Scattered Assets: How Afrikan-Americans & Other Resources Can Shape 21st Century Pan-Afrikan Empowerment

By B.I.M. Katembo

Scattered Assets seeks to be a conduit for facilitating a much-needed and provocative dialogue on optimal 21st Century Pan-African development, through understanding the leverage and power of resource use; a selected, 8-work anthology of the author's speeches and writings (from the vantage points of human capital, sociotechnology, culture, and economics) is used to discuss empowerment. The notion of African-Americans and the African continent becoming mutual resources is a major, recurring and explained theme. Also, the book offers a fresh perspective and analysis - and thus, a new conversation - on empowering African people and associated interests through prudent use of existing tools and assets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Proisle Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961526273

Book preview

About the Author

Baruti I. M. Katembo ([e-mail]),mathematician, is the co-author of the book UWENZI: The Pan-African Factor, A 21st Century View (AuthorHouse, 2016) and several article publications including Thatched Dwellings, Pan-African Relations and Circularity (Praxis Journal, 2022) and Taking UBUNTU beyond abstract concept and theory (Msingi Afrika Magazine (online), 2022). Baruti, an alumnus of North Carolina A&T State University (BSIE; MS – Applied Mathematics) and North Carolina State University (MLArch), has been a mathematics faculty member at several colleges and universities, and has served as a board member of the Lutombi Kawana Integrity Foundation (Zambia). His selected research interests are in numeracy, sociotechnology and resource usage. He also enjoys discussing the applications of UBUNTU to culture and society.

Trilogy Relationship amongst Elephants in a Bamboo Cage, Scattered Assets and UWENZI

Elephants in a Bamboo Cage: The Black Condition, the American Psyche and the Next Step Forward (2002), Scattered Assets: How African-Americans & Other Resources Can Shape 21st Century Pan African Empowerment (2012) and UWENZI: The Pan African Factor, A 21st Century View (2016; co-authored) as collective works represent a literary trilogy. Scattered Assets is prequeled and sequeled by Elephants in a Bamboo Cage and UWENZI, respectively. Elephants in a Bamboo Cage examines the quest to optimize potential after enslavement and colonization (mental & physical) from an Afrikan-centered slant.  Scattered Assets looks at Pan-Afrikan empowerment and the optimization of potential through the lens and use of various, disparate assets/resources which may have to be harnessed and systematized. UWENZI outlines how the global interface and networking of Afrikan people, resources, culture and interests actualize Pan-Afrikan development.

Elephants in a Bamboo Cage

The Black Condition, the American Psyche and the Next Step Forward

grayscaled elephant image

About

Elephants in a Bamboo Cage

The simmering undercurrent of racial tension in today’s United States (known to some as America) stems from its own historic, insatiable lust for an inexhaustible supply of plantation slave labor by which to build a country and an economy for a new White nation. The mass importation, enslavement and brutal treatment of Afrikans are all by-products of the former English colony’s psyche of White supremacy and its quest for national and economic independence. The current issues of race relations are contentious ones centering around vast and lingering disparities in power between the United States’ primary racial groups: the European and the Afrikan. Elephants in a Bamboo Cage (2002), prequel to Scattered Assets (2012), examines the interplay of ethnoracial compatibility, culture and the historical legacy of slavery as a pretext for examining America and its social climate with regard to race. Can Affirmative Action create Black socioeconomic parity with Whites? Can Blacks and Whites live as equals in the same space? Are the premises of integration both false and racist? What must Blacks do to determine their own destiny? These are some of the many provocative questions that the book tackles. It challenges and critiques mainstream models for Black empowerment and seeks to introduce new paradigms in addressing one of the most fundamental questions in American life: By what means (if any) can Blacks achieve socioeconomic, ethnoracial parity within the United States? If not, what are the options? Culture, education, technology and geoeconomics are analyzed as strategic components in advancing a solution to this question and to other ones concerning race relations.

Dedication

To my parents, family and the countless millions of

Afrikan people who lost their lives during the Maafa

(aka Ntam Kese).

