I'm not a black, I'm an African

By Sicebise Msengana

Isidima nobukhosi base Afrika mabu buye. Translation: African dignity and royalty must be restored.

 I remember there are people who complain about being called Africans. After all, no one would identify with a region filled with savages, cannibals and jungles( which is not supported by facts). Africa is a psychological chain of great shame for the African Diaspora.

The 1955 Freedom Charter Was Fraudulent

By Sicebise Msengana

Dr. Pheko argues that "Zephaniah Mothopeng a Pan Africanist leader who was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for leading the Soweto Uprising described

Up From Slavery

By Sicebise Msengana

Chapter I. A Slave Among Slaves 

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters--the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins. 

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.

Black Panther Party Platform, Program, and Rules

By Sicebise Msengana

October 1966 Black Panther Party

Platform and Program

What We Want
What We Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

I'm Not Afrikan, I'm Negro

By Sicebise Msengana

To analyze the above statement would take volumes of books on philosophy, history, economics, psychology, biology, slave studies and a host of other disciplines. It is the nucleus of a problem that has caused a whole people to change the concept of who they were, their status in the world, and effectively erased the history and culture of their original homeland. The Afrikan was literally written out of the history books from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade onward. Adjoining those realities, Afrikans were brutally forced to abandon every tradition, custom, ritual, religion,

Go Back to Africa

By Sicebise Msengana

It is difficult not to get angry when hearing the "Go back to Africa" argument. This argument is not about Africa but the so-called kindness of white America. It assumes: white America has been very kind and offered the best parental care ever to Africans, besides the European powers. Black Africans were enslaved and sold by their own African brothers. Chattel slavery was immoral wrong, but whites ended it. Racism ended when Jim Crow laws were abolished. We even voted for the first black president, Barack Obama. Racism is a done deal -- get over it! If black Americans are still suffering, it's their own fault!

Where Was God During Slavery

By Sicebise Msengana

Where was God during slavery? In other words, what did he do to stop the Transatlantic slave trade? This is a tough question because God has been silent on many issues facing his creation. Instead,  he has been hidden, never letting us see or hear God, but occasionally trying to get our attention through indirect means: "working" through people, revealing his supposed existence through creation and dropping "hints" here and there. But it is not direct.

The Weapon of Theory

By Sicebise Msengana

www.warscapes.com

Address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966. 

If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also — and even more important — a New Man, fully conscious

Malcolm X Quotes on Human Rights

Sicebise Msengana

1. "Well, I am one who doesn't believe in deluding myself. I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation, you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution, you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American."

Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex

By Sicebise Msengana

Fkeriblakinger.com

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. 

Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business. 

Continental Government for Africa

By Sicebise Msengana

We have seen, in the example of the United States how the dynamic
elements within society understood the need for unity and fought
their bitter civil war to maintain the political union that was
threatened by the reactionary forces. We have also seen, in the
example of the Soviet Union, how the forging of continental unity
along with the retention of national sovereignty by the federal
states, has achieved a dynamism that has lifted a most backward
society into a most powerful unit within a remarkably short space
of time. From the examples before us, in Europe and the United
States of America, it is therefore patent that we in Africa have the
resources, present and potential, for creating the kind of society
that we are anxious to build. It is calculated that by the end of this

The dangers of "Takeaway" History

By Sicebise Msengana

W. E. B. Du Bois said: "We cannot if we are sane, divide the world into whites, yellows, and Blacks, and then call Blacks white." Today, our children are fed with half-truths and lies. We are taught that first and greatest human civilizations were not from Africa. Some academics rather attribute the pyramids in Egypt to some ancient alien race.

Africa is for Africans

By Sicebise Msengana

I want to bring something important to your attention. It's a shame that they [Europeans] draw old tired arguments to justify land grabbing. I'm a xhosa and it is generally accepted that Nguni tribes migrated from Western Africa to Southern Africa some thousands of years ago. By the time Europeans landed on our shores my Xhosa ancestors were well established in the area. But notice how they [ Eurocentric scholars] distorted historical facts and said both groups arrived at the same time. It didn't stop there.

They also committed several genocides against the Xh

QUOTES FROM MARCUS GARVEY

By Sicebise Msengana

"The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness"

"Behind the murder of millions of Negroes annually in Africa is the well organized system of exploitation by the alien intruders who desire to rob Africa of every bit of its wealth for the satisfaction of their race and the upkeep of their
bankrupt European countries."

Say! Africa for the Africans

Sicebise Msengana

Say! Africa for the Africans,
Like America for the Americans:
This the rallying cry for a nation,
Be it in peace or revolution.
Blacks are men, no longer cringing fools;
They demand a place, not like weak tools;
But among the world of nations great
They demand a free self-governing state.
Hurrah! Hurrah! Great Africa wakes;
She is calling her sons, and none forsakes,
But to colors of the nation runs,
Even though assailed by enemy guns.
Cry it loud, and shout it Ion' hurrah!
Time has changed, so hail! New Africa!
We are now awakened, rights to see:
We shall fight for dearest liberty.
Mighty kingdoms have been truly reared
On the bones of blackmen, facts declared;
History tells this awful, pungent truth,
Africa awakes to her rights forsooth.
Europe cries to Europeans, ho!
Asiatics claim Asia, so
Australia for Australians,
And Africa for the Africans.
Blackmen's hands have joined now together,
They will fight and brave all death's weather,
Motherland to save, and make her free,
Spreading joy for all to live and see.
None shall turn us back, in freedom's name,
We go marching like to men of fame
Who have given laws and codes to kings,
Sending evil flying on crippled wings.
Blackmen shall in groups reassemble,
Rich and poor and the great and humble:
Justice shall be their rallying cry,
When millions of soldiers pass us by.
Look for that day, coming, surely soon,
When the sons of Ham will show no coon
Could the mighty deeds of valor do
Which shall bring giants for peace to sue
Hurrah! Hurrah! Better times are near;
Let us front the conflict and prepare;
Greet the world as soldiers, bravely true:
"Sunder not," Africa shouts to you.

Acknowledgements
Say! Africa for the Africans
By Marcus garvey

Message to Grassroots

By Sicebise Msengana

An extract from Malcolm X's speech,  Message to Grassroots:


"A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall,
saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out
beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome”? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation."

Acknowledgements
Malcolm X
Message to Grassroots
November 10, 1963

Takeaway History

By Sicebise Msengana

"Those early Egyptologists sought to take Egypt out of Africa and black skinned Africans out of Egypt. It was a conspiracy to minimize African’s role in early human civilization. Such a conspiracy could only be carried out because of the near uniform
belief among whites in the inferiority of Africans. T