On October 4, 1963, Haile Selassie I stood before the United Nations General Assembly and delivered an address that would outlive every diplomat in the room. The Ethiopian emperor spoke of war and peace, of the machinery that ground small nations into dust, of a world order built on the dispossession of African peoples. His words carried the weight of a man who had watched fascist bombs fall on his country while the League of Nations offered nothing but silence.

Thirteen years later, Bob Marley set those words to music.

“War” transmits Selassie’s speech in a way that only Bob could. The emperor’s words had sat in the United Nations archive for thirteen years, waiting for a voice that knew the weight of the conditions being named. The verses move through the circumstances that make peace impossible: the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior, the citizenship of first and second class, the color of a person’s skin determining the content of their life. Each condition named is a door that remains closed. Marley’s voice does not plead for these doors to open. He announces that until they do, the war cannot be over: “Everywhere is war.”

The spiritual architecture of this resistance rests on a specific claim about how evil operates in the world. Rastafari names this operation Babylon, the interlocking systems of colonial extraction, mental enslavement, and institutional violence that reproduce themselves across centuries and continents, systems that learn to speak new languages while keeping the old grammar of domination intact. What Rome was to the early church, what Egypt was to the enslaved Israelites, Babylon is to the suffererahs of the present age. The flags change. The currencies change. The logic remains.

Marley’s prophetic stance required him to speak against this system from inside its crosshairs. Prophecy at a distance is commentary. Prophecy under fire is witness.

In December 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, gunmen entered his home at 56 Hope Road and opened fire. Marley took a bullet to his arm and chest. His wife Rita was shot in the head. His manager, Don Taylor, absorbed five rounds. The assassination attempt failed because certain messages are bulletproof even when the messenger is not. Marley performed two days later. Eighty thousand people watched him reveal his bandaged arm. He showed them what it costs to sing the truth in a country where truth-telling makes you a target.

“So Much Things to Say” emerged from this wound. The song opens with the names of those who faced similar opposition: Marcus Garvey, Paul Bogle, both maligned in their time, both vindicated by history. Marley places himself in this lineage because he recognized the pattern. The prophet does not choose his burden. He carries it because the message must reach those who need to hear it. The cost of speaking has never been the speaker’s to negotiate.

The song’s refrain carries a double meaning that Jamaican audiences understood immediately. “So much things to say” points to the abundance of truth that cannot be suppressed. It also points to the danger of saying too much. Certain words draw certain consequences. Marley sings both meanings at once, holding the fullness and the risk in the same breath. When he declares that he will never forget how they crucified Jeh-sus Christ, he names the pattern that runs through history like a bloodline. Systems built on exploitation must destroy the voices that expose them. The destruction becomes the proof. The silencing becomes the sermon.

The connection between prophetic witness and systemic evil becomes most clear in the bridge between accusation and appeal. Marley never rested in denunciation. His war against Babylon always circled back to the ground from which resistance grows. In “One Love,” that ground reveals itself in four words that carry more weight than any manifesto.

Hear the children crying.

The cry of children is the moral bedrock of Marley’s music. The floor beneath which no argument can sink. Children do not cry because of ideology. They cry because they are hungry. They cry because they are frightened. They cry because the world built by adults has failed them in ways they cannot yet name. To hear this cry and respond with indifference to genocide is to forfeit one’s claim to humanity. To hear this cry and build systems that perpetuate it is to become Babylon with your own hands.

Marley’s insistence on this cry performs a specific spiritual work. It refuses the abstraction that allows evil to continue wearing a clean suit. Policy debates about economic development, arguments over political sovereignty, theological disputes about the nature of justice: all of these can proceed at a comfortable distance from the bodies they affect. The cry of a child permits no such distance. It demands response. It makes the listener complicit in whatever follows.

You cannot unhear what you have heard.

