Revolutionary Daily Thoughts: The Philosophies and Opinions of Our Ancestors/Elders

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"So the way we live now, what draws our spirits forward, if our souls
are not energized by the urge to attain projections of our own best
selves? History gives us easy, painful answers to that question.
Insistently, over centuries, we have been offered the self-
projections of people who came determined to unburden us of our land,
our resources and our freedom. To distract us from seeing what they
were about, they offered us their gods, their narratives, and their
history as the best ideals we should aim at. To top up the measure
they turned our image into symbols of everything negative. While
they worked hard to render us ignorant of our own ideals, they
presented us with caricatures of our past selves so furiously ugly
that in a search for salvation we were urged to flee in psychic
terror from anything like ourselevs, the better to embrace values
engineered to kill us, because in our ignorance of self those lethal
values seemed to hold promises of salvation. See where we are
today. In this situation, what can creative spirits do?....Find out
how to reach forgotten memories of self. Then examine memory
retrieved. From that examination will come knowledge needed for
creating new designs....This is work for creative spirits: finding
out about Africa, exploring what values have proved positive in the
past, and which have proved poisonous, so we can absorb the positive
and throw up the poisonous, as we ready ourselves to imagine our new
society, and then to create it."

Ayi Kwei Armah
The Eloquence of The Scribes

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"It is wrong that when you have cultivated a shamba for your brother
and the fruits are ready, he denies you a share; God Himself must
curse such behavior. And it is unwise to say that a pot which helped
you to cook should be broken to pieces when you have eaten from it and
are satisfied, for you do not know what may happen the next day and if
you are hungry a pot broken in contentment will not serve you in need."

John Okello
Revolution in Zanzibar

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"Since post-conquest political power derives from superior violence,
violence has become the way to efffective power in African politics.
For that reason, it is easy to suppose that the search for political
legitimacy through violence is an African cultural trait. History
tells a different tale. The present taste for military seizures of
power is the continuation by mimetic Africans of a pattern that began
gaining ground with the collapse of ancient Egypt and that of feudal
empires like Ghana. The modern pattern was explicitly defined in
Berlin in 1885, where a conference of European states laid down what
became a law in Africa under European rule, and is still the rule of
thumb used by men hungry for power: Whoever could organize
sufficient military violence to take over territory in Africa was
welcome to rule it. Those who think this is a simple universal
principle of government are ill-informed. The principle of
government based on might as right is neither universal nor eternal.
It is a cultural and historical preference, dominant wherever
Europeans rule. The literature of ancient and feudal Africa supports
a very different approach to the issue of legitimate power."

Ayi Kwei Armah
The Eloquence of the Scribes

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"Effective words strike the mind with sufficient force to help them
stick in the consciousness. "

Ayi Kwei Armah
The Eloquence of The Scribes

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"We owe it to our ancestors and those yet to be born to use this moment
in history to heighten our struggle for the liberation of African
people!"

Conrad W. Worrill

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for
grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and
my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to
live in submission and scorn of sacred principles."

Patrice Lumumba

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"Who
can be born
black
and not exult!"

Mari Evans

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"Our education must therefore inoculate a sense of commitment to the
total community and help the pupils to accept the values appropriate to
our kind of future."

Julius K. Nyerere

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"For the intelligent spirit looking for inspiration knows where to
search: in the vast storehouse of information constituted by the
accumulated knowledge and values of all the ancestors who ever
thought, dreamed, aspired, acted, achieved, and died, leaving traces
of their passage here. The more intense the need for inspiration,
the wider the search, the deeper the concentration. If the
information living humans need to improve their lives exists in the
storehouses of the ancestors, then the primary task of the awakened
soul is to equip itself to reach those ancestral fields whenever it
needs resources. Apart from carefully observing environing reality,
the awakened, creative soul, capable of awakening others, learns to
hear the voices of the ancestors, to read their writings, to access
their records. The ancestors may be contacted in books, songs,
prayers, proverbs, music, ritual and art. The soul which wishes to
receive inspiration makes a habit of visiting these sites of
ancestral existence, to ask questions, to listen and to read, to
analyze and to sift. After that, having nourished itself with
insights from the ages, courage from beloved ancestors, and clear-
eyed observation of present reality, the creative soul can go to
work."

Ayi Kwei Armah
The Eloquence of The Scribes

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

"Many people suffer most the suffering they fear."

Azanian (Afrikan) proverb