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Itumeleng “Itu Neter” Makale is an Afrikan-Centered Black Nationalist thinker, an Afrikan Sovereignist-Race
Vindicationist and an enduring conversational fellow in spaces that are intellectually and spiritually
replenished with Black Power-imbued meditations. The psycho-spiritual turning point stations and
intellectual grapplings in his evolutionary quest for life enhancing and sustaining essential and
existential elements, ideas, outlooks and philosophies for African people, were Islam, Christianity
and “Black Hebrewism” (which worldviews he later outgrew to gravitating to stronger Afrikan-Centred leanings), with which he sought to establish a Pan-African Black Consciousness filtered utilitarian
approach, to give impetus to the African re-education and consciousness-raising psycho-spiritual
aspect of the Afrikan restorative revolutionary project.
EARLY LIFE
Itumeleng Makale was born in
Rammulotsi, near Viljoenskroon, in the Free State province, South Africa, where he attended
Ntsoanatsatsi Lower Primary School, Mahlabatheng Higher Primary School, Kgolagano Secondary
School and Kgabareng Secondary School. He attended part of his high-schooling at Matlosana, Jouberton, near Klerksdorp, at Tsamma Secondary School. It was when he reached his mid-teens at the beginning of his high-schooling that he received and embraced his philosophical orientation to politics through Black Consciousness when he joined the Azanian Student Movement (AZASM), the Black Consciousness high school student chapter.EDUCATION
Studied Law. At the height of his
political convictions and the depth of consciousness, his perspective broadened when he stretched
his anti-colonial critique to also problematize the very education he was pursuing as a form of
epistemicide meted out on the Afrikan Spirit to place Afrikan people’s instrumentalities of reasoning
in dislocation, paradigmatically. He saw the content of his academic studies as merely comprised of
verbal and intellectual symbols whose philosophical, epistemological and cosmological basis was at
the core of what he was deeply gravitated to critiquing. Itumeleng further went on to question the
very value system with its paradigmatic lenses that informed his idea of success and the choices he
made in pursuit of that “success”. He found the education system to be occluding authentic
existence in Afrikan people, with other people, other than themselves, wielding the power to define
over their heads, and the will to interpret their own reality to convey their lives in consonance with
their essence.
His convictions deepened so much that he became devoid of
intellectual aloofness to the study content to which his mind had become repulsive. He further saw
that the academic studies framework as virtually guaranteeing to produce regurgitators of other
people’s words, thoughts, ideas, outlooks etc, which he reasoned was what has imprisoned Afrikan
people’s evolution in the jail of consciousness disorienting epistemic irrelevance for which one can only
become a mere knowledge consumer in an education system that appeared to him as having a little
(if any) room for those like himself whose participation with the epistemic space is mainly focused in
knowledge production as opposed to certificated knowledge consumption.AREAS OF EPISTEMIC/INTELLECTUAL INTEREST
– Health Sciences – Holistic & Preventive Health and Regenerative Nutrition and related areas
of practice– Science of Being
– Etymology
– Philosophy
– Culture & Spirituality studies
– Foundational values to Hegemonies– Cosmology & Mythology
– Conceptual Frameworks to Politics & Economics
– Ancient World History & Afrikan History
CURRENT PROJECTS
– Second book entitled (yet to be published) ‘Unshackle – Stepping On Toes: A case for the reorientation of Afrikan
Consciousness’. Makale, like others who write from an afrikan-centered perspective, sees a
fundamental fault line in uncritical adoption of alien ideas, philosophies and ideologies. If we
as Afrikan people are to create independent intellectual spaces it becomes imperative for us
to foreground the centering of Afrikan ideationality. We are not, he maintains, handicapped
in intellect that we should depend on others for invention and as such operate as
transplants of foreign traditions. He posits that, from an Afrikan-centered perspective, there
is a recognition that ideas, theories or concepts are bound in a particular culture and history,
their claims to universality notwithstanding. Thus they issue from peculiar cultural
assumptions. To be sure, they issue from a specific ontological and cosmological matrix. So
when one embrace foreign ideas or theories, they are not only accepting them but they also
inevitably accept the metaphysical assumptions and claims that produced them. It follows
therefore that the practice of adopting other people’s ideas or theories is not so innocent an
exercise in the construction of ideologies or philosophies or theories. Indeed, cultural
anthropologist, Marimba Ani, assures us that thought is culturally structured – what in her
cultural schema she calls “Utamawazo”.
It is in this regard the critique Makale marshals against alien traditions becomes relevant.
Nothing is shielded from the rigour of his critical examination inquiry. From Marxism to
Feminism to liberalism to Abrahamism(the Judeo-Christian-Islamic triad) to post-modernism
to existentialism.
– Third Book entitled (yet to be published)‘Psychology: The Afrikan Indigenous Paradigm’. In this literary Project,
Makale shares an Afrikan-Centred paradigm from whence he draws his perspective on
Afrikan Psychology as Afrikan Psychology is that branch of Afrikan Spiritual Cosmology that
studies the human functionality as foregrounded in the energy/spirit, called moya/umoya
that is the propelling fuel that enables human beings to live efficiently and productively with
the goal to be in harmonious and life-enhancing unison with all other life forms.– Music Project:
– Released an album called Chambers of a Vintage Soul’.
Conscious Soul Music in his native language Sesotho. Giving Afrikan Indigenous rendition to
Soul music as an Afrikan diasporic innovation.– Was featured in the following Cool Affair Productions music projects as both a spoken worder and a singer; Detox G.T.E.B.H.B Vol 1 & 2, Afro futuristic: A Conversation with the Black Future, Yurugu Menticide Camps, and Scamto
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