The architecture of resistance that runs through “War,” “So Much Things to Say,” and “One Love” is a practice of attention. A discipline of listening for what power would prefer to render inaudible. Marley trained us to recognize this pattern. Selassie’s speech at the UN named conditions that the assembled delegates had agreed not to notice. The suffererahs in Trench Town lived realities that the Jamaican political establishment preferred to manage rather than address. The children crying in the streets issued an appeal that could not be answered by manifestos or five-year plans.

This practice of attention explains why Marley’s music continues to function as it did during his lifetime. The conditions named in “War” have not been met. The philosophy of racial superiority adapts its vocabulary while preserving its outcomes. It learns to speak diversity while practicing exclusion. The degradation of African peoples continues through debt structures, resource extraction, and the quiet export of instability to regions the cameras have learned to ignore.

The cry of children has not stopped.

What Marley offered was a discipline for remaining present to these conditions when everything in the world invites you to look away. The prophet does not promise victory. He promises witness. He stands in the gap between what is and what must be, refusing to let either term collapse into the other. This is the spiritual architecture of resistance: the refusal to pretend that the present world is acceptable while the children are still crying.

For those who receive this witness, the question is what the diagnosis demands of those who accept it. Garvey taught that mental emancipation precedes every other liberation. The mind that has internalized Babylon’s logic cannot fight Babylon’s structures. It can only rebuild them under new management. Marley’s music works on this interior terrain, loosening the grip of assumptions that make injustice appear natural, inevitable, too large for human hands to move.

The war continues because Babylon continues. The children continue to cry because the systems that produce their suffering continue to operate, continue to profit, continue to call themselves necessary. And now, the war has gone digital. Encoded in the algorithms that run through every part of our lives.

To hear Marley now is to receive an inheritance and a commission. The inheritance is a tradition of resistance that runs from Garvey through the Rastafari elders to the musicians who carried the message across water.

The commission is simpler. And harder.

Hear the children crying.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Marcus Garvey found the key to his freedom and ours in a London library. He was twenty-six years old, nearly broke, reading in the British Museum when he picked up a book written by a man born into American slavery. The book was Up From Slavery.

By the time Garvey finished, a question burned through him that would reshape Black consciousness across the globe: “Where is the black man’s government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” Washington had shown him what one man could build from nothing. Garvey decided to build a nation.

Born enslaved in Virginia in 1856, denied literacy by the laws and violence of slavery, Washington labored in coal mines, working in darkness while dreaming of letters. He walked five hundred miles to reach the Hampton Institute because he believed education was a liberation strategy. When he founded Tuskegee, his students made the bricks that built an institution. They owned the ground beneath their feet because they had created it with their own hands.

This was the blueprint Garvey recognized. Washington was not waiting for inclusion into someone else’s structure. He was manufacturing the raw materials of sovereignty. Garvey did not inherit Washington’s caution, but he inherited his proof. “Intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden,” Garvey wrote, because he knew that intelligence without institutions remains powerless. If we could build schools from nothing, we could build shipping lines. If we could build shipping lines, we could build economies. If we could build economies, we could answer the question Garvey asked after closing that book.

“Cast down your bucket where you are,” Washington urged. Find the resources around you rather than waiting for salvation from elsewhere. Garvey cast down his bucket and pulled up a global movement. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Black Star Line, and the vision of African redemption all grew from seeds planted in Alabama’s red clay, where formerly enslaved people were making their own bricks. Washington proved building was possible when you started with nothing but your mind, your purpose, and your hands. Garvey took that proof and scaled it across oceans.

The exhaustion our young people feel today comes from trying to live inside Babylon’s architecture. Washington and Garvey understood something more dangerous to the existing order. We do not need their blueprints for our survival. We need only the recognition that our hands have always been capable of construction.

What will we build from nothing?

