Irugu comes from Dogon mythology. A small group of African people whom Europeans would consider probably primitive, unquote. who have a most complex cosmology, and in it they talk about Ama, the creator, having created all beings with twin souls, the male and female.
part and that represents the whole being. Yorugu was a being that tore himself away from the process of gestation, the process of being born, so to speak, early before Amma was finished creating. Because he wanted, in his arrogance, he wanted to compete with the Creator, with Amma, and create a a better universe, an earth actually, than Amma could create. When he came down from the heavens, came to begin the process of creation, found that everything that he created was incomplete. That indeed he could not create perfection or anything with life because he himself was incomplete.
he then realized that he was missing a part of himself. So he goes back to Amma to get his female part so that he could be whole. Amma had given that twin soul, that female part, away.
So that Yerugl was in the state of searching for this other part of himself that would make him whole and never being able to find it. so that he was forever incomplete, could only create destruction, actually, could only destroy, and could never be fulfilled. That, to me, was a statement of what I saw in the nature of European cultural thought and behavior. Why is this study important?
Why did you undertake this study? There's a personal reason that the point that I was at when I began graduate studies, I saw us as African people always being put into a position when we would be in European or white academic institutions of being used to study our communities. So that they can then use the information to control us.
And I said that I would not be put into that position. And decided that, as I was being taught European anthropology, I said, let me use... some of this and see if I can turn it around and indeed study them and put them under the microscope.
And that was the beginning of this process. I think the, the, uh, ideological reason, the political reason most definitely was that Europeans have been very good at masking their intentions and their posture towards African people and other non-European people. And we have not understood what their purposes are, their intent towards us, have not been not understood their behavior and I felt that this kind of study could help to unmask what in reality is the nature of Europeans.
So Urugu, an African centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior is about what? It's about how European culture works as a consistent machine. for the achievement of European power and total control of the universe.
That's what it's about. Let some people think that this study is just for, or book, is just for intellectuals and not for the working man and woman. Could you tell us some ways that European cultural thought... and behavior have us working against One of the things that they do I think that is very damaging is the way in which they, how shall I put it, train our children in schools to act.
against themselves and their people, to deny the aspects of themselves that really indeed are their strengths. We, of course, have experienced that, have been conditioned in this way, and it affects every single... one of us, what you call the working Africans, may be in a better position to begin to understand the kinds of things that I'm pointing to.
It is the people who have been so indoctrinated within the academies that find it more difficult to critique, to look critically. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. Because the Academy, since the time of Plato, back in 600, 700, 500 actually, years before the Common Era, the Academy is the place that has been used to de-spiritualize the universe.
It has been used to promote a conception of truth that has no spirit in it. And we... We as an African people are a spiritual people. So that what it does, as these institutions do, is to take us away from ourselves. So the more time you spend in them, the more you are convinced of this European reality, which is not a real reality, is not a reality for African people.
You make this statement in your introduction. This study was not approached objectively. It is not possible.
to be objective towards Europe. Explain that. The concept of objectivity itself is something that has been used by Europeans to control African people. It is a concept which says that we can contemplate truth without being connected to any culture, without coming from any perspective.
With... without having any political implications in what we do. That of course is not the case.
And what we did was to accept this and say that, oh, they're scientists, they're scholars and so forth, were describing us objectively. What they were doing was promoting a particular way of viewing the world, promoting a particular political interest in the world. I do not make that claim because that claim, it would be a lie. It would be. It is always a lie when, you know, you open up a book and somebody says, well, I'm being objective in doing this.
How can you be objective? You are a human being. You're part of a culture.
Your people have had an historical relationship to other people. For any African person to say that they are being objective about Europe would be to say that they were being apolitical, nonpolitical. We need to. get away from that so this is a very political work it is meant to be if you told black people that White people were committing biological genocide against us and that by the year 2000 whatever, there would be no more black people. You would get one reaction.
But you're saying that we're being threatened with cultural and psychological extinction. How do you get... African people to see the urgency of the situation?
Um, I don't know, frankly, if you can. I think that we have to focus on young people, young African people who have not... ...been so conditioned with a way of thinking that supports European imperialism, European power. that they still have the ability to use their intuition, their spirituality, their African-ness to create, to think beyond the limitations that have been given to them in European academies. I think most of us as adults...
As elders have been so conditioned that we're afraid to move beyond the parameters that have been defined by our enemies. in our thinking so that our vision is limited. And so we are really not the people who should be conceptualizing the...
the plans, you know, the movements, what we should be building. But I focus on the younger people who hopefully are still more in touch with what is natural to African people. And if I can affirm that in them. They will see the urgency. I find that in my teaching.
I find that in teaching young people that once they are affirmed and introduced in a conscious way to the African worldview, it becomes crystal clear to them. And they see an urgency in us as African people building for self as opposed to imitating forms which have been put in place to make sure. that we continue to be oppressed. Culturally and psychologically, do you think we realize what we have lost? No, not, you know, it's so, it's ironic because we don't realize it on a conscious level, yet we live it every day in the way we walk, in the way we talk, in the way, in the music we create.
There is a depth of spirituality which exists in the way we talk. in us as a people, which has continued since our origins, that our ancestors have passed to us, and which we continue to pass on ourselves, that we don't consciously recognize as a strength. We don't realize that it is something that we need to use to think with, so that when we are presented with a European worldview in the classroom, we think that that's the only way to be.
That's the only way to think, because we didn't come with anything. So I don't think that we are aware on a conscious level of what it is that we've moved away from in terms of power. You see, that's what we're not aware of.
Could you talk something about how we came to be who and what we are today? If you understand the question. I think I do. Okay. I think that we have to look back at a period that I call the Maafa.
We as Africans were very consciously stripped of our culture. Now that becomes a platitude. You know everybody's saying that. Stripped of our culture, but we have to see that...
We had a strong culture and so forth. But nobody seems to realize the depth of what that means. Being stripped of our culture meant being conditioned to accept ourselves as inferior beings.
Okay? It meant that we were conditioned to feel that we had to be dependent on Europeans. Dependent on white people. that we could not do things for ourselves and in our own image.
That conditioning began with a period, a long period of terrorism, which was very physical, you know, physically manifested. At the same time, there was the breaking of the will. So there was cultural violence, I call it, you know, in the book, as well as the physical violence, which was very physical.
very important. We then came to a period in which we mistakenly thought we were free. We're now at a point where we think that we have freedom, the ability to be whatever it is that we can be within this society and so forth. Yet what happens is that we are still... Thinking within a modality that has been determined by those who would oppress us, those who would control us.
