggles in society, they are social beings. And each of these must be seen, approached and engaged as interrelated, interdependent and inseparable.

What I want to do here is share some of the essential teachings of our ancestors on how we can relate rightly, act justly and walk gently in the world. Starting with some of our most ancient texts and ending with some of our modern texts on the sacredness of nature, I want to share how they sensed and engaged the world as sacred and worthy of transcendent respect. In the classical spiritual and ethical texts of ancient Egypt, the Husia, the Great Praise Poem to the Divine by Pharaoh Akhenaten stands out as an excellent example reaffirming the sense of the sacredness of the world. He says in this great work: “You are beautiful, great, radiant exalted above every land…sustaining all you have made…people, cattle, animals and all there is. You make a Nile (for Kemet) deep in the earth and you bring it because of your love that cause the people to live…all other lands, you make a way of life for them also. You place a Nile in the sky and it comes to them”. In this praise poem the Pharaoh Akhenaten speaks of the beauty and sacredness of the world suggesting it is goodness of itself, a creation of the Divine, and a means of sustainment and beauty for human beings everywhere. He also stresses the equal access to and right to the necessities of life which the earth provides as a Divine endowment, “and everyone can see this so that they may live rightly”.

Also beautiful in the spiritual, ethical and aesthetic sense is the definition of holiness by a Bakwena (Setswana) person given to a colonial missionary who saw holiness in a less inclusive and therefore incomplete way. Approaching holiness as a wholistic and inclusive reality, he stressed in his definition that not only is spirit sacred, but also the earth and all in it. Thus, he says, “When abundant rains fall during the night and wash all the world, trees and cattle clean and the air breathes clean; and the rising sun shows a drop of dew on every blade of grass, that to us is holiness”. In a word, the forms, contents and processes of the world are both sacred and beautiful.

Another important sacred text which teaches us to recognize and respect the sacredness of the earth and all in it and our moral responsibility to care for it and do good for it is the Odu Ifa. It tells us, that “those whose turn it is to take responsibility for the world, they should do good for the world”. Clearly, it is our time and our responsibility, we, the living, conscious and capable, to take care of the world and do good for the world in the ways we each and all can.

Our ancestors also taught that “the world should stop making sacrifices for wealth, and instead make sacrifices that would protect the earth from its enemies. In this way, we will live”. And again, this calls for us to sense the sacredness of the earth and all in it and relate, act and walk in dignity-affirming, life-enhancing and world-preserving ways.

In more recent times, Nana Dr. George Washington Carver gives us a beautiful model of sensing and appreciating the sacredness of the world. A highly accomplished and respected scientist, he also was a very spiritual person, combining it all in the way he conceived and lived his life and did his work. Sensing and seeing the world as sacred, he spoke of how he did “love the things God has created, both animate and inanimate”. Advancing love of creation as a sacred space of living, learning and working, he taught that if you approach nature with genuine love and a will to learn, it will give up its secrets just as other loved ones do. Nature, he taught, has wonderful stories to share and awesome goodness to give, if we love it and learn its languages and lessons. Indeed, he said, “the singing birds, the buzzing bees, the opening flower and the budding trees, along with other forms of animate and inanimate matter, all have their marvelous creation story to tell”. And “more and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature (around) us”.

Nana Dr. Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement whose model offers a framework for environmental work in the world, also stressed “love for the environment,” as an indispensable value which teaches us to see and sense the earth as sacred. She taught an active caring for the world which “motivates one to take positive action for the earth, such as planting trees and ensuring that they survive; nurtur(ing) those trees that are standing; protect(ing) animals and their habitat; conserve(ing) soil”; and other related life-affirming and world-preserving activities. And she urged us to have and demonstrate “gratitude and respect for the Earth’s resources” and “valuing all that the earth gives us and because of that valuation, not wanting to waste any of it”.

Again, then, in our deep sense of the sacredness of the earth and all in it , let us dare to relate rightly, act justly and walk gently on earth. Let us relate rightly, embracing an expansive understanding of ourselves that reaffirms our ancestral teachings of the unity of being, the oneness of life, and the interrelatedness and interdependence of the whole world. Let us act justly in and for the world and for ourselves, giving everyone and everything in the world their rightful due. It means respecting the earth as our honored ancestors taught, i.e., for:

1) its intrinsic value as a goodness in itself;

2) its status as a divine creation and sacred space,

and

3) its being a central and indispensable source of our shared well-being, sustainment, our sense of the sacred and beautiful, and our expansive concept of ourselves and our responsibility.