Acknowledgements

I am honored to stand on the shoulders of my ancestors in making a small contribution toward Afrikan development and global humanity. There were many before me who sacrificed and struggled unselfishly for the progress and advancement of Afrikan people. Because of their efforts, I have the opportunity to follow the path which they have laid. Some of them, never having known the meaning of freedom, served out their entire lives in captivity on the slave plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean. My remembrance of them stimulates the vigor of my efforts. God has truly blessed me in giving me the strength, courage, and knowledge to carry out the visions of those who labored long ago for Black people so that I may stand in dignity today. For this, I am grateful. It is my sincere desire that these ideas regarding Afrikan cultural preservation, of which I humbly bring forth, be expanded and spread by others who read this work. Hopefully, the impact of my research and ideas will pay proper homage to our culture, ancestors and traditions and thus, will inspire others to use their talents and skills in the same pursuit.

Contents

Preface ……………………….……………......……..……… i-iii

Chapter 1: Maafa ..……….………..……………………… 1-12

Bantu Roots and the African Diaspora…………….2-4

Willy Lynch Today …………………………………….. 4-5

America’s Lukewarm Recompense to Blacks ….. 6-11

The Meaning of a Nation ……………….…………. 11-12

Chapter 2: America’s Dilemma:

What’s to be done with the Negro? .…….……….… 13-16

Jefferson and the African Problem ….………….. 13-15

Lincoln Agonizes Too! …………………………...... 15-16

Let’s Talk Openly and Honestly ……………….…….. 16

Chapter 3: White Racial

Attitudes and Black Responses …………………...… 17-23

Euronationalism ……………….……………...…… 18-19

Black Cultural Restoration ………………….…… 19-22

A Deaf Ear to Reparations ……………..………...22-23

Chapter 4: Mfunzi ………………………………………. 24-35

Black Magnet Schools …………………..………… 25-26

HBCUs ……………………………………..…………26-31

KiSwahili Language Consortium Program ……. 31-32

A Remedy to Affirmative Action in Higher Ed ….33-35

Chapter 5: Geospaces and Economics ……………. 36-54

The Southeast and Its Future …………………… 37-38

Integration or Separation with Reparations ... 38-43

A Look at Black Productivity and Progress …… 44-47

Efficiency and the Irrelevancy of Size ………….. 45-47

Recapturing Ancient Glory ………………………. 47-48

The Underpinnings of Erecting a Nation ……… 48-54

Chapter 6: Some Final Thoughts …………………… 55-71

Glossary ……………………………………………………. 59-65

Bibliography ………………………………………………. 66-71

Preface

Elephants are huge mammals characterized by a long muscular snout and two long, curved tusks; they are indigenous to Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. Healthy, full-grown elephants have no natural enemies other than humans. They have a few characteristics of note: 1) the strongest creatures on Earth; 2) the largest land animals; 3) tremendous capacities for long-term memory; and 4) gather in groups to ceremonially cry for their dead. Throughout history, people have prized elephants for their great size and strength. On the battlefield, soldier-ridden elephants have trampled and terrified enemies. Elephants also have been trained to carry heavy supplies through jungles and to haul huge logs from the forests where they once lived.

In this work, Elephants are metaphorically likened in human form to African people: a race indicative of resilience, keen intellect, and moving spirituality. The paradoxical question is How could a group of such strong and colossal creatures, much less one, be forcibly restrained by a cage (or enclosure) made from bamboo?. In 264 BC, Hannibal, the great Black military genius from Carthage, North Africa, organized, trained and used African elephants as land transportation systems, battering rams and tank-like weaponry in his military campaigns and battles across the Alps against Rome’s armies.

Alpha Animal Training Technique

Contemporary trainers shape and modify the behavior of elephants by implementing an adaptation of an ancient method called the Alpha Animal Training Technique (AATT). The AATT is an ancient, scientific process implemented on captive animals, especially herd ones, to modify and control their behavior. Mental manipulation techniques are used to subconsciously transform the then-human trainer’s image into that of an alpha animal (i.e., the master or herd leader) of the same, look-alike species. With the proper conditioning, same-species herds willingly and collectively follow and obey their alpha animal. Elephants are matriarch-led herd animals by instinct and can consequently be effectively trained, conditioned and manipulated with the proper administering of the AATT process.