And we don't see beyond that. So the question for me becomes, who controls how you think? We have the ability to create our own structures, our own theories, our own definitions of reality.
to look at the African worldview, to look at, for instance, the Dogon people, to look at the Kemetic people, to look at our own people who have, even look at Carter G. Woodson, for instance, the miseducation of the Negro, which I don't think was really ever understood by us, and to use these things as inspirations for the building of institutions, the creation of things, the building our own buildings. We have the ability to do that. So it's almost like we've been conditioned so well through such a long process that now it is us who are enslaving ourselves mentally.
Because the job has already been... The job has been done. It would be so easy, in one sense, for us to undo it. That's what I'm saying in this book. Because...
The way the system of European control works is that you have to accept a concept of reality which makes them superior. If you deny that, their thing will not work. And they will lose their control.
So that they put all of this energy into establishing the system that begins when you're three, four, and so forth. which Defines reality in such a way where there's no spirit because they aren't a spiritual people you see Which talks about this this objective truth and so forth which says that African spirituality represents backwardness, so you need to move away from it It does all of these things which make you as an African person as an African person us distrust the very part of our ourselves, which is our strength. I'm going to get back to this question, and that is this whole question of do we know what we have lost? Do we realize that we have not always been Democrats, have not always been Baptists? always been black Greeks, have not always been links, have not always...
How do we conceive of ourselves in a different time? I think that there is a lot that is being done within the movement of African-centered education in that regard. In terms of, I think we have more information now than we've ever had before. And I have seen the effect of that information.
That is very important that people do begin to realize and understand, first of all, how young Europe is. is in relationship to Africa and what we were putting into place, creating, building, conceiving of long before Europe existed. When you open people's minds to that, it can have a lot of power. So that I think that... Generally, we have not understood that, but we have an opportunity to do so because of the work of many people now that is building on work that was done before that we didn't know about.
Good evening and welcome to For the People and the second part of our conversation with Dr. Donna M. Richards, author of Urugu, an African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. In this segment, Dr. Richards discusses, among other things, the role the Greek philosopher Plato played in creating the European way of thinking and behaving. But first, we begin with this question. As you say, other cultures have exhibited aggression, imperialistic tendencies.
What accounts for Europe's success? I'm glad you got to that question. Because what it allows me to do, I think, is to get at what I think is the specialness of the approach, the method that I used in this study. So it's going to take me a little while if that's okay. I said to myself that, and this definitely was with the help of the ancestors, I want to, you know, affirm that by the way, that it was not...
Why is that important? That's important because of our concept of connectedness, our concept of the universe, that it's not just words to talk of a spiritual universe and our spirituality as a people, but we've got to understand that. understand where our energy comes from. And I know that that's where mine came from.
So this is ours. This belongs to us. I had to say, how do you think you can do this?
I mean, how would I approach studying the European given African conceptions? You see, it's one thing to say, okay, I want to do this, but then use their conceptions. What does it mean for us to really think in African terms? And so what I did was to develop concepts that came from an African worldview, not a European worldview. And I came up with the concept of a Seelie.
I also used an African language. That's a Keith Waheely word that means seed, origin, the essence of something. The reason that was important was because what people would say is, and they will say, oh, Europe is so vast. It is, there's so many different...
kinds of European forms and different countries. How can you talk about Europe as a whole? Now, of course, they've been talking about Europe as a whole all of this time, but when we begin to look at them, suddenly it's going to be, no, you can't really do this because it's too diverse.
I needed a concept which could explain a culture in terms of its core, in terms of its ideological core, so that you could look at every different aspect of the culture and see how it fit into this one seed or core. And that's why I used the Asili. And the idea of the seed was that once that Asili is in place, that cultural Asili, it will seek to fulfill itself. So the way in which the culture will develop will all be feeding into that assili. And that would help me to get at consistency in terms of European development.
What throws us as a people is that we make exceptions. You know, we say, oh, well, that's different over here, and that's different, this is a good one over here, and this doesn't really work that way. But in my analysis... It's all consistent and it's all working for one purpose. And the concept of a Seelie helped me to see that.
And that is, that comes to the answer to your question, is that what I was able to do was to see that the nature of the European Seelie was to seek power. That it, in essence, is, we could almost say it is an Seelie which lacks wholeness. And therefore must always see, go back to Yorugu now, remember Yorugu as the incomplete being that is always, always must be seeking but can never be fulfilled because he can't get the... complementary part of himself.
Their Asili, the Asili, the European cultural Asili, is incomplete, must always be seeking. Now, it cannot be... fulfilled through spirit because they have no knowledge of spirit, no relationship to spiritual reality. Therefore, fulfillment is thought through power, and power here means power over other.
And what that means is that everything within the culture, all of the development of European culture, all of the forms, all of the institutions, the ideas even. are all for the purpose of achieving European power. Now, your question was, if...
If we can recognize that there have been imperialistic behaviors in other cultures, then what is the difference between European culture and these other cultures? And the answer is that Europeans have been most successful at achieving world domination. Because everything within the culture supports the quest for domination.
Everything? Everything. Including, and most importantly to me, their philosophical concepts.
Including their concept of truth. Including their... Academies, academia, the intellectuals, including that.
It works with, including Christianity as it manifests itself, you know, within the... the European development. All of that works for the achievement of European power. Okay, okay.
What would you say are the main features of African cultural thought and behavior that separate it? from European culture about in the Hague? I think that that's a good question because even to understand the nature of European culture and how it works, what we need to begin with is the African worldview and how it works. That provides a frame of reference that you can then use.
The African concept of the universe is as a spiritual whole. where everything is interrelated. That means that what is emphasized is not only spirit, but connectedness. And that we conceive of ourselves, we experience ourselves, I should say, as spiritual beings, that as almost as cosmic beings. And by that I mean that we are connected to nature, to the forces of nature.
nature to each other in such a way that that's where we get definition and that's where we get strength and so power for us becomes energy the energy to do to make things happen we energize each other interaction becomes important complementarity becomes important the relationship between spirit and matter is one in which they are connected where material reality is understood as just the way spirit manifests itself. That's simply. On the other hand, in the European worldview and way of thinking, the way of looking at the universe, human beings become separate and distinct individuals.
The only way that you can know anything about the universe is to separate yourself from it, to take connectedness out of it, and thereby create what they call the object. That's all that you can know. Now this object is a thing that has no feeling, no meaning, no spirit.
Okay? That's an illusion. in their minds, but it works for them. Because what Plato did, if we can go back to Plato, is that if he could get people to agree that this was the only truth, then what he could do is say that...
Well, the people who were closest to that truth, those are the people who should rule all the other people. So that worked within their culture. It gave him the basis for a hierarchy within Europe. Now explain to me this creation of the object thing.