And let us walk gently in the world asserting ourselves in the world as good relatives to all in it, without species arrogance, abuse, and insensitivity to other living and inanimate beings and without conscious or unconscious complicity in the plunder, pollution and depletion of the world by our own practices. In a word we must see and conduct ourselves not only as human beings (watu), but also as (walimwengu) with joyful responsibility for the well-being and shared good of the world and all in it.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Centering and Cultivating Black Love: A Complementary and Species-Compelling Need.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:24:38 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) As we close out two months of commemoration and celebration of the history of our people, I reach back to retrieve and reaffirm thoughts on centering and cultivating Black love. It is not an exaggeration to state that there is no issue of greater importance, urgency or enduring impact in terms of the foundation, functioning and future of us as a community and a people than the quality of male/female relationships. Indeed, this speaks not only to the health and wholeness of our people, but also of each member of the community and to how we imagine and either forge or forfeit a good future for our children. So, the issue of quality relationships between men and women and boys and girls is not just about coupling, cuddling and masterful moves. Nor is it about sexual seduction and consumer things about which they think they will die if they don’t get. And it is not just about the increase in desperate and hope-to-die claims that they will never love, be hurt or hassled, trust or try to build a relationship again. Indeed, the intensity of the denial only demonstrates how deep and enduring the need to love and be loved is.

Surely, then, it is about something deeper, more ancient and indispensable, something our ancient sacred texts tell us is inherent in the conception, creation and functioning of the world – the complementary and species-compelling need for male and female love, presence and cooperative practice in the world. For the Husia and Odu Ifa speak to the need we have not only for each other in spiritual, natural and social ways, but also the need of our togetherness to create and sustain the good in family, society and the world. And it is within this ancient and ongoing African understanding that we must conceive, build, sustain and make flourish our relationships and teach our children likewise by the most careful instruction and self-conscious example.

There are so many things that block the road toward realization of the togetherness in love we long and live for. There is racism that degrades and devalues, sexism that teaches submission and domination, and materialism that makes things and money the measure and meaning of everything. There is also unemployment and vulgar individualism, Eurocentric drama, drugs and unrealizable dreams, the prison system and broken promises, the media and the mean and merciless streets, and a long history of Holocaust, horror and other forms of oppression at the hands of our oppressor. So, the wonder is not that we have problems, but that so many of us have survived and solved them and went on to build rock-strong, stable and loving relations worthy of the highest praise and promise. Indeed, the point is not that we have problems – for that’s only human; the issue is how we solve them in the most gentle, loving and effective ways.

Love is the heartbeat and hope of any real, reciprocal and enduring relationship, and we must understand it not simply as an emotion, but also as a practice. For at its best, love is ultimate appreciation, attentiveness and consideration that expresses itself in the mutual investment in each other’s happiness, well-being and development. It is ultimately a reciprocal, deeply rewarding and awesome giving of ourselves and receiving the same from another as a sacred exchange.

Here it is important to make a distinction between pleasure and happiness. For pleasure is satisfaction of the senses, but happiness is satisfaction of the heart and mind. Pleasure is a time and space limited satisfaction of desires by external events and experiences, but happiness is an enduring inner satisfaction. And love, as mutual giving, engenders such an enduring inner satisfaction, enhances our sense of well-being and enriches our development as persons and human beings.

At the heart of the practice of love is active commitment to an Afrocentric value system which teaches and reinforces our essential identity as bearers of divinity and dignity, and requires us to approach and treat each other and our relationships as sacred and worthy of the highest respect, care and consideration. Since the Sixties, I’ve taught that the Nguzo Saba is that African-centered value system and that we can use it to build our relationships and community and enrich our lives.

The first principle is Umoja (Unity) which stresses the good and need of togetherness in the most principled and purposeful ways. It teaches us to remove all thoughts, emotions, speech and conduct which undermine our togetherness and pull us apart. At one with each other, we will see ourselves in each other and sense our divinity, reaffirm our dignity and develop an identity meriting a high respect and place among men and women.

Kujichagulia (Self-determination) teaches the right and responsibility to choose, to choose who we will be and it requires that each of us be allowed and encouraged to be who we are in the most positive and progressive sense without crass criticism, hindrance or negative questioning, but always within the framework of the requirements of togetherness and common ground. And it teaches us that the ground of our choosing must always be from within the context of our own culture and its highest values. Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) teaches us active working, building and struggling together to clear space for our love to grow, to transform ourselves so that we feel and fit right and rightfully together and to take collective responsibility for the good and bad, right and wrong, the beautiful and ugly that strengthen or undermine our relationships.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) teaches us the principle and practice of shared work and shared wealth, that we not make money the measure and central meaning of all things and to reject debilitating disputes and disagreements about it. And it requires us to avoid materialism and consumerism of the dominant society, value each other more and those qualities that reflect strength of character and depth of commitment.

The principle of Nia (Purpose) teaches us that we must live purposeful lives, share goals, aid each other in realizing our different yet interrelated goals and work toward things that strengthen each of us. At the heart of this practice must be the goal of building a friendship defined by our thinking good of each other, wanting and working for the good of each other, doing good to and for each other, and sharing good with each other as a fundamental principle and practice of love and life.

Kuumba (Creativity) urges us to pursue the positive, avoid the negative, to constantly reaffirm the dignity and worth of each other, and our need for each other and to avoid all conversation and acts that degrade and violate the sacredness of each person and the relationship itself. And it means that we, as the ancestors taught in the Husia, must strive always to quickly and eagerly to raise up what is in ruins, repair what is damaged, rejoin what is severed, replenish what is depleted, set right what is wrong, strengthen what is weakened, and make flourish what is insecure and undeveloped in our relationships.

Finally, Imani (Faith) urges us to trust and believe in the good, and in our capacity to create it and share it. It encourages us to produce a new paradigm and practice of Black love and live it as a conscious need and undeniable necessity of life. And this means bringing into being a new man and woman who truly live for and through each other and pass on this lesson and legacy to future generations.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Bombing, Beheading and Laying Waste the World: Regarding Iran, Israel, the US and Existential Threats.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:41:42 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) Mad Max Trump and Thunderdome Netanyahu have taken the world to war again, offering us a pre-apocalyptic picture of apprehensions, vulnerabilities, catastrophes and consequences to come, pretending an existential threat to them when they, themselves, are a real threat to the world and their own countries. For anyone with even a modicum of historical knowledge knows there will be consequences, blowback and strike back of various defensive, retributive, disruptive and destructive kinds. Representing the savagery of the civilization they claim to be protecting, they continue to wage a genocidal war against the people of Palestine and glory in language of epic fury, bloodlust and carnage as they now attack Iran. Joined at the hip, heart and head in racist thoughts and imperialist thuggery, they have begun an immoral, illegal and illogical aggression against Iran which is posed as a war of necessity but is clearly a war of calculated criminal choice.

It is immoral because it has no just cause, its claims are infested with lies and gaslighting illusions, and its consequences to the Iranian people, others and the world are senseless, needless and wide spread death and destruction. It is illegal because it violates domestic law, the Constitutional requirement for Congress to declare war. And it violates international law which requires UN approval of the war as justified and prohibits aggression against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of a people and is considered one of the most serious crimes and concerns of humanity. Indeed, as the sacred text, Odu Ifa, teaches “War ruins the world” and all in it and thus, affects us all.

And this war is illogical, for its camouflaged excuses are contradictory and continuously concocted and changed post facto, and it is hostile to sound moral and political reasoning, reasoning about respecting and saving human life, protecting the earth, privileging peace, and rightly choosing negotiation and diplomacy rather than mutual destruction. Indeed, much of what the US wanted was agreed to, and yet, following Israel’s model of bombing to kill the Palestinian negotiators during the ceasefire negotiations, the US and Israel launched their war of aggression against Iran while talks still were ongoing and promising.

As they go to war, their war cry is the early man concept and practice of beheading the enemy, whether persons or whole peoples, calling it “decapitation” to make it sound less savage. But whether they call it decapitation, targeted killing, wet work, assassination or some other word, it is rooted in and reflective of a culture of war worshipping and beheading and celebrating it by dancing around the fire and asking the whole group to join the celebration. The circles of fire are gone but the bloodlust and the calls to celebrate beheadings are still present as nightly news, accounts and announcements of enemies bombed and decapitated, not only enemy heads of state and leaders, but also everyday people and little girls at school in Iran or at all ordinary places and special spaces in Palestine. As Trump stated, taking a page out of Netanyahu’s killing-fields warbook for genocide in Palestine, “Bombs will be dropping everywhere”.

And they have cultivated and coerced a cast of obsequious and cartoonist characters around them to call out when prompted “off with their heads; off with their heads” as the first and last solution to an endless list of problems. Thus, whether it’s an attempt to decapitate or behead the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and genocide or the officially-declared threatening and problematic Iranian government, they must be beheaded, killed as both a preferred solution and a terrorizing sign and signal to others of their vulnerability and of the viciousness and vengefulness of the long imperialist axe. Indeed, in spite of the pablum of promises to put America first, we are told by a Republican senator and born again MAGA acolyte trying to justify the unjustifiable war that really, “America First is to kill people who wish us ill with a record of trying to destroy us in the region”, i.e., The Middle East, Western Asia, a region of great imperial interests and coerced and expected regional compliance.

If we are to ever get out of this moral desert created by the death cult of war and wealth worshippers, Americans must give up the moral evasion that characterizes so many of their ongoing positions on critical issues facing this country and the world. It is not enough to lament Trump’s not following procedures and breaking laws, we must also stress the central moral concern of this issue which is the commitment to kill without conscience and to brag on quick massive and effective slaughter by the US and Israel. It is as if we felt comfortable applauding and praising the Nazis blitzkriege or lightning wars and practices of genocide and carnage against Jews, Gentiles and peoples of color designated as unworthy of life and freedom. Indeed, it is rejection of this morally vicious and vulgar practice that opens the way to honestly confronting all other issues.

Let’s be honest, we must also deal with the elephant of ethical issues represented by Israel in the room. And we cannot continue to favor, fund, foster and even follow Israel in its genocidal and imperial wars against Palestine, Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere. Israel, clearly a client state, is also secure in its ability to shape US domestic and foreign policy as recent discussions and events reaffirm. Indeed, according to a New York Times article, Netanyahu has bragged about this in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, saying “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Thus, Israel dragged the US into both wars against Iran for its own interests.

