Education for a new reality in the African world must be an education that enables the African to handle all of the wealth producing resources of Africa. An education that enables the African to manage and market these resources and an education that enables him/her to prepare the generations still to come to do the same thing. A large number of African children should be chosen at birth and trained towards these ends and all education should be for the total sovereignty of African people. There is nothing in African traditional values that prohibits modernism, upward mobility, or the use of science and technology. Africans must realize that they live in a modern technical world and that there are lessons we can draw from our ancient societies to guide us. Africa has to move with the age in which it finds itself in order to survive.

What I am proposing here is a holy order of commitment. In the future we cannot leave land and nation management to chance. What I am alluding to here is the establishment of an international priesthood of liberation and an institute to maintain that priesthood. If we are to go back to nationhood and be safe and secure, we must understand that a nation must be a cultural, political and economic container of the national and international aspirations of a people. The commitment to maintain the nation and secure it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, must be part of everyone\'s mission, not something left solely to politicians. Africans the world over must stop playing games about who is an African. Everyone in Africa who cannot be addressed as an African is either an invader or a descendant of an invader. It is time for the African to ask the guests in their house the question: What is your mission in my house? And—do you have any loyalty or commitment to the preservation of my house, as I conceive it to be? Africans must be bold enough to let the non-African in Africa know that, \"I will share power with you in Africa to the extent that you are willing to share power with me in Europe. You demand and get the prevailing power m your countries and I have every right to demand and get the prevailing power in my country.\" Africans should demand and get Africa as African-ruled as France is French-ruled and England is English-ruled. Too many times Africans are expected to share power with others who have no intention of sharing power with them. In educating Africans to realistically face the world of the immediate tomorrow, I am referring to the essential selfishness of survival.

Education is power. When education is properly done, education opens the door to power. A true education has one purpose and one purpose alone: to train the student to be a handler of power. One of the things that we fail to understand is that our oppressor cannot afford to educate us to handle power. We live in a society where, if we were properly educated, we would not ask for power. We would take power. We will have to stop answering to names that our mothers and fathers did not give us. We will have to stop answering to names of which we are not.

The real crisis facing black educators began a long time ago with things we did not understand. I think back to reading about a scene of an African being forced on a slave ship, and he reaches back and puts a handful of African dirt in his mouth. I think that African understood more about education than most of us. He understood the basis of nation—land. Until we understand the land basis of education and the nation basis of education, we will miss the point. Where did we go wrong and when did we stop being innovators and became imitators?

In the nineteenth century we began to be \"those things most, unlike ourselves.\" When we had the golden opportunity to set a new tone in education, we tried to be like our oppressor instead of setting a new basis for education. Professor Ivan Van Sertima says that European expansion into the broader world and European colonization of history have locked us into a \"five hundred year room\" of history. A room wherein African people and their contributions to the world were removed from history. The basis of education for a new reality is to pull us out of this five hundred year room. We have to understand what was wrong with our education and examine the nineteenth century in the African world. The nineteenth century might have been the greatest century in the whole of the African world. This might be the century that we have to go back and examine in order to survive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.We produced the finest minds that we have produced since the decline of Egypt and Nile Valley Civilization in the nineteenth century. This is the century of a search for Africa again.

Let’s look at the Caribbean mind and its contribution to the stimulation of black social forms in the United States. We need to understand that the Caribbean mind never functioned well at home. Once it begins functioning well it is driven away from home. It has a way of producing seed that does not grow in the soil of the Caribbean. The soil was fertile in the United States and the best of these minds came here. It started with Prince Hall. Robert Campbell would come here. He would travel with Martin Delany to Africa and write A Search for a Place. John B. Russwurm would edit Freedom\'s Journal. Peter Ogden was one of the founders of Odd Fellows. Prince Hall found the Masons. H. Sylvester Williams tried to establish a Pan-African League in Trinidad. It failed. Trinidadians did not pay any attention to it. The same thing happened when Marcus Garvey started his Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in Jamaica. He could not get it off the ground. The soil would not take the seed. The greatest contribution to the formal idea of Pan-Africanism was made by three Trinidadians: H. Slyvester Willlams, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore. Why couldn\'t these minds function at home? You can trace the history of these minds for two hundred years all the way up to Marcus Garvey, including those that returned home and were killed. None of them were accepted at home.

The greatest and clearest of the minds of the nineteenth century was Edward Wilmot Blyden. What he said about education in his famous inaugural address at Liberia College, in 1881, said more about education over one hundred years ago than we are saying right now. He said:

We will have to work for many years to come. Not only without the popular support that we must have, but with inadequate resources…We strive to be those things most unlike ourselves. No matter what talent we have, we feed grist into other people\'s mills and, of course, nothing comes out except what has been put in. And that then is our great sorrow.

This was said in 1881, over one hundred years ago, and we are still doing it. He was not only ahead of his time; he is ahead of this time.

Let\'s look at Africa in the nineteenth century. This is the century of the massive anti-colonial revolts. This is the century when the African world faced reality as it had never faced reality before. In the first half of the century, the Zulu Wars in Southern Africa had already started. The Ashanti Wars in Ghana had already started. The Islamic Wars in the Sudan had already started. The Maji Maji Wars in Tanganyika and neighboring territories, and the Riff Wars in North Africa had already started. And the wars in Nigeria led by Ousmane Dan Fodio had already started.