I'm not clear on that. Okay, what you do is, if you can, as a human being, first... Separate, make a split in yourself and say there's part of me that thinks and there's part of me that feels. Now in reality that doesn't happen.
You're a whole person. At least that's the African conception. But in his conception, that's what he said, that's what Plato said.
Then what you say is there's a part of me that's better than the other part of me. This thinking part is better than this other part. Okay? Then you say that the better part needs to either control or do away with that lesser part.
So you got this thinking being. The thinking part is getting rid of the emotional part. Right.
Okay? Trying to control that. And so then what he says is, that's the only way that you can have knowledge.
Okay? So here you, if you have somebody who is feeling who is dealing with feelings okay or who is defined in that way then they're the lesser person they're the bad person and they should be controlled by the person who who is just doing this thought thing, you see, that they've constructed, all right? So within the state that he constructed, the republic, then he was able to say, base it all on this concept of the object, to say that these better people who could understand the object, who were not spiritually into things, they were the people who should control things. Well, look what happens then.
you get nations relating to each other or cultures relating to each other. You say the culture that accepts this objective way of looking at truth, that's the creation of the object. That culture should dominate, control those that don't have that concept.
They should control the more spiritual cultures because they're the ones that are more civilized, more scientific, more rational. and all of those things. Now, I'm going to push you on this.
This is a very difficult topic. I'm going to push you because we want to make sure that, first of all, I understand, and secondly, that everybody in the viewing audience can understand the creation of this object. Can I push you? This object.
I'm still trying to get at that. Okay. It's always better for me to go back to our experience, okay? For us, what I call a phenomenal universe is important.
And to break that down, all we mean is that experience is important. The way we experience things is important, in our knowing, whatever that is. Go back to the European conception, the creation of the object. You take out experience. There should be no experience in there at all.
There should be no connection. Okay? Another thing.
For us, we learn through our involvement in the universe, in life. That, again, is experience. go to the creation of the object the way the object is created is by detaching the self from everything the object is what the object is the thing that is left when you detach yourself from the universe all right remember the object is what is left and it's a thing when you detach yourself from the universe okay think about Descartes saying I think therefore I am meaning that there's nothing else that is important about a human being except this ability to somehow do this thing of rational thinking on this object. That's all that makes you a human being. That's what makes you important.
For us, you can't separate thought and emotion. They're part of, they, their thought and feeling are necessarily linked. And from that we get intuitive knowledge, which is very important for African people. What do the two do for each other?
The emotional part and the, quote, rational. I think what they give is, they give us, for one... thing intuitive understanding of things that is the African people like the the ancients used to say know thyself what they meant by that is we are like a microcosm of the universe the universe exists in That's an African belief, okay? Therefore, if that's true, then by studying yourself, by knowing yourself, you come to know the universe. By coming to know the universe, you're coming to know yourself.
That's why they said, know thyself, okay? If we accept the European concept, then you're left with a self with no relationship to the universe, no emotional involvement. in the universe.
It is detached. Okay? But that was necessary to create that object.
The important thing about the object was that it could be controlled. That's what Plato was getting at, and that's what has been accepted since his time. That in order to know, in order to be able to have knowledge, you had to be independent.
Okay, that's what the separateness did for you. And that's what the lack of feeling did for you. It gave you control over something. What you control is the object.
So we come back to the object. Now if you look in terms of people and cultures, we become... the object. Okay. You see?
That can be controlled, that can be acted on in any way necessary or possible. What do you do when you go into a scientific laboratory? You have these things that you can manipulate and do whatever you want with.
That's the same way in which African people are treated, are related to, by Europeans, as objects that can be manipulated in whatever way has to be manipulated. Now, what we do is we feed into that by accepting their definitions of reality. Or we would understand, we're not objects, hey, what are you doing? You see what I'm saying?
That there is a spiritual reality that connects us to the universe and so forth and so on. You've already touched on that. this but um what do you mean by spiritual spiritual universe and what kind of universe did um okay plato we'll be talking about him a lot i see oh boy by a spiritual uh universe we we mean um a universe that is fundamentally spiritual in nature that means that spirit is the fundamental reality that That means that there is a level of reality that gives meaning. ...to everything else in the universe. That's the...
it's like a foundation. It gives meaning to everything else and it connects everything else. See, that's why rhythm, by the way, is so important to us as a people, because it's that which connects things. We believe in connectedness.
We look for relationships, for interrelationships. Again, what Plato did was... What I believe is that that connectedness, that rhythm in the universe is difficult for the European to understand because they function on a level of surface, a surface level, a literal level, not a multidimensional level with depth. And when you start talking about...
spirit you're talking about multi-dimensionality multi-levels it gets deeper and deeper and deeper when you talk about the object what you're doing is that's just a very surface kind of reality. In all African systems there are levels that you go to as you grow. In fact, life, a human life, is the development through stages of existence where you're learning more and more and more, you know, about yourself and the universe.
So among the Dogon people, if I can go back to them, they have a level, the simplest level is called jiri-so. IRI than SO and it translates word at face value. For them that is the most superficial level of learning.
And they move from there to what they call word from the side, then word from behind, then clear word. So you're getting to deeper. You're gaining perspective. You see, you're getting textures of truth.
You go to the object. You go to... Plato's concept and what you have is a very simplistic way of looking at reality that necessarily disconnects everything it compartmentalizes it separates go back to your question about what is the spiritual universe the spiritual universe that concept tells us that you cannot separate things that there is some level on which everything is interconnected okay that's one thing it means it also means that um we are focused on meaning not just what something appears to be but what does it mean How is it a symbol of a deeper sacred truth?
That's what it means to think in terms of a spiritual universe. That's how we think as African beings. So it's powerful, but it's also difficult if it's not your nature. It may be impossible if it's not your nature. Plato was doing.
We really need to get beyond this, because it's larger than Plato. But what he was doing was, he came along at a time in European development where, in order to solidify... and to concretize and to further develop the definition of what it meant to be European, he used thought. He said, if I can get people to agree to a certain way of thinking, by then it can help to define who's going to be in charge of this hierarchy. Okay?
And if you're dealing with a people who, remember what the Africans said about the Greeks. What did they say? They said, you Greeks are but children. What did they mean? They meant that they could only approach reality on a surface level, that they couldn't understand the depth of the...
the symbolism that was involved in African culture and in Kemetic civilization. So now if he could get people to accept a definition of truth, which was simple in this way, you see, which did cut out the spirit, the rhythm, the connectedness, and so forth, then what he could do was to indeed affirm who he was. That's what they did. They defined truth in such a way that... that it affirmed them, it was indeed in their image.