Also, important here is the loss of a critical moral force in American society in which too many Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists have sacrificed the best of their faiths for the worst of their feelings and fantasies about Palestinians, especially on the issues of genocide in Palestine and the equal human worth and rights of the Palestinian people. And this has led to brutal suppression of campuses and persons and communities of all kinds, including Jews, themselves, but especially Palestinians and Muslims, here and around the world who dare speak out and struggle for the equal worth and human rights of Palestinians and all human beings.

There is no person or people in the world who has moral immunity from criticism, and no oppressor who has equal moral status to the oppressed or a greater claim to rights of self-determination, security and conditions for a good and meaningful life. If an oppressor has the same moral status as the oppressed and is also posed and treated as superior, then there is no right or justice in the world, and there is no moral problem or social penalty in oppressing those who are less powerful and less capable than others.

It is also important to reject and resist the Hitlerian lie that Trump and Netanyahu have any real concern for the Iranian people and their right to be free from oppression whom they are bombing and beheading with what they admit is a fury of overwhelming violence. An invader and oppressor cannot bring freedom; the people themselves must wage the decisive struggle to free themselves and direct the course of the lives and future whether in Iran or Palestine.

And finally concerning the issue of existential threat, one of the greatest threats to a people is itself, if it is addicted to illusions and fantasies about itself and others. This makes it deaf to truth, blind to injustice, vulnerable to moral evasion and ultimately to destroying itself. For a society that cannot see and concede its own problems cannot solve its problems. And a society that cannot solve its problems cannot survive its problems.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Remembering and Re-Reading Woodson: Envisioning An Emancipatory Education.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:22:10 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) In remembrance, retrieval and reaffirmation. Clearly, in this important month and historical moment of celebrating Black History through remembrance and recommitment to ever-deeper study and emancipatory practice, our minds easily turn to the writings and life work of the father of Black History Month, Nana Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950). For it is Dr. Woodson who framed and laid the foundation for our celebration of Black History Month, having given his life to writing, teaching and advocating history as an indispensable core of any real, useful and emancipatory education. And it is he who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), the Journal of Negro History (1916), and Negro History Week (1926). However, out of his many works, none of his writings have been more read, referenced and raised as worthy of the most careful and continued study than his Mis-education of the Negro, a historically grounded critique of the then existing educational system which, with appropriate reconsiderations and revisions, remains highly relevant, even today.

Dr. Woodson, who received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard, was a well-placed educator who had served as a teacher, school principal, and professor and dean at Howard University and West Virginia State College. Thus, he had participated on the various levels of education as teacher, administrator and critical observer and had gained intimate and extensive knowledge of how the educational system disadvantaged Black people through what he termed mis-education. There are several critical elements in Woodson’s concept of mis-education and his envisioning an emancipatory education.

First, Dr. Woodson argues for what we called in the 60’s a relevant education and after Molefi Asante, an Afrocentric education, one rooted in the historical, social and overall cultural reality of Black people. And he found the misreading, falsification and manipulation of history a core practice and cause of the mis-education of Black people. Thus, he says at the outset, “only by careful study of the (African American) himself and the life he is forced to lead can we arrive at the proper procedure in this crisis”, i.e., the mis-education of Black people and the socio-economic and political disadvantages this imposes, aggravating the condition of oppression.

Secondly, Woodson places the process of enabling the self-determination in thought and practice of the student at the heart of the educational enterprise. Therefore, he states that “the mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think for himself and do for himself”. For Woodson, this emphasis on cultivating in students an enhanced agency, i.e., the will to think and act in a self-determined way, is not for frivolous, selfish or self-enslaving ways. On the contrary, it must be an emancipatory education, one that is both a promise and practice of freedom. Thus, he says, “the only question which concerns us here is whether these ‘educated’ persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor”.

Moreover, Nana Woodson contends that the educational system is undergirded by and duplicates a philosophy and “ethics” which justify and facilitate White domination through a racist protocol of disabling and controlling the minds, and therefore, the person and actions of Black people. As he says, in perhaps his most quoted passage, “when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his proper place and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary”. What is produced here, Dr. Woodson argues, is an “enslaved mind” which is derivative and disadvantaging rather than original and enabling. Such a mis-educated Black intellectual becomes “a hopeless liability to the race”, little more than a duplicate descendent of the original White mis-educator.

Dr. Woodson also places great emphasis on service to the masses and education as a vital power and process for such service. He tells us we should not adopt class attitudes and behavior based on acquisition of a university education. On the contrary, he says, we “should redefine higher education as a preparation to think and work out a program to serve the lowly rather than live as an aristocrat”. Here he argues for “translating the idea of leadership into service”, i.e., developing a concept of leadership which is defined by and embodied in the ancient African virtue of service to the people, especially the most vulnerable among us.

To rightfully serve the people, Nana Woodson stresses repeatedly the practice of education as a process of emancipation and empowerment that leads to progressive and continuous development. “The education of any people must begin with the people themselves”, he states. Indeed, “History does not furnish a case of the elevation of a people by ignoring the thoughts and aspirations of the people”. This requires, he maintains, understanding their historical back-ground and current condition, and developing an educational program and practice which teaches their real history, frees their minds and empowers them in their struggle for a liberated life and decent living.

Finish story here; Remembering and Re-Reading Woodson: Envisioning An Emancipatory Education.

Regarding Al-Shaair, Carney, Trump and Historical Ruptures: From Colonial America and Minnesota to Occupied Palestine.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:35:47 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) The essential recommendation of close reading and critical reflection concerning history is one of those kinds of advice which is regularly given but infrequently followed. Indeed, we are taught by mind-molding media, contemporary concepts of mindfulness, and the relentless force of current events to focus on the here and now and to rid ourselves of worries and wondering inspired and informed by the past and future. But the past is always present and the future is shaped not only by what we do in the present, but also by what we’ve done in the past and how we learn and use its lessons rightfully and productively or try to erase it and pretend a past cleared of all its problematic content and concerns as oppressors wish and want.

Speaking of the gangsta government and neo-imperialism of the Trump regime at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, lamented what he called the end of an era, an era, he said, of the rule of law, mutual respect and mutual benefit. What he was talking about was not the world, but rather Whites, Europeans, continental and diasporan. It is obvious, then, that the cause of this lamented ending was not the Trump’s piracy and murder on the high seas, his invasion and kidnaping the Venezuelan President and his wife and killing of civilians and soldiers, the bombing attack on Iran and resultant casualties and destruction, nor the continuing acts and threats against Cuba and Mexico.

And certainly it was not caused by the arming, facilitating, funding and depraved attempts to defend and justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza against the people of Palestine. For although the US government was and is Israel’s chief crime partner, almost all of Europe participated in the genocide in various ways and still supports its continuation under different names and strategies. What is different about Trump, as Nana Aimé Césaire said about Hitler, is not that he is doing something Europe had not been perpetrating in the rest of the colonized and enslaved world. It is that he dared apply to Europe and fellow Europeans, continental and diasporan, the warmongering threats and imperial practices once used principally, if not exclusively, against the dark peoples of the world, now called, with some adjustments, the Global South.

Carney conceded that the Europeans, the Whites, “knew the story of this international rules-based order was partially false” even in terms of how it played among Whites. And this was demonstrated by the fact that “the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were asymmetrical…and international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or victim”. It was a “pleasant and useful fiction”, he confessed, and a beneficial one, and so they all went along with it. And for those not in the upper classes, like the comforting racial self-pacifier of poor Whites, at least they were White and were not treated like the dominated peoples. And also, those countries and classes who wished and were able were allowed to have and exploit their own colonies and Indigenous peoples and incorporate them in society and the ruling system as they determined.

But here comes Trump and his crime partners ready to disrupt the system and make a Mafia offer Europe could not refuse, and with an infantile excitement about his power, he likes to brandish his big guns, literally and figuratively. He tells Europe’s previously compliant and cooperative leaders that he’s going to take over a European country, Greenland, the hard or easy way. And he talks to the European leaders as if they are less equal and worthy than they had assumed, and announces that he’s the alpha male in the board room and billionaire rulers’ realm, and they either fall in line or be disrespected, disinvited and penalized like any other less-than person, people or power. Here they seem, at least for now, to draw the line and stand some ground. But this in no way signaled a new world and way forward for the rest of the world.

There are several problems with Carney’s and his colleagues’ interpretation of the unfolding events in this historical moment. First, he does not seem to see and thus does not concede that he is talking from a Eurocentric point of view. His world order is the world order of European peoples, continental and diasporan. Thus, the rupture he is talking about, though important, is not a rupture for the oppressed, neither in time or place, for their oppression continues without even a discussion of relief or removal. The occupation and savaging of Haiti was not discussed, nor their role in it. Nor was discussed the strengthening of the UN or the freedom of Sudan, of the Democratic Republic of Congo and of other peoples and countries from European, continental and diasporan, manipulation, exploitation and domination by them and their compliant proxies.

If we are talking about rupture in the world order in any comprehensive sense, it is the era of European colonialism, enslavement and imperialism that fractured the human community in many and varied ways. Colonial America was a rupture in Native American life and history from which they are still recovering. And the rupture of African history and lives remain an ongoing problem which only genuine, resumed and continuing liberation struggles can heal and seal and open up new ways and futures for African peoples and the world. And of course, the same is true for South America, the Islands of the Sea, Asia and every place that suffers these continuing ruptures in their histories and lives, and especially Palestine and the Palestinian people whose attempted genocidal erasure stands out as the defining morally monstrous atrocity of our times.

