Sisters, you must think deeply about the way of your ancestors. Those of ancient Nubia, Kemet and the rest of your motherland surpassed all others in their wisdom and humanity. They are the ones who warned us about committing treason against the culture and tradition that make us African, lest we destroy ourselves.
Remember, there is no separation of the past and present, no divide between our his
torical interpretation and contemporary reality.
Only when we are taught that the new is always better than the old are we misled into believing that what has happened to us is not connected to what is happening, and will happen, to us if we do not rise as a people. Only in a world where we believe we can run away from ourselves, from our people, from our truth, can we accept that a people’s story has no bearing on the awareness, condition and possibilities of its individuals. Sisters, you must know that you are one with our past. And you must know that your greatest stories and traditions lie far beyond these shores in both time and space. But, more importantly, you must know that your being conscious of these two facts is vital to our survival as a people. You are the new vanguard, our people’s healers.
Your story is a phenomenal record of African women. No other women have been so loved, coveted and envied for their strength and elegance. Their lineage determined whether a man could be pharaoh. The world’s first divinities were female. The world’s first female doctor, Preshet, who was a “chief” physician, was a Kemetic woman. The world’s first ruler of an empire, Hatshepsut, was a Kemetic woman. The warrior who, even after Europeans tried to break her spirit by kidnapping, torturing and beheading her sister, relentlessly led the Angolan armies in a fight against the enslavement of Africans and the Portuguese onslaught for four decades, a woman so feared by her white enemies that she was called “The Black Terror, “was a queen named Nzingha. The warrior queen named Sarraounia militarily defended her people against Islamic invasion at a time when states all around her were submitting to this forced conversion and relinquishing their African spiritual traditions. Queen Candace led her troops in battle against the invading forces of Augustus Caesar. The remains of the world’s oldest human belonged to an African woman named Amargi (misnamed “Lucy”). The list of your accomplishments on the Continent alone is endless. Many are the names and deeds we will never know but can surmise because we know African women. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that your ancestral mothers’ social position as equals with your ancestral fathers led other people’s men, afraid to lose their patriarchal privilege, to suppress and brutalize their women to keep them from aspiring to what African men accepted as normal for African women.
In being themselves, ancestral African women had no difficulty taking up arms with their men against invaders. On the Continent, they commanded armies, served as guards, spies, guerrillas, foot soldiers, and archers. They became responsible for keeping the oratorical record when the men were carted off to slave on plantations and mines.
On the Kemetic Ocean, during the Middle Passage, they did no less. They were the eyes and ears of our revolts. They dealt with our enemy as their men did.
Enslaved or quasi-free in the western hemisphere and elsewhere, they did no less. Time and time again, they conducted enslaved Africans out of physical bondage. Harriet Tubman, in looking back over her life and thinking about the hundreds of Africans she had freed from the physical bonds of our enslavement, reflected on how she “could have freed thousands more if they only knew they were slaves.” Sojourner Truth, making the point that African women did the work that supposedly only men were capable of, refused to accept being defined down to the level of European females. Her cogent question of “Ain’t I a Woman?” still rings as a wake up call in our ears.
Standing tall alongside the likes of Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune and Fannie Lou Hamer, they withstood insults, taunts, water hoses, dogs and bullets. They spoke truth, regardless of consequences. They more than earned the honor of being named “first teacher” and nurturer.”
These various acts made them neither less than nor more like men. None of these responsibilities negated or confused their womanhood. They defined it.
You are the daughters of these incredible mothers who gave birth to humanity, to cultivation, to civilization. You are the inheritors of a legacy beyond the imagination of most.
So, sisters, you must recognize whom you are in order to see and begin to fulfill your responsibility as a woman of Africa. Only a clear understanding of our story through our people’s eyes permits this. Any other interpretation, anything less, fosters confusion.
Simply because you are being exposed to our story you are very privileged. And privilege carries responsibility. With it, you accept the difficult and humbling task of learning and teaching others so that your generation’s liberating mission can be fulfilled and correctly passed on to future generations. It is because of your privilege that you have an undeniable responsibility to your ancestors, those around you, and those yet to come.
There is nothing so powerful as a sister who knows who she is, who stands proudly on the shoulders of her ancestors because she knows she is the culmination of their wisdom and spirit. Nothing is more beautiful than a woman warrior in training who has studied her own before and above all others, and interprets reality and society out of that truth first.
I honor you, my warrior sisters, because of your power, beauty and privilege. I charge you with the mission of helping our people empower ourselves, of giving us the choice of walking the way of our greatest ancestors.
To help fulfill this mission, allow me to act in the role of father who, in the tradition of our ancestors, is every responsible man in the community. Let me pass on my wisdom, common sense, and expectations of what you should do, be and not ignore in this callous, corrupt, predatory world.
First, seek out a higher education, not a higher miseducation. Exercise your mind to its fullest extent. Like a muscle, it is strengthened and honed through more, intense exercise. Thinking is the mind’s exercise. Search for problems, which will challenge it to explore deeper, higher solutions. Knowing that “can’t died before you were born” and that nothing that you can visualize is impossible, find and work with all your power toward solving your people’s problems. Know that some will say, “You can do anything,” but will contradict themselves by saying “This particular dream of yours, this dream of building an African world, is impossible.” Nothing on this earth could be more gratifying and empowering than helping to liberate our people. A powerful people make for more powerful individuals. Higher education, wherever you are at intellectually, is the key to this mental liberation.