Now you say that his work was not very influential during the time that he lived. How did it become so influential? Okay, when I say that it wasn't very influential, I mean that he was still fighting a battle, that there were still other views, and it was not popular at that time.
But he was still fighting a battle. he had vision. That's what I believe, that he was definitely not a philosopher with his head in the clouds, as Aristophanes said about poking fun at the philosophers of the time, that he had a model, had a plan, and had a vision. So that what happens is, the academy he puts in place, the academy becomes the institution which supports this concept of truth, which in turn supports the structure of the...
the state that he's trying to build okay okay which includes slavery and everything else um after him then you get um these conceptions being developed by later subsequent philosophers um even aristotle who is um you know when you learn in school he is uh contrasted with plato like like his one big difference between Aristotle and Plato. From our point of view in terms of cultural realities, in terms of the European Assyria, they're like extensions of each other. He's just a continuance of that and put focus in a different area, further developed it, but has the same Assyria.
Then you come to the Neoplatonists. You come to even Augustine. I'm showing how Augustine's relationship to Platonic thought. And then you have, once you have the academy in place, and people should understand what I mean by the academy, that is where...
your scholars, you know, come out of. That is the basis for all of the educational system that we have and so forth. Once that's in place, it begins to grow and grow and grow and to the point that what we have now is you don't have to argue for a particular concept of truth in the school, say here in America.
It is assumed the thing that Plato was arguing for. then. He had to argue, for instance, for the dominance of the written or literate modality over the all. What had been the tradition was the reciting of oral epics and stories and so forth that everybody could get involved in.
And there was a lot of emotional involvement and so forth. What Plato saw in that was he couldn't control that. It was a lack of control. There's too much participation, you see, from large numbers of people.
But in terms of how they used writing, it becomes a... Mechanism for control. It's lineal in thinking, non-circular. The lineal is less spiritual, you see? It's more secular and it becomes something where once you write down the word...
then that word becomes oppressive. What do you mean then? Because of the writing.
What do you mean then? It's like, you know, we do that now. We'll say, oh, it's in a book.
I had a teacher once said to me that as missionaries, women to Africa and other areas, Catholic missionaries. that they didn't have a problem converting us because they had a superior religion and the way that people knew that it was superior was because there was this book, that it was in writing and it was something that they could point to in writing. So that what Plato was setting up was that you could use the written word to intimidate people and and have them feel that something was truer because it was in writing. The word to intimidate people.
And have them feel that something was truer because it was in writing. Okay? Now, that wasn't always the case. Because at the time we're talking that he is writing and doing his work, you know how many people are reading? Not many.
And that took a long time until the Gutenberg Galaxy, where you had many, many more books. available over the Gutenberg Bible that it was made if the printing was such that there could be you know books and primarily it was the Bible available to people people on a large scale media people okay writing is very important I'm not going to tell you it isn't books are very important they're also very limited you think that that is only one way of if I write something then I shouldn't be relying just on a literate or literal interpretation of what it is I'm saying. If I do that, that's very closed.
When we, you, write... poetry. When we compose music, okay, when we drum, all the things that we do, it allows for much more than a literal interpretation.
so that we're able to get to a deeper level of reality. And all I'm saying is that we should not close out these other modes of expression, of communication, but they're very important. What we're doing now is very important.
We cannot rely merely on the written word. Okay, and I think that there is a tendency for us not to understand that for us to To not understand the power That is in other modalities of ways in which we express ourselves and Even in the way that we use the written word. Because our people did that. We used writing. But we used it in a more symbolic way.
Okay. Okay. What is the Europeanization of humanity?
human consciousness? It is the acceptance of what I'm calling the objectification of the universe, the materialization of the universe, so that again, spirit is denied, spirit is mistrusted, um, it is relegated to an inferior, uh, position. And what happens is then... We think in ways that facilitate our oppression.
We think in ways that deny our... spiritual power. That's what I call the Europeanization of our consciousness and that has been talked about by other authors.
Asante talks about that. But it is a consciousness which reflects ...be European. Someone sitting home might say, well, you know, what's... what's the harm in listening to a little Bach? A little Beethoven?
Um, getting into some Milton... almost a Milton... Milton... What's the harm? The harm is that if you are a people who have been so conditioned as we have, that we have to even sit here and discuss, convince each other of what are our strengths, what did we lose, what did we have, who are we, in a positive sense, that your focus tends to become that little bit of Bach and that little bit of nothing and little bit of nothing.
little bit of this, so forth and so on, when you have not indeed understood the African worldview, African philosophy, African conceptions of truth, what African ritual is all about, ancient African history, African culture, that you have not, that... needs to be your frame of reference. Then when you get that little bit of Bach, you have a context within which to place it.
What happens with us is the reverse. We have terms this comes out of the European acili the European concept of truth like classical okay classical it's supposed to mean the highest form in any particular culture, right? It's what you value most.
That's one meaning for classical. It also can be a reference point, a pinnacle, a high point. So we are raised to think that Bach, Beethoven, whoever, that represents classical music in a universal sense.
That becomes our reference point. We're saying, well, that's the best. Everything else, now we know we don't enjoy it the most. You know what I mean?
We know that. But we feel a little bit, well, that helps to make us not quite, we haven't reached. yet. You know what I mean?
Whatever that point is we're supposed to reach, we haven't gotten there yet because we still enjoy all this other music. We gotta be refined a little bit more. Exactly.
Okay? That's the danger. The danger is what we know of the culture of our oppressors and the place that it has in our value system that is this superficial value system which is a product of colonialism. that's being colonized. That's the danger.
The danger is that we right now, the position that we're in, the condition that we're in, we need to be putting all of our energies into understanding who we are. Because by understanding that, that's what gives you the posture to be able to look critically. And what has been imposed on us.
We don't have a place to look critically at it because we are assuming the superiority of it. That's why I thought this study was important. Because all you have to do is get outside of it, study the African world view, and then you can be in a position to deny that reality.
So let me ask you this question to finish up with Plato. You would say that Plato... played a great role in creating what we today call the European? Yes.
And for what reason now? Yes. What I see is that in the development of European culture, which is an ongoing process, in the fulfillment of the Asili, that there are certain seminal points, seminal thinkers, doers, who at whatever point in history they were at, served a role of solidifying and further developing. ...being the definition of what it means to be European.
Now, let's look at before Plato. What you have are a lot of European groups. You know, we can look at the Indo-Europeans, who have already, the asylissi, I think, is in place.
Okay? How does it manifest itself? It manifests itself in aggression.
A silly meaning? This cultural seed that for the Europeans is defined in terms of the need for power in order to achieve fulfillment. Okay? I believe that's unlike any other culturalist theory.
Okay. So you see aggression. You already see the individualism.