We speak here also of a historical hypocrisy, a well-established and enduring fiction of human freedom, justice and inequality for all that has now come home to haunt Europe, both continental and diasporan. Once they declared that all men were created equal and endowed with natural and God-given rights, but excluded the majority of the world from this category and began colonizing and enslaving them, taking their lives, lands and resources in holocaust causing ways. And the voice and power of profit, racist hatred and hostility rose above forces of good will from every community, and these voices, as now, were silenced and suppressed until they reached a critical mass and a turning point in history characterized by the liberation struggles in this country and around the world.

Clearly, we are at a point now in history where all the life-crushing hypocrisy has come home to roost and ravage its own citizenry. We speak here of government and police practices implemented and supported against other vulnerable peoples in the world which are now being used in this country to suppress free speech and assembly and human rights and to penalize and punish those who resist; and even to kill citizens in broad daylight with a sense of impunity that they give their favored allies around the world. Minnesota is mourning the brutal killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two activists, consumed by the militarization of American life under a regime committed to weaponizing antisemitism, anti-immigrationism, anti-Blackism, and other evils grafted from historical, ongoing and AI generated anti-human claims and contentions.

And we who also mourn the cold-blooded killing of Keith Porter, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all the other Black people and other vulnerable people who were killed along this same path of police and state violence must commit to a new rupture in history. We mean here, a rupture of resistance; a rupture that achieves a radical reconception and reconstruction of this society and ultimately the world. It will be a society that is not depraved enough to penalize and fine Azeez Al-Shaair, an African American Muslim athlete, for daring to display on his nose tag a deeply human and compassionate message, “Stop the Genocide”. And it will be, as we have advocated and fought for the whole of our history in this land, the achievement of an inclusive and shared African and human good and the sustained well-being of the world and all in it.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

The Nguzo Saba in the Context of Katrina: Being Our Own First-Responders and Self-Savers.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:21:34 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) It is a fundamental teaching and uncontested contention in Kawaida philosophy that there is an endless library of lessons and legacies in our history and culture which we can learn from and live by in good and meaningful ways. Ever mindful of this, one of the ways I want to commemorate this 60^th anniversary of my conceiving and introducing the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles, and of the world African community’s beginning embrace of them is to discuss them in the context and commemoration of the 20^th anniversary of the combined natural and manmade catastrophe of Katrina. And I want to do this in respectful remembrance and deserved praise of our people and due reflection on our people’s being their own first responders and self-savers in this catastrophe and in other similar disasters throughout history. Likewise, I want to reflect on how, in weathering these hurricanes of history, they exemplified and reaffirmed the values and vision of being in community vital to our lives, work and struggles as a people.

Someone could easily ask how could a people practice the Nguzo Saba if they didn’t know them? Leaving aside the fact that there was a strong and influential Nguzo Saba community, Ahidiana, in New Orleans and elsewhere founded in the 70s, it is important to remember that an authentic value system evolves from the people themselves. And they themselves choose from options of history and life open to them. Indeed, my grandmothers and grandfathers and other ancestors embraced and practiced love, truth speaking, justice doing and care for the poor and vulnerable before they became Christians. As we say and teach in Kawaida, our people did not come here naked and in need, but fully clothed in their own culture, which was good, beautiful and resourceful and sufficient in itself.

Moreover, we also speak of knowing without knowing, knowing the principle and practice without being concerned with its meaning as a consciously worked out life-enhancing way to relate in the world. Therefore, they helped each other and did not call it reciprocity, and they did good of all kinds and did not always have names for it or a need to claim it. Rather, they did it as a part of how they understood themselves in community. And it is in this context that they and we became and are our own first responders, our own self-savers, and ultimately, our own liberators. Indeed, we are injured physicians, who do and must continue to heal, repair, renew and remake ourselves in the process and practice of repairing, renewing and remaking the world which has injured and continues to injure us in various pathologically oppressive ways.

Also, in explaining our knowing without knowing, it is important to reaffirm here that, as African people, our ancestors and their views and values remain in us. However, because of the Holocaust of enslavement, colonialism and other forms of oppression, they are often half or wholly forgotten and appear as derived from later sources. But they are in us, in our deep consciousness, living lessons and legacies from our past. And this is why from Nana Maria Stewart and Nana Martin Delaney to Nana Haji Malcolm and Nana Fannie Lou Hamer, we are called to wake up to our history and humanity in the fullest sense. And in spite of the savage and seductive calls and coercion of all oppressors to the contrary, we must wake up and stay woke, ever conscious, deep thinking and thoroughly committed in our constant striving and struggling to be ourselves, free ourselves, flourish and come into the fullness of ourselves.

Thus, our people in New Orleans and elsewhere were already practicing principles of community before the coming of the catastrophe of Katrina. And among these values were the Nguzo Saba, both as a conscious value system, but also and more so as values of community without the African language, formal order and particular philosophic emphasis of the Nguzo Saba themselves. The Nguzo Saba: Umoja (Unity); Kujichagulia (Self-Determination); Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility); Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics); Nia (Purpose); Kuumba (Creativity); and Imani (Faith), drawn from our culture, capture and codify these communitarian principles, now upheld and practiced throughout the global African community. Therefore, as the storm clouds appeared and the waters began to rise, there was a coming together to practice principles of community essential to our people’s survival, sustainment, development and flourishing. And the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles, are evident in these practices.

