“We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

— Marcus Garvey

The second night of Kwanzaa belongs to Kujichagulia. Self-determination. A red candle joins the black one at the center of the kinara, and the principle it carries completes what Umoja begins. Unity gathers the people. Self-determination decides who those people will become.

Garvey’s instruction cuts to the marrow of this work, distinguishing between freedoms granted and freedoms claimed. The body’s chains fell in 1865, but the mind’s chains remained, fastened from the inside where no proclamation could reach them.

Emancipation from mental slavery requires a different key. Kujichagulia names this labor: to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves. No one else holds this authority.

For centuries, definition has been outsourced. Others named us, selecting words designed to diminish. Others wrote the textbooks, produced the images, controlled the stories told about Black life to Black children. A mind trained under these conditions learns to see itself through borrowed eyes, measuring worth against standards engineered to find it worthless, seeking approval from sources invested in its smallness.

Garvey identified this wound with precision. Mental slavery survives the end of physical bondage because it lives inside the mind, reinforced each day by media, by institutions, by the doubt we swallow without noticing its taste. And Garvey also gave us the cure: to see ourselves through “Ethiopian spectacles.”

Kujichagulia demands we recognize the condition before we treat it. The first step toward self-determination is admitting how much of the self has already been determined elsewhere.

Recovery begins with attention. Notice which voices shape your understanding of who you are. Audit the sources. Who wrote the history you carry in your body? Who produced the images you absorbed before you had words to question them? Who profits when you feel inadequate? Self-determination requires replacing borrowed narratives with recovered ones: reading what our ancestors wrote, studying how they organized, learning the names erased from curriculums designed to erase them.

Daily practice turns principle into habit. Name your children with intention. Speak your values aloud so the young hear them repeated until repetition becomes inheritance. Build institutions that answer to the community rather than to outside funders whose money comes with strings attached. Support Black businesses as a strategy, not a charity. Teach your children to ask who benefits when they feel small. Kujichagulia is not a sentiment summoned once a year. It is a discipline of reclamation exercised in every choice about what to consume, what to teach, what to build.

The candle burns red for blood, for struggle, for the ancestors whose bodies were never their own. Their minds resisted anyway. They sang in languages forbidden by law. They named their children in secret ceremonies the overseer never witnessed. They passed down stories that no archive holds because the archive belonged to the enemy.

Kujichagulia honors that resistance by continuing it. The freedom to define yourself is the freedom no one grants. You take it. You hold it. You pass it forward so your children never beg permission to know who they are.

Kujichagulia: To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.

Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe