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If you live in this society, and you’re not depressed, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you.
~Sobonfu Some“Western society means chaos to the African spirit. In order for that spirit to thrive order must be restored….We must create an environment within which our Africanness can be healthy and productive, as it was meant to be.”
Marimba Ani Let the Circle Be Unbroken
Dr. Carruthers writes … “African champions must break the chain that links African ideas to European ideas and listen to the voice of the ancestors without European interpreters.”
Always Remember
“Colonization ensured that the people in power and their viewpoints are understood to be the true knowledge, automatically rendering the African way of knowing false.”
“To know means to record in one’s memory, but to understand means to blend with the thing and to assimilate it oneself.”
“What reveals itself to me ceases to be mysterious—for me alone: if I unveil it to anyone else, he hears mere words which betray the living sense: Profanation, but never revelation.”
“The highest thought you could have about a situation or individual is to see something other than how the situation appears in the physical, but its true spiritual essence to not give into the illusion that your physical eye perceives.”
“Mental liberation requires that we locate ourselves on the timeline and map of history, that we name and define ourselves, and that we rectify the problem of the loss of knowledge of self wherein we are “overwhelmed by other people’s knowledge.” Today the formal education of most people of African ancestry is usually accomplished in systems that take us far away from ourselves. We use words, models, language, theories and values of others to think about and solve our problems. These others see us as objects. By looking through their lenses we come to see ourselves as objects as well. This is precisely what Carter Woodson has called miseducation and DuBois called “double consciousness, always looking at the world through the eyes of others.” That is the worst of what he calls “double consciousness.”