Our people knew from prior experiences and evolving additional evidence that whenever the officials decided to come and whatever they actually did, they, themselves, would need to act together in the interest of their own good. In a word, they, themselves, would have to be their own first responders and self-savers, and build the relations and spaces of safety, support, survival and recovery they needed. Our people knew it was ultimately up to them regardless of what the federal and local governments were obligated to do. For early on, it was clear, they did not count as high priority in the calculation of the urgent.

In the face of imperfect information, delayed rescue and resources and constantly deteriorating conditions, it was on them to decide to act against the odds and with the absence of assistance that preferred peoples and their pets receive as a matter of course and of racial and class calculation. Indeed, unlike in favored places in which other people live, the people of New Orleans were referred to as refugees in their own country, and denied immediate and adequate life-saving aid, paralleling the savage treatment and mass killing of other devalued peoples like those of Haiti, Sudan, Congo and Palestine and other peoples and places various presidents and their fellow oppressors and genocidal allies designate as disposable. And they knew without knowing its many names and notions that racial and racist capitalism cultivates and dines on disaster, grows fat and fetid on the oppression of the vulnerable and seeks to realize depraved dreams of genocide, gentrification, and luxury hotels on the hidden graves of its victims.

During this time of the growing disaster and great suffering 20 years ago, I wrote in these pages a greatly deserved praise of our people who again embodied the best of our values in being their own first responders and self-savers in the face of a callous and criminal neglect by various levels of government. I said, as always, we should pay homage to our ancestors and in this case, to those who died undeserved and avoidable deaths caused by the criminal neglect of the established order and to those who gave their lives saving others. And I continued saying, “Let us also praise the people for their resilience in the face of such immense and overwhelming devastation, for their courage under water, fire and the gross failure of their government to serve and save them, and for their kindness and compassion toward each other”. Moreover, “Praise is due to those who shared their meager food and drink and sacrificed seats to evacuate others, to parents who stayed behind to send their children to safety, to younger people who watched and pushed the wheel chairs of the ill and aged, and to those who deferred in line to the elderly, the ill and the infant”, as did husbands, wives, friends and other family members.

And I wrote and repeat here, “Let us also praise the national African American community as a whole for its immediate outpouring of unity, empathy and aid on every level, and who acted swiftly to issue the call for aid and began at once to mobilize and organize to deliver it: funding groups, professional organizations, activist organizations, religious institutions of all faiths, artists, actors and athletes and children as well as adults. They knew that, in the final analysis, we are our own liberators and must heal and repair ourselves in the process of repairing the world”.

In these due praises are a clear portrait of a sacred and soulful people, resilient and resourceful, practicing unity, in their gathering together to save themselves and do good for each other; self-determination, in their self-assertive decisions and initiatives; collective work and responsibility, in their mutual caring, and rescuing and recovery efforts; cooperative economics, in their pooling and sharing what little they had and could get; purpose, in their choosing and cherishing life in the constant face of death; creativity, in their making ways out of no way and lifting up the light that lasts; and faith, in their belief in the Divine, themselves and the ultimate triumph of the Good through righteous and relentless struggle, regardless of the odds and adversaries against us.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

Again, Retrieving the African Ideal: A Courageous Questioning in These Times.

Dr. Maulana Karenga — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 23:05:17 +0000

(ThyBlackMan.com) The arrival of September 7^th easily brings to mind and memory for Us the 60^th anniversary of the Organization Us, a major organization in the Black Power phase of the Black Freedom Struggle; the African American Cultural Center, the founding site and international headquarters of Kwanzaa; and the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles, the defining values of the pan-African holiday Kwanzaa and Kawaida philosophy from which I conceived and created both. And I reach back to retrieve a discussion of our origins in the search for the African Ideal through courageous questioning in thought and practice, as both wondering and questioning, reflective and practical resistance.

The conception and development of our philosophy, Kawaida, the work and struggle of our organization Us, and the people-focus, cultural groundedness and social consciousness of the leadership and people we seek to cultivate, teach and exemplify, all began with what our ancestors called in the Husia a “courageous questioning”. Indeed, this courageous questioning runs like a red line through our history from Seba Khunanpu, a peasant, who questioned Rensi, a chief judicial official in ancient Egypt, about the concept and practice of justice, especially concerning the vulnerable to Nana Fannie Lou Hamer who declared in the midst of the Black Freedom Movement, that she questioned America in its hypocritical claim to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

And this tradition and model of courageous questioning is expressed also in Nana Messenger Muhammad’s commentaries concerning embracing a God and religion of freedom rather than a God and religion of oppression and in Nana Min. Malcolm’s criticism of a racialized democracy that makes us victims rather than beneficiaries. Likewise, it is found in Nana Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Nana Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s critical stress on education for liberation and upliftment rather than vulgar careerism and mindless service to the established order.

