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

Modern Racism

By Sicebise Msengana

Modern racism: It pays to pick on sensitive issues -- because we have to address these important issues or future generations will pay for the sins of the parents. Racism still persists today simply because people think it is non-existent. And most people think it will magically go away, if we ignore or don't talk about it. Racism will exist as long as humanity exists.

I Write What I Like

By Sicebise Msengana

Steve Biko: Irrepressible Revolutionary African Giant Still Relevant Today

I Write What I Like, a collection of writings and speeches from the work of South African/Azanian Black Consciousness pioneer, Steve Biko, originally published in 1978, remains one of the monumental pieces in the history of writing about black liberation in the world. As Lewis Gordon describes the book in the foreword, it is "a classic work in black political thought and the liberation struggle for all humankind" (p. vii). Desmond Tutu hails Biko in the preface as the "father of Black Consciousness," a movement that he argues was "surely of God," and Thoko and Malusi Mpulwana introduce the book by explaining that black solidarity is still urgently needed in the current context of post-apartheid society, particularly as erstwhile atomized identities from diverse segments of the black community vie for recognition in the shaping of a different society. They salute this re-publication of Steve Biko's writings as an apt tribute to the legacy of African heroes and heroines who sacrificed their lives for the cause of liberation from white colonialism: Albert Luthuli, Mthuli KaZhezi, Ongopotse Tiro, Mapetla Mohapi, Griffiths Mxenge, Victoria Mxenge, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and the nameless others whose lives were snuffed out by apartheid's torturers and assassins.

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