It would be good to look at... at Diaz's work, for instance, in terms of looking at the features of what he calls the Indo-European or the Northern Cradle. So you already see these things. However, it cannot become the world-dominant power that it needs to be because they're not unified.
Okay, so what do you need? You need something to begin to say to these people, you are one. You can gain more power by coming together. Because when you've got this strong destructive tendency...
which is something that I talk about, you know, in the book. You see, there's an innate destructive tendency. You've got this individualism because we've already talked about the separation of the human being, right?
You've got... this aggressive tendency then if you something doesn't bring you together what will you do you destroy each other okay plato comes along and he uses the concept of truth what what would be called an epistemology that's only a concept of truth uses that As something around which people can come together and identify and say, okay, this is going to be us. Now, as I said, that didn't happen right away. You had to fight all these other people that would be dissonant, you know, voices. But eventually, yes, that became what Europeans identified with.
They said, this way of thinking, this rationalism, this extreme rationalism that helps us to control, it gives us the illusion that we are controlling the future, the past, the universe, and everything. This is us as European people. So he was key at that point.
Now... Then you get a little later stage. Here comes along, let's look at 312, what they call A.D. Here comes Constantine.
What does he do? He sees that what you need is a religious statement. Which will help to achieve this world domination, this power.
Help to bring these Europeans together so that they can have power over others. So he adopts. Christianity.
You see? And that gives him the model that he needs in order to say, we have the right, in fact, we have the mandate. He said, He personally had the mandate, and you need to look at his own quotes and the things that were written about him, to go throughout the world and in the name of this one true God, which was them, which was the Europeans, to make everybody into these Christians.
So he's adopting Christianity as a weapon of control. Absolutely. And it's compatible with the Roman Empire.
The... On a political level, you've got this empire which is spreading and spreading and spreading, right? He wants control of that. He looks at this religion, and he says, ha, that'll do it. That will help me.
What I'll do is say, look, there's only one God. Christianity comes along, there are all these other religions in the world. Christianity comes along and says, all of the other religions are false. All of them are bad.
This is the one true one. Well, that fits. Then he says, either...
been placed here to service this one true God they put me here for this I've got to conquer people so that they can you know be corrected religious I hate to do it but all right what you gonna do no no I'm just saying all right So that's what he's saying. You know, he had this vision, this dream with this cross and the cross that conquered by this. Now this is all in his own words and in his friend Eusebius'words. Right? And he takes this course, made everybody make these courses, and said conquer by this, and they went into battle.
They won, and that was it. He said, yeah, this is the thing. And I'm saying that at that point in the development of European culture, that was key.
That became this solidifying, defining form, institution that would help to bring together a monolithic. Yes. What was it going to be?
All fulfilling the Asili. Okay? Then at another stage, you get this definition of science doing that.
Again, based on this concept of the object, that we are the scientists. This is the age of science. We are in the forefront of that, and therefore we have the right to rule the world.
world really because we are the scientists we are the smartest people most knowledgeable people um the uh capitalism at at one point becomes uh that which brings together uh the european self-image um and has them working as one helping to further develop the assili so different stages in European development. There is a need, there's this tendency to be fighting each other, you see, and then of course you have all the other other people in the world who are also developing and responding to this so you need ways of controlling them and ways of making sure your troops are tight and together. So you need something to rally around. I want to ask you about Greek myth and how Greek myth helped explain European violence. Oh, um...
Well, I think it probably helps more to not so much explain it, but as to demonstrate it and the need for violence, which I think is part of it. of the Asili. There is...
well let's not even look at... let's not look at the myth. Let's look at...
let's go prior to that and look at... Indo-European mythology. When you talk about Odin and these various gods who were the war gods, who had to be fed by human blood, who rewarded people with... this heaven, you know, Valhalla, which was the warrior heaven, which was this great honor if you got to go there. And the emphasis was on individuals in battle.
And, you know, the bloodier the battle, the better it was because it made you a better person and so forth. Early Indo-European mythology is replete with or filled with these kinds of images and concepts. Within the Greek culture, we get the same thing, where violence is valued. It's sought after.
There is some kind of fulfillment that comes out of it. Now, in terms of my analysis... It is that the asceli, again, you must understand, is incomplete.
So that it's not in harmony with the universe. And I think the concept of harmony is a very important one for us as a spiritual people. And so it is like almost what Colby Cambon says, formerly...
Joe Baldwin, he says that they come to be, the Europeans, as being outside of nature, outside of that natural universe, which is a state of harmony. And therefore, there's this constant thrust to try to subdue nature, or to see that as an enemy. This is on confrontation, it's on destruction. And you see it within Greek culture, you know, as well.
So that the Assyrian has to, it forces the collective, the group behavior to be destructive. Now that can bring us to even their concept of progress. We as African people accept this idea of progress.
thinking that we've got to imitate Europeans, that everything that is technologically more efficient is better. The higher you can build buildings, the better it is. The more cement that you have, the bigger the cities and so forth and so on.
We don't really look at where their idea of progress comes from. It comes from their world view. And it is really... about controlling nature. It is about and the feelings of power that come from that for them.
So we don't get feelings of power by controlling nature. Okay, that's the difference. It is about consuming the universe. Consumption. So then now you get them talking about the problem of what ecological sanity they call it.
That's a very deep issue but they are not prepared to deal with it because the culture doesn't have the wherewithal to deal with it. You can't deal with the concept of interrelationship of all of us as natural beings in the universe and the balance. and harmony when you're talking about things being objects. You can't do that because the way you think doesn't allow you to do it. What problem does that present for African people?
You talked about how Plato influenced European thinking, but here you have Africans in African Americans, in this case, in a culture. Where as you indicated earlier, we are forced in many cases to ape. Mm-hmm.
Ape Europeans. Mm-hmm. Um.
How does this need to split the emotional and the rational, all right, to be like Plato? How does that impact on us? Okay, what it does is that if we were, we talk about having independent schools, which I think is what we need to be doing.
We need to be having our own schools, because of course you've got to educate your own children. But in doing that, we need to be looking at what are the concepts that you're going to use as you develop your children. How are you going to make sure that they are being developed as African children?
How are you going to guarantee that it is a spiritual conception of the universe that they learn to use so that their energies can be liberated, can be released? What is happening is that we are using these same concepts that you've just referred to in dealing with our own children. What does that do to them?
You know how we talk all the time about the problem of our children being turned off in school? You have teachers talking about, I can't reach them. We talk about, oh, this child is hyperactive, and so you want to give them drugs. So this. that you can, you know, control them.
What we're doing is trying to relate to our children using our, using alien concepts of not only truth, not only learning. But of the human being. So that the spiritual needs of our children are not being met in those school arenas. Because we've made the mistake of thinking that... What an academy means is that you separate out whatever is intellectual from everything else.