Hugh Auld could not keep his mouth shut. That was the gift. Sophia Auld, his wife, had been teaching young Frederick the alphabet, tracing letters on a slate the way you might teach any bright child. Twenty-six letters. Each one contraband. Then her husband walked in, and the room’s temperature changed. A slave who learns to read, Auld said—spitting out the words—becomes unfit for slavery. Worthless to his master. Auld meant this as a burial. Douglass received it as resurrection.

Think about what Auld confessed in that kitchen? The whip was not the engine of slavery. The chain was not the engine. Ignorance was. Douglass discovered something Marcus Garvey would write in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey: “Intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden.”

Ignorance was deliberately manufactured, carefully maintained, and passed down like poisoned inheritance. The entire system depended on keeping Black minds in a kind of enforced twilight, able to work but unable to reason about the nature of the work. This was the design. Auld knew this the way a man knows where he buried the body. And in his panic, he pointed straight at the grave.

Douglass was a child. But he was a child who knew how to listen with his whole body, the way we learn to listen when listening is the difference between a blow and a breath. He heard Auld forbid reading. He also listened to what lived beneath the forbidding. If literacy made a slave unmanageable, then literacy was a weapon, and he would become unmanageable. If knowledge rendered him worthless to a master, then knowledge transferred that worth to himself. Auld had drawn a map and labeled it poison. Douglass read the map and found the antidote.

We know this pattern. The boss who tells you that you are not ready for the position reveals that your readiness is exactly what threatens him. The gatekeeper who demands credentials while others who are not as talented as you slip past the velvet rope. Every time someone explains why you cannot have a thing, they are telling you why they fear you might take it. The prohibition is the curriculum. Always has been.

What Douglass did next required a kind of holy stubbornness that we should all model. He traded bread for lessons from white boys in the street, children who had letters but no idea what they possessed. They held gold and thought it ordinary. He scratched words on fences, on sidewalks, on any surface that would hold a mark.

Baltimore became his classroom. The whole city, conscripted. He got his hands on The Columbian Orator and read it until the arguments took root in his chest and became his own. “I read and reread with unabated interest,” Douglass wrote. The arguments “gave tongue to many a thought which had often flashed through my soul.” The man who tried to extinguish a flame had shown him where the kindling was stored.

Our downpressors are teaching us things that, if we reverse-engineer, we can discover the keys to our collective and personal freedom.

The question is whether you are paying attention. What have you been told you cannot learn? What knowledge has someone insisted was not meant for you? The fear in their voice is a kind of respect. Learn to hear it. Behind the warning lives a fear. Behind the fear lives the truth they hoped you would never discover. They built the prison. Then they handed you the key. You are closer to freedom than they want you to know. Hugh Auld understood this, which is why he tried to stop it. He failed. They always do.

How are you making yourself unmanageable?

Thanks for reading! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

—Steve Biko

Steve Biko understood something that most revolutionaries miss. The gun pointed at your head matters less than the voice inside it telling you that you deserve to be shot. Apartheid South Africa built its entire architecture of control on this insight, spending decades perfecting a system designed not merely to contain Black bodies but to colonize Black minds. Biko saw through the machinery and recognized that the iron bars and police dogs were secondary installations, backup systems activated only when the primary weapon failed. That weapon was psychological and devastatingly effective.

We inherit these internal colonizers without consent. They arrive through school tracking systems that funnel us toward smaller futures, through media images that render our features ugly by repetition, through a thousand daily encounters whispering the same message until we mistake it for our own voice. The lie takes root in the soft tissue of childhood imagination, where dreams are still forming and therefore most vulnerable. By the time we recognize what has happened, the occupation is complete. We police ourselves.

Biko’s breakthrough came at university, in liberal spaces that prided themselves on inclusion. He watched Black students defer constantly to white leadership, seeking approval before acting, waiting for permission to think. Physical access to white institutions meant nothing when psychological subordination remained intact. Liberation could not be granted by those who held power over your mind. It had to be seized internally, in the territory between your ears, before any external freedom became possible.

