“An ideology for liberation must find its existence in ourselves, it cannot be external to us, and it cannot be imposed by those other than ourselves; it must be derived from our particular historical and cultural experience. Our liberation from the captivity of racist language is the first order of the intellectual. There can be no freedom until there is a freedom of the mind. As Lorenzo Turner understood, language is essentially the control of thought. It becomes impossible for us to direct our future until we control our language. The sense of language is in precision of vocabulary and structure for a particular social context. If we allow others to box us into their concepts, then we will always talk and act like them. Black language must possess instrumentality, that is, it must be able to do something for our liberation; such a position is not foreign to our particular or collective international struggle. Liberation is fundamentally a seizure of the instruments of control. If the language is not functional, then it should have no place in our vocabulary. In every revolution, the people have first seized the instruments of idea formation and then property production.” “History is instructive for us. In the thirteen American colonies, the rebels took liberty and parliamentary representation and gave them definitions foreign to the ruling classes. In 1789, in the French Revolution, the so-called first modern revolution, the people took liberte, egalite, and fraternite and made them instruments for a collective will to power. The Soviet Union’s revolution of 1917 could not have succeeded without the creative eloquence of Trotsky and Lenin. They understood that to free the masses from abject slavery it was necessary to teach them to think in different terms. In Algeria, in Cuba, in Mozambique, in Zimbabwe, and in Angola the same pattern appears. We cannot seek only to be opposites of the oppressor, that simply makes us ‘reactionaries,’ and ‘reactionaries’ are conservative not progressive. The aim of systematic nationalism is to make the language ours, to claim a new language, not merely an opposite language.” “Africans have shown a remarkable ability to humanize any language we have spoken whether it was Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, or Russian. What Nicolas Guillen did to Spanish, what Alexander Pushkin did to Russian, what Langston Hughes did to English, and what Aime Cesaire, the greatest of all poets, did to French, suggest that it is in the soul of our people to seize and redirect language toward liberating ideas and thought.” “African-Americans are an historic people. We have met the challenges of an alien culture, a racist mentality, and an exploitative enterprise with our African ability to transform reality with words and actions. We must nourish this capability. Maulana Karenga argues that ‘no people can turn its history and humanity over to alien hands and expect social justice and respect’… Language is the essential instrument of social cohesion. Social cohesion is the fundamental element of liberation.” “All language is epistemic. Our language provides our understanding of our reality. A revolutionary language must not befuddle; it cannot be allowed to confuse. Critics must actively pursue the clarification of public language when they believe it is designed to whiten the issues. We know through science and rhetoric, they are parallel systems of epistemology. Rhetoric is art and art is as much a way of knowing as science.” Molefi Kete Asante “Afrocentricity” Page 31
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:27:48 +0000
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