So that in the European conception, an academy is a place where intellectual things go on and there's no place for intellectual things. for anything else. That's not a realistic conception of a human being. A human being is a whole human being. So when you have a child in a school and in a classroom, they are not just this...
mind that you want to control. That you pump stuff in and you're ignoring the rest of them and so forth. So that we have to find, for instance, I'm going to take something which will seem very simple to you, probably unimportant. That would be good. But to me it's central and it's a good example.
We are going to have to look at how do we build buildings? How do we build buildings in such a way that we help ourselves to communicate with each other and with our spirits? And how will that help us to think?
How are we going to arrange classrooms? We take for granted that you have to arrange a classroom so that you have these lines of seats. You know, and then we ask the children to stick, they come in there.
Suppose there are five, six, seven year olds and they have to sit. And they have to sit absolutely still all the time. There's no other way that they do things.
Suppose when we come together we form circles. You see? Would that make a difference?
That's what we have to begin to look at. If we have to question everything. ...which is enlightenment, which is spiritual fulfillment, illumination. This comes straight out of African civilization.
All African learning involves... that, okay? So that this was a group of people who took the Christian mythology and used the mold of the mysteries. And they would come together in groups and talk and try to develop themselves spiritually and so forth.
Now, there were problems with that. Because given a spiritual conception of the universe, which they had, okay, they said that the importance of the myth about Jesus was that the world was a place of worship. It pointed to the ability of all human beings to be reborn spiritually, and that it was a symbol of that rebirth.
That was an important point. Another important point about their organization was they didn't believe in hierarchy. They would come together in groups.
It's almost like you have a study group. and you learn from each other. No bosses.
Exactly. Okay, so that was an important point. Another point we could make is that the female principal, or women, had a more important part to play in their group. But institutionalized religion had an ideological role to play, okay, a political role to play in the formulation and the solidification of the European empire. Okay, in order to fulfill the aphelion, which is seeking power, Constantine sees this, others see this.
What would help that to happen is to have an institution, the church, which has a hierarchy. Which has a chain of command. Okay, that's one thing. So keep that in mind.
So the Gnostics are a threat to that, because they say, no, we don't recognize any hierarchy. Very importantly, now this is a, this is a, this fascinates me, this point, but you just got to follow me along, okay? We'll be following you on this one. All right, good.
There is what we call the Apostolic Church. The Apostles. What they say, and this is what most Christians would say, is that the resurrection of Jesus was an Actual, I don't think actual is a good word here, physical occurrence and historical occurrence. Now, the question is why do they put so much emphasis on that? Okay?
The Gnostics said that that whole concept was to be understood symbolically, again, as pointing to to the idea of how you could resurrect the spirit. And so it was a spiritual concept. Now, we know that we had had concepts of resurrection long before the Jesus story. So that the meaning of that has to do with the regeneration of life. Okay, and with illumination and coming to know self and so forth.
It's a very deep concept. The Apostolic Christian Church said that it had only to be understood as an historical, physical occurrence that took place just like you and I are sitting here. The resurrection? Yes, that it did not, it was not to be understood spiritually or...
symbolically. Why? Why did they put so much emphasis on that? Because then what they said was this took place at a particular point in time, particular place, and there were people who saw it.
Why are they so important? Because those people Can then say, well Jesus said to me, do this, build this, okay? Upon this rock and so forth.
And those people who actually witnessed this, this physical occurrence, then pass on authority, which they have gotten directly from this person. By being in the presence. By being in that presence. They pass it on. Then that group passes it on.
That is the concept of the apostolic church. What are you passing on? You're passing on authority. You're passing on the sanction to be able to say, we control this and we can tell you what is right and what is wrong and so forth and what to do and how it should work.
So that papal authority to this day... In the Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church is based on that foundation of being able to say... say that this is something that occurred at a specific time in a specific place and there were these people who saw it and they then had the authority to then give us the authority.
So you see how organization is involved, ideology is involved, and that it had to serve a particular purpose, a political purpose of achieving power. The Gnostics would get in the way of that. And there were other heretics, they called them heretics also, who were getting giving different interpretations of the teachings that didn't fit the objective of gaining power.
The Gnostics were saying, no, that's not the important thing. Everybody can experience this rebirth and this resurrection, and everybody can become spiritually illuminated. takes work and it takes spiritual work. Now to the Judeo-Christian split, which is just as interesting.
Yeah, I enjoy talking about that. Okay. The background that...
that I'm assuming that people would know, because I don't have time to go through all of that, is the extent to which Judaism embodied the values and principles that we're talking about that are part of European culture. Okay? Very, very, the monotheism, the written codification. Okay? Also patriarchy, by the way.
But that's another issue. So then you have the Christian formulation which comes directly out of that. Right? Then the question, I remember I was young and always raised in my mind, well why then this antagonism?
Why the need to say, you know, that one was wrong and one was right and we're not them and so forth, when they're really, you know, the same thing? The answer... It's always political and in terms of power when you're talking about European culture. And that's what the concept of the Philly helps us to do. Always look for what are the political implications.
What are the implications for the development of European culture? Look at the power trail. Exactly.
And that's what it is. It's a trail. What Judaism did was to say to its people, which was the smallest people, you are a special people.
You have been put here to be a model. And through your actions others will, they will learn and they will see that. But still they're not going to be you.
They aren't going to be the chosen people. They aren't going to be the special people ever. You have been put here for that special reason.
Okay? Okay? What Paul begins to do is something else.
That statement, the statement that the Jewish people are making within that religious context is not one that can be used for expansion. They aren't seeking converts. You see, they're saying we're special and we're an elite whatever we are and we're content to remain that way. We know we're superior. We don't want to convert anybody.
We don't want to convert anybody because you can't be us. But the European... As I put it, ego, self-image is expanding. It's got to grow.
Because they're talking about world domination. They want to conquer people. How can they use the religion to conquer people?
And at the same time say, you can't be in this. They couldn't do that. So what changes is...
The whole definition of the Gentiles and that they could also be saved. So that Paul can then preach, people can then preach, if you come into this thing, we can then save you. Well then now, so what do you... gained by that? You gained the same way that the Romans were able to go around the world and say, look, we'll make you a Roman citizen.
And then by that, you become civilized. And still, they maintain power. Okay?
This uses the religion to say, become a Christian. You will be saved. But it's like being saved in their image because still it's Europeans in control, Europeans in dominance.
The Jewish statement was too contained, okay, too tribalistic in a sense to allow for that and it's a question of rhetoric as well. What has worked so well in European Christianity to colonize all of us is the rhetoric of saying, We love you. And we have this gift to share with you and we're doing this for you.