This is why he built the Black Consciousness Movement as a philosophical insurgency rather than a political party. The South African Students’ Organization that Biko co-founded in 1968 did not ask permission or seek validation from white liberals. It created space for Black people to define themselves on their own terms, discovering beauty and intelligence without external certification. The movement understood that self-perception precedes self-determination. You cannot fight for freedom while believing you are unworthy of it.

Marcus Garvey articulated the same truth decades earlier, declaring that mental emancipation must precede political liberation. Both men recognized that oppression operates most efficiently when it no longer requires enforcers. The perfectly colonized mind does the work of its own subjugation, producing compliance without coercion, obedience without orders. Breaking this internal chain requires a systematic rejection of every lie installed during the long process of mental occupation.

The apartheid state killed Biko in 1977 because they could not contain what he had unleashed. A banning order in 1973 had failed to silence him. He adapted by building health clinics and literacy programs that spread consciousness beyond the reach of security forces. The idea had gone viral, spreading through minds across the country. They could stop his mouth, but not the awakening. He proved something essential. When enough people reject the lie of inferiority simultaneously, no amount of force can reinstall it.

What remains for us is the daily practice of mental decolonization. The voices telling you to dream smaller, to seek approval, to doubt your capacity for greatness did not originate in your mind. They were installed by systems designed to benefit from your diminishment. Recognizing this fact is the first act of resistance. Rejecting the lie is the second. You are already free the moment you stop believing you are not.

Marcus Garvey’s Blueprint for Mental Liberation

Summary:

In this episode, we confront the crisis of the "shrunken imagination"—the internal voice that convinces us to dream small due to systemic oppression. We explore how Marcus Garvey built the largest Black organization in history by transforming mental slavery into unstoppable institutional confidence.

Key Topics & Takeaways:

The Root Problem: "Mental Slavery" is not just a personal flaw; it is the internalization of oppression that sabotages potential leaders before they even start,.

Garvey’s Origin: Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey realized early on—through his father’s library and travels to Panama—that freedom is a battle fought on paper and in the mind before it is fought in the streets,.

The Strategy: Head, Heart, Hands Framework:

Head (Mindset): Mental liberation must precede political freedom. As Garvey noted, "Intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden".

Heart (Purpose): Ambition must be tied to collective upliftment, not just personal wealth. It is a generational commitment to building a future.

Hands (Action): Vision demands execution. From the Negro World newspaper to the Black Star Line, Garvey proved that confidence is the precondition for action,,.

Memorable Quote:

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started."

This Week’s Challenge:

Move from "shrunken imagination" to action:

1. Imagination: Write down one "unrealistic" idea for community uplift that feels too big to share.

2. Action: Take one concrete step this week (e.g., draft a plan, research for two hours, or contact a collaborator).

“With confidence, you have won before you have started.”

— Marcus Garvey

The final candle burns. Seven days of intention close where all things begin and end: with faith. Garvey understood this. He declared that with confidence, victory precedes action. The outcome settles before the work commences. Imani, the seventh principle, anchors everything we have built across these Kwanzaa nights.

Imani translates as faith, though translation flattens the fuller meaning. The declaration we make on this day carries the weight: to believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. War-room faith. The kind that sustains movements and raises children and refuses the seductions of despair.

Garvey built an empire on such faith. He organized millions across oceans and continents without the internet, without television, without any technology beyond the printing press and the human voice. He believed in our capacity before we proved it. He saw what we could become and treated that vision as evidence. His confidence moved ships and founded businesses. It created the first and largest mass movement of Black people in the Western Hemisphere.

We light the green candle on this final night because faith points toward the future. Green is the color of the continent we revere and the harvest we anticipate. Imani asks us to weigh the evidence of our wounds against something heavier: the record of our survival, the persistence of our genius, the undeniable fact that we are still here making meaning in a world designed to erase us.

Practical faith requires practice. We teach our children our history so they know the ground beneath them holds. We name our ancestors aloud, so the dead remain present. We gather in circles, even small ones, because isolation corrodes belief. We protect our elders because their memory is our archive.