The concept of courageous questioning (nedjnedj ken) is found in the Book of Rekhmira, a prime minister of ancient Egypt. He lists it among a series of virtues that a Maatian civil servant or activist intellectual possesses. These virtues are being: versed in the texts, clear of vision, insightful, well-mentored, deliberate, patient, courageous in questioning; and wise in listening to the ancestors. He does not explain what he means by courageous in questioning, but from the context of his whole text and related ethical texts like Seba Khunanpu and Seba Khakheperasoneb, and moral self-presentations in ancient Egyptian autobiographies, an idea of its expansive meanings becomes clear.

Indeed, courageous questioning is a rightful and righteous calling into question, seeking answers and offering a severe criticism of the evil, the wrong and the unjust. In addition, it is constantly seeking and speaking truth to the people and to power, demanding justice and bringing Maat (truth, justice, propriety, harmony, balance, reciprocity and righteous order) into being.

And it especially means doing this without fear of consequences of death, political imprisonment, exile, underground existence, and constant attacks of all kinds – or without deference to debilitating and oppressive conventions, customs, hierarchies, or perverse and pathetic calls for peace without justice. It is to speak audaciously, as Seba Khunanpu spoke to Rensi saying “this humble person who returns to make a complaint to you is not afraid of you, the one to whom he makes his rightful claim”. Indeed, he tells him to “speak truth and do justice for it (Maat) is mighty, it is great, and it endures”. As it was in ancient Egypt, so it was with our other forefathers and foremothers mentioned here and others, a constant and courageous questioning and quest to end evil and injustice and bring justice and good into being. And Kawaida and Us embraced this tradition from them, even before we recovered and reconstructed the ancient Egyptian Maatian ethical tradition contained in the Husia.

Kawaida, Us and our leadership principles and practice began with a critical and courageous questioning in the 1960s in a time in which Black was just beginning to come back into its own, and we dared to hurry the dawn of its coming. Africa was just rising in liberation and “Negro” things and thoughts lingered on like a morning fog that refuses to disappear quickly at sunrise. And thus, such questioning did not come without consequences or costs. Ours was a deliberate and depthful questioning concerning ourselves and then society and the people who ruled it. On every front, we raised questions of our identity, purpose and direction as a people. It was a process and practice of both opposition and affirmation, a defiant opposition to and rejection of the irrational reasoning and cave contentions of our oppressors and an audacious affirmation of the inherent worthiness and enduring weight of our people in the construction, transformation and advancement of human history.

The questioning was a total questioning, a questioning about how we live, the conditions of our lives, the possibilities of freedom and flourishing, and the unavoidable requirements for achieving them. We questioned the rationality, rightness and sanity of allowing our oppressor to be our teacher or tutor, or to tell us without challenge the tall tales of bringing us civilization and God and saving us from ourselves. We questioned and rejected his claim of being in any way superior, God-sent or possessing some racial or religious right to conquer, kill, dispossess, enslave and oppress us and other peoples of the world. We questioned and rejected his racial and religious claims to be singularly chosen, elect and exalted above all the other peoples of the world. And we refused to let the oppressors interpret and use God as an ally of enslavement, an enabler of holocaust, and a racialized divinity doing the barbaric bidding of the oppressor.

There was for us something wrong, irrational, unseeming, and in some cases, less than sane, about accepting doctrines of one’s own inferiority, of being saved from oneself by an oppressor, and being taught the way to live by manufacturers and merchants of death. There is in Us, then, the early and ongoing questioning and criticism of the varied constraints on human freedom and human flourishing, i.e., racism, White supremacy, sexism, classism and other oppressive “isms” of thought and practice. In addition, there is a later calling into question the wanton injury to the earth, the plunder, pollution and depletion, and a parallel call to heal, repair and remake the world as central to the process and practice of healing and repairing ourselves. And we call this in the ancient Egyptian Maatian tradition, serudj ta – to repair, restore, renew and transform the world and ourselves making each more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited and received it.

This clearing of the tundra and forests of falsehood and mystification sowed and carefully tended by the established order, opened the way to our reaffirmation of Africa as our moral ideal. It was a seeing of ourselves as Nana Muhammad and Nana Malcolm and our fathers, mothers, elders and others taught us, as possessors of divinity and dignity, inferior to none, anterior to all and a vital part of the rising tide of human history represented in the liberation struggles which were then reshaping and reordering the world. Thus, we stressed reaffirmation of the sacredness of our people and all human beings and our need and responsibility to honor our identity as an ancient and ongoing source and sign of creative work and righteous struggle in and for the world. There is today, in the midst of so much genuflection in leadership and injustice in life, an ever- increasing need of more courageous questioning in thought and struggle. And we must, each and every one of us, ask ourselves, “if not this, then what? And if we don’t do it, who will?” For Us on this our 60^th Anniversary and always, the answers to these questions are as clear as a cloudless day in the summers and seasons of our revolts and righteous resistance for good in the world.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/