Despite having dropped out of school, barely in the eighth grade, returning only after many years of street life, and mindless play, I have committed myself to ReAfrikanization and nation building. I know that I am not smarter, more intelligent or more powerful than you. I know that you ancestors’ brilliance and resilience flows in your veins. So you are capable of equaling and surpassing my work and that of all your elders.
Know that when we are speaking of higher education we are not talking about credentials or classrooms. We all know idiots with PhDs; we all know “geniuses” that could not punch their way out of a paper bag because they lack common sense; we all know honor students who could memorize chapters and books of information but could not think. Credentials and classrooms are useless unless they lead us toward consciously applying knowledge to improve the quality of our community. For us, education is significant when it is constructively applied by self-determining African warrior scholars toward their people’s empowerment. Only fools with a genocidal death wish nurture and protect others before their own family. Our family should be the model we have provided for others to follow, not a joke for others’ entertainment. If you want the reputation of a warrior scholar, then don’t run from the challenges of intellectual warfare. Be African!
Second, think about the consequences of your sexual behavior, first. The advice here is simple. Don’t be drawn into sexual relations without having a mature, clearly defined plan for the birth and rearing of African children. Do not engage in sexual behavior that is not reproductive, because you assume that it will not lead to disease, or sexual activity that leads to reproduction. Do not rush. Always think. And while thinking, bear in mind the fact that most males raised within the western cultural context see females as sexual prey and toys however kind their intent, however lovingly conveyed or oblivious they may be to their own predation because they have fallen for their own confusion that every female is “the one.” If they “love” you, they can wait. As the elders constantly remind us, “It’s not going anywhere.”
Third, understand the purpose of dating. You are searching for a complement. You are trying to locate someone who will work with you to build family, community, and nation. You are not playing a game of sexual roulette. Neither are you, a “piece” on display in a meat market. Alexandra Dumas was right. “A man’s mind is elevated to the status of the women he associates with.”
That being the case, there are things you must know before you make any serious decisions. In this world, if approached with eyes open, dating can help you get at these answers. You need to know, what is he now doing in preparation to be what he says he wants to be? Is there clear evidence of his vision in his work? Does he love himself and his people? Does he have a sense of humor? How well does he recover when he stumbles or falls? Does he lie? Steal? Not see lying or stealing wrong when others do it? Can he admit mistakes? How does he handle them? Are his gifts to you superficial, popular trinkets (regardless of monetary value) or is the bulk of his giving based on what you need, without you having to ask for it? Does he care about your health (does he care about what high heels do to your feet and spine, that tight clothes and underwear cause health problems like poor circulation, yeast infection and worse)? Does he really, truly care about your mental and physical well-being? Does he protect his responsibilities with more than his mouth? When in your company, does he scan the environment looking for potential dangers, or is he always so engrossed in your attire/body (or other females’ attire/bodies) or his conversation that threats go unnoticed? Does he know any of our stories? Does he read anything of substance? Is he what you would want your sons to be like? Spend some time getting these answers in what he does more than what he says. And do not expect to change him if the answers you get are less than what you might expect. Look elsewhere. In their hearts, individuals are who they are. Find someone worth you.
Fourth, never marry a man who is not your friend. And friendship does not evolve in a few days, weeks or months. Sometimes it requires years to develop friendships that are deep enough to truly know a person.
Talk to elder couples you respect about friendship and marriage. Find those common threads among these complements that have enabled them to endure the struggle of marriage together. Take their advice on relationships seriously.
Above all, know that marriage is work, hard work. It takes hard work to build anything worthwhile. Marriage is compromise and patience. It does not come easy but is well worth every emotional penny invested. And remember that time is the greatest predictor of success. The more time you invest into something, the better the outcome/product and the larger the reward.
Fifth, you are what you eat, just as you are what you think. Work to replenish what you most need. And, the best indicator of what you most need is what you most are. Humans are about 75 percent water (interestingly, the same percent of this planet’s surface is covered by water). Drink water and follow healthy diets.
Remember, your temple comes first. If you seriously care about your body, read Queen Afua’s Heal Thyself and Sacred Woman, Llaila O. Afrika’s African holistic Health and Nutricide and Jethro Kloss’ Back to Eden.
Sixth, stay as far away from drugs and alcohol as is humanly possible. If elders are here to teach the youth so that they will not make our same mistakes, then let the wisdom gained from my experience be your lesson. Twenty plus years in the streets and substantial amount of dollars wasted on partying; and women have taught me that only you can free your mind. Nothing artificial will help you feel, measure and channel you’re given power to your and our benefit. Do not bring the enemy within because, once in, it may never leave.
Seventh, know thyself. Deeply study your story to know who you are. Our ancestors warned us that, “if you don’t know who you are, any history will do.” Being the culmination of all the Africans in your bloodline who came before you, in order to understand who you are, you must understand who they were. Sisters, do not fall for the amalgamationist, subintegrationist hype of a supremacist people desperate for security in the midst of those they have systematically sought to destroy. All people chose their ancestors. Only the names of those deserving remembrance should be called. Rape, under any physical or psychological conditions, automatically disqualifies one from ancestral status. There should be no statute on limitations of either rape or murder. And, if there is, there shouldn’t be. Africans have no European ancestors.
And last, but definitely not least, be your spiritual self. Know your ancestors. Call on them for guidance, protection and power. Feel your power in spirit, and do not mindlessly submit to the deadening dogma of religion. Know and live by the principles of Ma’at, i.e., truth, justice, righteousness, order, balance, reciprocity and harmony (all the while remaining mindful that everyone around is not African). Do not see them as words you just perfunctorily mumble. And allow the truth to fully manifest in what you think, say and do. Be the African your ancestors meant for you to be.