The doubt will come. It always does. Garvey was deported, imprisoned, slandered by his own. Karenga faced years of darkness before Kwanzaa found its footing. Every ancestor whose name we carry knew seasons of defeat. Imani holds that suffering yields to something larger. The struggle continues because we continue. Our victory is already written in the fact of our persistence.

Tonight, we carry the seven principles cycle through our lives, each one feeding the others, none complete without the rest. Imani crowns the sequence because everything we have practiced this week requires belief to sustain. Unity needs faith to hold. Purpose needs faith to endure. Economics needs faith to serve the right people.

Garvey called us to believe in ourselves before the world gave us permission. Kwanzaa gives us seven days to rehearse that belief in the company of those we love. The candle burns low. The declaration rises.

Imani!

Faith!

They put him in a cell designed to break his mind. Robben Island was a factory for despair, a place where the state suppressed resistance by crushing the spirit first. Nelson Mandela understood this from the moment he arrived. He also understood something his jailers never expected him to grasp: their weakness.

Mandela began studying Afrikaans with the discipline of a soldier preparing for war. This was the language of apartheid, the tongue his captors used to degrade him, to issue orders, to construct the legal architecture of his oppression. Learning seemed, to some observers, like surrender. It was the opposite.

We mistake knowledge for allegiance. When you study the system that holds you down, people assume you admire it. They confuse fluency with loyalty. But Mandela saw what many of us miss: understanding your oppressor is not betrayal. It is reconnaissance. You cannot dismantle what you do not comprehend. You cannot negotiate with a mind you refuse to enter.

This applies far beyond prison walls. Every day, we navigate systems built without our consent, institutions whose logic excludes us, cultures that speak in codes we did not create. The temptation is to reject the whole apparatus, to refuse engagement as a matter of principle. That refusal feels righteous, but it also leaves us without leverage.

Mandela’s Afrikaans became a weapon because it came from a man they expected to hate them. When he spoke to his guards in their mother tongue, he disrupted their certainty. He forced them to see him as human, as intelligent, as someone who had chosen to understand rather than simply oppose. That choice unsettled them more than any protest could.

Marcus Garvey called this the work of the Head. Before your heart commits to liberation, before your hands build the new world, your mind must map the territory of the old one. Self-mastery begins with situational mastery. You cannot outwit an adversary you have refused to study.

Our generation faces a version of this challenge. We are told to disengage from corrupt institutions, to build parallel structures, to starve the beast by withholding our attention. Sometimes that advice holds merit. Other times, it amounts to strategic blindness, a principled ignorance that leaves us vulnerable to forces we declined to examine.

Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years in prison fluent in the language of his captors, intimate with their fears and contradictions, prepared to negotiate because he had spent decades preparing to understand. When he walked out of Victor Verster Prison in 1990, he was not a victim seeking revenge. He was a strategist holding cards his opponents never knew he possessed.

The lesson cuts both ways. Learning the language of your enemy does not mean adopting their values. It means gathering intelligence and converting your pain into preparation. It means refusing to let justified anger become a strategic blind spot.

Your cell does not decide your story. Neither does your rage. What determines your story is whether you spend your years cultivating understanding or nursing grievance. Mandela chose understanding. We get to choose too.

If you enjoyed reading this post, consider supporting my work: https://buymeacoffee.com/geoffreyphilp

“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.

I learned the gradations in Kingston before anyone named them. Browning. Red. Clear-skin. Every yard had its taxonomy, every schoolroom its unspoken ranking, and no colonial officer needed to enforce what we enforced on ourselves. The British had gone home. Their measuring system stayed behind, alive in our mouths, alive in the way aunties appraised babies and decided which ones would go far.