The physical confrontation diminished as the slave trade turned into Colonialism (another form of slavery) and the Africans soon realized that missionary efforts were also a form of slavery. The Europeans began to take away the African energies and began to destroy the African images of god. One of the ways to continue to enslave a people is, after removing one set of chains from their body, to place another set of chains on their mind. This will not only make them change their religion, but also make them abandon their religion. Make them change their dress, their tastes, their music, their food, and when this is done, you don\'t need any prison walls to confine these people. The prison walls inside their mind will be more binding than any prison walls you can construct.

Once we face the reality of the imprisonment of the African mind in the nineteenth century, we will face up to what was happening to that mind. We will look at the debates between blacks and blacks and look at the blacks going to Liberia to \"Christianize\" their \"heathen\" brothers. Read Alexander Crummell\'s work. He was a great black missionary. But he was a missionary with the mentality of a white missionary. He was going to Africa to spread Christianity in a continent where every element that originally went into the making of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism began. Every element that went into these three religions had long been in practice on the African continent.

Once we understand the nature of our oppressor\'s religious oppression, we must look at the mentality of our respective oppressors. The oppressor in the United States has taught us to face reality better than any of the others. The oppressors in the Caribbean area and in South America gave their black population the illusion that one day they would be allowed to join the club. The oppressor in the United States has taught us explicitly that we will never join the club. Even with what we like to call integration, another fakery, they still let us know that if we manage to get into the club, we will never be accepted.

In the physical integration in the Caribbean Islands and in South America, if you are almost white, a special place is made for you in society. You are not allowed in the house, but you would be allowed in a designated area close to the house. In the United States, the crudest of oppressors say, if you\'ve got one drop of one drop you will be placed with the blackest of blacks and at one word, all of you will be placed in the same sack. Although the females with the one drop had some advantage in the domestic job market and the husband market, and another market which I will not mention, no place was made for them in their father\'s house. And this is reality.

In my research for this paper, I re-read a dissertation on religion written by an African attending Syracuse University. His dissertation detailed why African religions never became world religions. He said they had no pews, no collection plates, no temples, no missionaries, everything was free. He asked the question: How can such a religion become a world religion? Nobody was exploiting anybody. Priests were free. The community paid the priest so they did not have to pass the hat. The community brings the priest his food and makes his clothes. He pointed out that all of the elements that we call Christianity came out of Africa. All of the symbols of Christianity came out of Africa. He explained that when the people from Israel came into Africa, they had no clear religion, no law and no language, when they left they had all three. His dissertation was not well received by Syracuse University and he was thrown out, in 1933.

I would like to approach my conclusion with quotations from great African American women poets because in the great civilizations of Africa, long before we knew Europeans existed, women were revered, were treated equally and moved freely through the society and played all kinds of roles. The first deity in history was seen as a female goddess. The first woman to ride at the head of an army was an ancient Africa woman. The first woman to challenge the foreigner challenged Octavius, who later became Caesar Augustus. Another African woman challenged Alexander of Macedonia.

In her poetry, Mari Evans has said that part of the immediate solution to education is to \"speak the truth to the people.\" With this she implies that if you give people the light, they will find their way.

In her early poetry, Pauli Murray, now The Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, speaking of freedom, in her Dark Testament, says:

Freedom is a thing like amber wine
that lures man down a path of skulls.

For they killed the dreamer but not the dream
the dream is always the same.
The dream is about freedom.

Professor Carolyn Fowler of Atlanta University, in speaking of the need to bring African people back together again, said:

We need to look at each other more. We need to get acquainted with each other\'s personality. We need to remove the strangeness that has grown up between us across all the seas and all the centuries.

Margaret Walker challenges us to take action in her classic poem, For My People. She called for us to:

Let the new earth begin.
Let a new race of men rise and take control.

We will accept her challenge and my answer to her will be, Sister Margaret, we are people of vision and we see tomorrow, not as a male-dominated tomorrow, but as a collective tomorrow with males and females functioning as equals. We will say to her: We have heard the martial music. We have heard the trumpet call. We accept the challenge. We are the new men who, with our women at our side as equal partners in this enterprise, are prepared to take charge.

There are over one billion African people on the face of the earth. Properly counted, the Africans in the United States, the 1990 census says, are at 30,000,000, and the census takers missed over twenty percent of us. In the Caribbean there are 60,000,000 admitted people of African descent. In Asia there are millions who are African, whether they know it or not, and on the islands of the Pacific that are several more million who are yet to consider their African ancestry. The population of Africa was last fixed at over 700,000,000 and continues to grow.

These are staggering figures. Our study of history has taught us that we were yesterday\'s people, and by our shear numbers we will be tomorrow\'s people too. With this understanding of our new importance we can change the world, if first we change ourselves by educating ourselves this new reality. When we count one billion of this earth there will be very few people who we will need as allies. The main allies that we will need we will be able to find among ourselves. We will be the only people who will have a continent for themselves. We will not be an oppressed people and we will not be an oppressor of any people. We will not need to exploit or take advantage of other people. We could bring to the world a new humanity and build a new age of man. This might be our mission; it might be the greatest legacy that we can leave for mankind.

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