You know, the whole brotherhood rhetoric. That is only rhetoric that is meant for those who would be victims. of the colonial thrust, of the imperialistic thrust. Okay, that rhetoric was not in the Jewish statement.
It didn't say. In fact, you need to look at Deuteronomy. You need to look at the Old Testament. It's very clear.
It's saying you do whatever you have to do to those other people who believe in those other gods. Kill them, their children, their babies. Now, this is in the Bible.
I don't know to what extent people, you know, have carefully read that. But look in Deuteronomy. It is very clear. It's a very aggressive statement in the sense of it's really defensive.
Saying protect yourself against those false gods and kill anybody that you have to who is trying to get you to believe in any other god. Okay? But it did not... It's not about them trying to go throughout the world and convert other people. The conversion...
Good evening and welcome to the final part of our conversation with Dr. Donna M. Richards, author of Urugu, an African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. What I'm arguing in the chapter on religion and ideology that we have not understood as a people is that every religion is a statement. It is a sacralizing, a making sacred of a nationalist ideology. Every religion says to a particular cultural group, you are special, you are sacred, this is what you're supposed to be doing, you know, and this is why you're here, and so forth. Every religion is tied to culture, and what we have fallen for is this, this, this.
this rhetoric of that rhetorical ethic yeah i think and also the the the what i call the syntax of universalism which really got us which is that there are universal religions universal ways of thinking that go beyond culture you see that's there for everybody Christianity is for everybody. Christianity has functioned in the service of European culture. That's the European power. Okay, now, the rhetorical ethic comes in.
They're not going to say that. When they come to take over your land, they're going to say, we're here to love you. Right? Speaking of taking over land, let me read a quote from Urugu, an African-centered critique of European cultural behavior, the part that I'm looking for, deals with the Leopold and his dealings in the Congo.
And maybe you can comment on that. I think you're quoting Cohen, who says, quote, whole districts were depopulated. Of eight villages with a population of over 3,000, only 10 persons were left. Of another district, the population dropped in 15 years from 50,000 to 5,000.
The Bulangi tribe, formerly numbering 40,000, sank to 8,000. King. In Leopold, it is calculated, netted a profit of between three and five million sterling and could call to God to witness the purity to his motives and his desire to promote civilization. Okay, that might be Chinwe Izu. Is that Cohen's book?
No, it says Cohen. Okay, because there's another book I would refer everybody to, The West and the Rest of Us by Chinwe Izu, who is a Nigerian author who did such an indictment of European colonialism, and it talks about that as well. There's a lot in there that touches on what I'm trying to say. trying to get at in this book.
Because one of the things I'm trying to do is to show the consistency in European behavior towards Africans and other non-European people. One of the reasons that Leopold, he's only one, you know, in many. We happen to know about him.
You know, you could talk about Columbus and his governors and cutting off parts of people's hands and so forth. One of the reasons that they're able to do that... ...is because they can make of human beings objects. Because they can see us as things.
You see, and that's why it's important to see the relationship between platonic law as it has developed throughout European development and what we are taught in school and that behavior. And that's one of the things that I wanted to do in the book is... It's easy for us to hear this as an atrocity story, say that's an exception, isn't that horrible? But we need to see that in a very meaningful way.
Philosophers like Plato, who we think is so wonderful, okay, um, God, um, I would say even, even neighbor, Reinhold Neber, who is a Christian philosopher, that they are connected to that behavior because they support a worldview or they affirm and teach a worldview which makes it possible. That's what we need to see. We need to see the connection.
We also need to see that... Given the Europeans approach to reality and their lack of relationship to spiritual reality, that they are able to have that kind of behavior, the physical destruction of human beings, and at the same time... To use the name of their God in relationship to it.
And there's no contradiction. I have a quote somewhere from the Special Forces, which says, oh God in your name, help us, you know, to do what we have to do to these people. Because we do it. You know, you have told us to do this. I have a quote, as Du Bois pointed out, the good ship Jesus, which was one of the first slave ships.
There's no contradiction. The name of the slave ship Jesus, the thought. Right.
And then they have a whole prayer about please don't let us lose too many people on this as we do this. Please, you know, make our injury. as few as possible as we go in to rape this land and take it.
So let me ask you this. How do you see black missionary work today? That is, black churches who engage in...
Let me say, because I don't want to just point fingers at particular people, but that is one of the most extreme, no, not most extreme, it's not one of the most extreme, it's one of the most blatant, one of the most obvious examples of African self-hatred that we would experience. It is not one of the most extreme. I think that we all suffer from a self-hatred and that it manifests itself in different ways. That certainly a missionary who is going among African people to preach. A doctrine which implies their inferiority is a sad phenomenon because they're talking about themselves.
They have accepted another whole cultural form, whole cultural experience as being superior to who they are. and they have accepted that without thought, without questioning. What I'm trying to do is to get people to question at a fundamental level. That's what we need to go back and do. We need to question our basic assumptions about the nature of reality and that's the hardest thing for people to do.
So that a black missionary is... is denying spirituality? Because they can't say, how can they say that these people that I represent, this form that I represent is more spiritual than what you have here?
They can't say that. You see what I'm saying? So they're in a religion that's denying spirituality.
And they're basically saying what the slave master said. Precisely. You have no religion that's worthy of.
That's right. Uh-huh. They have accepted that. So in order for them to accept that, what do they think about themselves? You see?
It's Woodson all over again. Carter G. Woodson. You don't need the shackles anymore.
You don't even need the back door and the sign saying go through the back door because the conditioning is so thorough that we will make the back door ourselves. I want to ask you about your thoughts on the so-called new world order that I want to read another quote that would... touch on that.
From your book again, Urugu, African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. You're quoting J.B. Berry.
Here. In the latter period of Greek history, which began with the conquest of Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human race as one we may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea the principle of the ecumen or inhabited world as opposed to the principle of polis or city promoted by the vast extent ...of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting from Alexander's conquest... And by his policy of breaking down the barriers between Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the ecumenes. It soon became familiar, popularized by the most popular of later philosophies of Greece, and just as it had been implied in the imperial theory of Rome, the idea of the Roman Empire.
its theoretical justification might be a common order, the unification of mankind in a single world embracing political organism, the term world, or this, which imperial poets use freely. In speaking of the Empire is more than a mere poet poetical or patriotic Exaggeration it expresses the idea the unrealized ideal of the Empire There is a stone from halicarnassus in the British Museum on which the idea is formally expressed from another point of view the inscription is of the time of Augustus and the Emperor is designated as quote savior of the community of man mankind. That is an expression of the European aphelion, is an expression of the European cultural ego, the need to constantly expand, to consume, and to control the universe and to dominate the world. It is, I would say, marketed as a spurious but doubtful humanism, universalism, desire to keep peace in the world, order the world, do away with difference. The Pax Romana, which was supposed to be this great peace that would be over the world, meant one thing.