Garvey warned us about this. “Never divide or create confusion between the different colors in the Negro race.” You no longer need an overseer when the yard polices itself, when the compliment lands like a qualifier: pretty for her light complexion. “Smart for a dark boy.” The exception filed into the rule. Every ranking by shade does the work of the colonizers for free. You do not need to conquer a people busy conquering themselves.

Slave codes formalized these distinctions. Field and house. African-born and Creole. Dark and light. Planters understood what Haile Selassie would later understand in reverse: unity threatens power. The counter-strategy was division. Let the captives manage each other.

We inherited that division, and it grows still in family photographs sorted by complexion, in casting calls, in the dating preferences we pretend are personal taste. The inheritance feels natural because we received it young, before language, before we had any frame for knowing what we were learning.

Selassie faced the same divide-and-rule tactic at the national scale. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia while the League of Nations watched. Selassie stood in Geneva and told them the truth: it is us today, it will be you tomorrow. They did not listen. He learned in exile what isolation costs a people, and he spent two decades building the Organization of African Unity so no African nation would stand alone again. He asked Nkrumah and the monarchists to subordinate their argument to the goal. Sovereignty first. The pace of integration could wait.

The colorism question demands something similar, because the same tactics remain in play. The diaspora wars that fracture Black Americans from Caribbean people from continental Africans follow the old script. Who is more authentically Black. Who suffered the right way. Who belongs, and who arrived too late to claim the name. The argument generates heat and no light, and while we debate something that Peter Tosh answered long ago, “No matter way yu come from, as long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African.”

The video ends with a challenge: build one bridge. For some, the bridge runs across ideology or generation. For others, the bridge runs across shade, across the old taxonomy we carry without knowing we carry it.

The colonizer left. The ranking stayed. What we do with the inheritance remains our choice.

Marcus Garvey understood something fundamental about freedom. You cannot beg your way to liberation. The hand that feeds you controls you, and the mind that accepts this arrangement has already surrendered. Garvey built the Universal Negro Improvement Association on this principle, declaring that our redemption would come through economic and spiritual independence. He was not speaking to individuals alone. He was speaking to a scattered nation.

Decades later and thousands of miles away, Thomas Sankara inherited this understanding. When he became president of Burkina Faso in 1983, the country depended heavily on foreign aid and imported goods. Sankara saw this dependency as colonialism wearing a different mask. Within four years, he transformed a nation by refusing to accept the terms of subjugation dressed up as assistance. His government launched vaccination campaigns that reached millions. They planted ten million trees to push back the desert. Women entered government and the military. All of this happened because one man believed, as Garvey did, that we possess everything we need to save ourselves.

The philosophy connecting these two figures is not complicated. Self-reliance means producing what you consume, educating your own children, and building institutions that serve your interests rather than the interests of those who would keep you dependent. Garvey preached this through his newspapers and speeches across the Americas. Sankara practiced it by banning the importation of food when local alternatives existed and requiring government officials to wear cloth woven by Burkinabè hands.

Our current situation demands that we revisit these lessons. Dependency has evolved. It now wears the face of technology we do not control, food systems we do not own, and narratives we did not write. The global economy positions Africa and the diaspora as consumers rather than producers, as markets rather than makers. Garvey warned us about this a century ago. Sankara showed us the alternative.

What both men understood is that self-reliance is not isolation. Garvey built international networks connecting Black communities across continents. Sankara welcomed solidarity from revolutionary movements worldwide while insisting that Burkina Faso determine its own path. The goal was never to withdraw from the world but to enter it on equal terms, with something to offer rather than only needs to present.

They paid for these ideas with their lives. Garvey died in London in 1940, exiled and largely forgotten by the mainstream. Sankara was assassinated in 1987, likely with the complicity of foreign powers who found his example threatening. Their deaths remind us that self-reliance is dangerous to those who profit from our dependency.

The question facing us now is whether we will honor their sacrifice through action or merely through commemoration. We have their blueprints. We have their words. The only thing missing is our commitment to the work they started. Building requires hands.

Our hands.