Reclaiming our minds; reclaiming our souls; reclaiming our people: A call to the black world

Abstract

From Barbados to Burundi and from New Guinea to Nigeria, almost all that is known about crucial developments in other black nations comes from white world news organisations ‐ BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and other corporate‐controlled media. Owing to this, as well as to the general longstanding relationship between the white world and the African Diaspora, our peoples, our strivings, our triumphs ‐ are either routinely ignored or grotesquely distorted. There is no structural mechanism for the sharing of information throughout the African Diaspora. As a result, we truly are at the mercy of a corporate‐controlled media that not only presents either no information or distorted information about the African Diaspora to the rest of the world, but feeds these distortions to us throughout the African Diaspora. In the process, the international media promotes and inculcates standards and values that are philosophically and culturally discordant with the global African reality. Governments and peoples of the African Diaspora must begin to discuss, debate, and re‐think for ourselves, and amongst ourselves, those circumstances and conditions, those values and realities, those yardsticks by which we will measure and judge ourselves. It is based on these standards that we should judge and assess the health and appeal of all nations. There are certain priorities, of course, that all nations and peoples should embrace ‐ an informed and educated populace; affordable health care for all; employment that serves the needs of the individual and the interests of the nation. Beyond that, however, throughout the Diaspora we in the African Diaspora must recognise the strengths that are uniquely ours, and build on them. The giraffe becomes a pathetic caricature when it attempts to be a gazelle. The time has come for us to reclaim and re‐assert our essential African‐ness; to build societies where the social, economic, and spiritual development of the human being is paramount; to recognise all that is ours materially and spiritually ‐ the minerals in the earth, the forests above it, our waterways, our God‐given resources that for so long have been the source of enormous wealth for everyone but us; our traditions, our values, culture, our kinship networks, our humanity.