It meant Roman domination of the world. The same thing with Alexander. But more importantly, the same thing with Europeans now, and when I say Europeans, I hope everybody understands that I'm talking about European Americans as well, talking about Europeans wherever they are, that this talking about uniting the world, there being one culture, one world, saving. us from ourselves, so to speak, that that is a rhetoric that we fall into.
The Christian rhetoric is the same. It is this universalistic rhetoric talking about universal brotherhood, where actually what is being expressed is... is the Assyria seeking to fulfill itself. The need to achieve more and more, greater and greater European dominance and power throughout the world.
How did the Romans do it? They did it by saying, order in the world is brought there through us, by us. We are the ones who bring order.
Well, that's the same thing as saying, as imposing your culture on another group of people so that you can control them, conquer them, subdue them, and make them victims. That you read by Burry points to this tendency, this thrust of European culture, which is to rule the world. It's that simple. Does it not show you also how old this idea is?
Exactly. That it's an old one. Exactly.
And it shows you the consistency. Another thing that we fall prey to is when so-called... liberals, critics of European society would say that this only existed at a certain time or it only exists now or this is an exception.
They avoid the fact that or the reality that there has always been a consistent thrust of European culture and that is this I just drive. Another African term that I use for that, the energy source, is the utama roho, this drive to seek power, to seek control. And that has been consistent and it has now, it expresses itself in terms of what he calls this ecumenical thrust, which sounds wonderful. everybody together, but you bring everybody together under you. So it is consistency that we look for when we use the concept of a ceiling.
What do we do to ourselves when we hear President Bush or Clinton, um, Speak about the new order and anticipate that order. How should we... Are there any tools of analysis, tools of, I don't know what the word is, that we can use that would make us, when we hear things, say, okay, um, bing, bing. Absolutely. And tools of analysis is exactly what it is.
And that's why I've developed, well, we have developed the concept of Asili and some other concepts that go along with Asili. You hear a statement from Bush. You hear a statement from Clinton, whoever it is, and right away what you say is, okay, how does this fit the Asili?
Okay? The Asili being? Being the ideological core of the culture, which helps you to see what is the political function of whatever it is that is being done or said.
It is the seed of the culture which continues to develop, but it is not the seed of the culture. It is the ideological core, it is the matrix, it is the essence and the place where in all the different aspects of the culture come together and can be understood as monoliths, as one thing. Okay? Now, this concept is simple. It helps to do away with all of the confusion.
I have used it in an after school program that I have. in Harlem, where I work with young people, that once you identify the Sicilian, you just plug it in. The light goes on, as you said, and you say, or the light goes on, and you say, uh-huh, now, how should I interpret that? I used an example with the children.
There was a headline in the paper. Push... He sends so many thousands of troops into the Sudan, into Somalia, right?
And I asked them, then it says, he is concerned that people be fed. Okay, I had laid out the whole conceptual model of Asili to them, and then we had interpreted European culture using that model. Then I said, now, how would you analyze that statement? Okay?
All right. What we're looking at is the logic of European culture. That's what you have to do.
You have to say, how does it work? That's what the Asili tells you. Okay? So you don't get fooled by the rhetoric. So I said to them, and they could say to me, does it make sense, knowing the European theory, knowing how they have functioned throughout history, that Bush is going to be concerned with us eating?
Does that make sense? No, it doesn't fit. you see it's inconsistent it doesn't make sense then why would we think then how do we need to look at him sending these troops in the answer becomes because it's a way of extending the power of the united states of europe of whatever okay so it makes things very simple for you and allows you allows us well some someone cutting you off someone watching might say well I am an American, a black American, so what America expands its power, my power is expanded also.
Okay, um... And that person has to understand what they're giving up, okay, what they've committed themselves to. Now, I'm going to say this on one level. which may not be meaningful for everybody, but needs to be, and that is on a spiritual level, that given the African conception of life, your life is not separate from that of other African people, nor is it separate from all of African existence in sacred time, not lineal time, which means that we have to... have an accountability to our ancestors and to those who come after us and to the community.
And so that you may think that you can get away with this and get, what, certain advantages, possessions or whatever it is that that person is seeking for yourself. You see, and that's your reward. The spiritual reality is that you are accountable to something much larger than that. And so that you are fooling yourself, that is an illusion, for you to think of yourself as an individual or as an American, because certainly Europeans don't think of you as that.
See, you've gone for the rhetoric. In doing that, one of the most devastating things about the European worldview and about European ideology for us as a people is individualism. Individualism is their basis for functioning.
Individualism is devastating to African people. Connectedness is our strength. Community is our strength.
Okay? So that person who makes that argument is very, very short-sighted, to put it mildly, and is seeing things in a very limited context. Now you can't, may not be able to... convince them of that. Okay?
It will come out eventually. But people, because of how they've been conditioned, will have to see it. I have to ask you this before I leave the Sudan area.
Why is it that Adid and the other the factions in the Sudan, why are they called warlords? Not that they are good guys, I don't know about them. Why are they called warlords?
And the folks in Bosnia, why are they just, I guess, leaders or whatever? Because of the importance of language. The connotation that language has, we've fallen for that.
It is a trap. It immediately puts them into a certain context. Whenever...
The American public is to be galvanized around, you know, a president's action against some non-European country. Notice this. The term barbarism, barbaric, will always come into play. What that's doing is setting up...
Your thinking, and to me it goes again back to Plato, where the warlord represents disorder, represents the chaos that must be ordered. So you have the saving troops going in to make order. So that's why they've got to be called warlords, just like African nations, language groups being called warlords. tribes because the association you see is with war and and even though the folks in yugoslavia are naming children and killing exactly you're not going to find those same terms being used because you what you want to do is to call forth very interesting uh certain ideas that are attached to certain feelings That will make us then indict our own people and identify with the Europeans who are going in. One thing that I want to say that's important and also maybe a little difficult to understand, but the key is, and I would say to everybody, study the African worldview.
Study our conceptions of the universe. Come back to who we are. No matter how much involved you become in European culture, etc., can you ever become master? Right, good. In that house.
Okay. Obviously the answer is that you can't. That it is constructed so that you cannot become that. And it will never be yours.
But the illusion is, And that's how they've done their job well, is that, you know, everybody can move up in this. Look at what's happened. You know, you've got Colin Powell, you see, so you can become whatever there is to become. Doesn't matter that he or anybody else has to be functioning in the interest of European power.