Under the AATT process, elephants learn to obey every command and task order of the master (trainer) without hesitation; disobedience is met with swift (and sometimes harsh) punishment, while obedience is quickly rewarded. The trainers use fear, chains and pain-inducing devices (whips, electric prods, etc.) to force obedience. The elephants are never allowed to envision their size and strength as tools for escape, defense, or power. In the wild, elephants, through sheer size, strength, and unyielding tenacity, command the respect of all other creatures; but, the correct application of the AATT process turns these colossal mammoths into timid and helpless giants who obey and serve the trainers whom they dwarf.

The mass capture and enslavement of Africans during the 15th through the 19th Century were mainly orchestrated to form a long-term, structural foundation for the economic maintenance of White civilization. Captured Blacks were forced by their captors to undergo intensive doses of a kind of human-adapted AATT process. The main purpose of implementing this scientific process was to mentally train and condition new slaves, their immediate offspring, and their future descendant generations to accept servitude, slave status, and captivity as a natural and proper condition. Even today, the lingering and damaging effects of the AATT process via implementation through slavery or colonialism are still felt and maintained subconsciously in varying degrees throughout the African world. The mass kidnapping of elephants from their native habitats for use as zoo displays or beasts of burden is allegorically analogous to the theft of Blacks from African soil for use as slave labor on New World plantations.

Bamboo Cage Scenario

Blacks as a race still function as mighty elephants caged with bamboo, i.e., intelligent, strong and rich in tradition; yet impeded by mental constraints which neutralize the full use of enormous talents and skills in developing self. The scenario of the Bamboo Cage refers to the present condition and predicament of African people whose mistreatment, abuse, and disrespect of themselves and from others are, in large part, caused by ignorance of self, a slave mentality, and a lack of vision. So, Elephants in a Bamboo Cage is a metaphoric phrase depicting an African people who are currently in a state of mental captivity. Any people, must have vision to erect their civilization and culture in the image of themselves. An elephant, caged in a bamboo enclosure, could, at will, rip the structure to shreds if it knew its own strength; analogously, Black people will awaken all dormant potential once the constraints of inferior thinking are eradicated.

1

Maafa

Blacks were forcibly transported from all parts of Africa to America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, chained down like wild beasts in the bottom of European ships; they were brought to slave ports and colonies under the most brutal and putrid conditions. Here, throughout this work, the term America is used as a euphemism to denote what has evolved into the geo-political entity and landmass, the United States. Obviously, Black people did not come to America voluntarily! Once on American slave plantations, they were treated as animals, i.e., driven like mules and bred like horses! They knew nothing but the cruelty of the White man and the sting of the lash. It’s only by God’s mighty hand, power, and mercy that Blacks are even alive today in America. Despite brutal treatment, Africans, who are a warm and friendly people by nature, have not been hostile or revengeful toward Whites. The European gets the full rap for slavery, but they aren’t totally responsible. Arabs were heavily involved in the selling of Blacks at least 500 years before the European got into the business. Many African leaders themselves were also partly to blame for being co-opted into selling their own race to White folks, European or Arab, because of greed, envy, capitalism and / or stupidity.

Europeans instigated many quarrels / feuds and also exacerbated existing ones between various African ethnicities in West Africa, Central Africa and along the African Atlantic coast to get one group to capture another in warfare; the Arabs raided Black villages in East and Southern Africa and also heavily used Blacks that had been converted to Islam to capture non-Muslim Africans. A large portion of the Black slavedealers who captured Africans for the Arab and the European were Muslims. They regarded the Africans who followed traditional religions as savage, heathen and primitive and therefore felt honored and compelled to help cast them into slavery. Even today, in contemporary Sudan, Muslim Blacks are still selling non-Muslim Africans into bondage and slavery throughout the Arab world.

From roughly the 15th through the 19th Century, Arabs and Europeans partnered heavily to exchange slaves and to disperse them to the Americas, the Middle East, and Europe; however, the Arab capture and enslavement of Blacks occurred at least 500 years before the European’s initial involvement beginning in the early 1500s. The Arab slave trade was more massive and brutal on Africans than the European one with entire regions in East Africa being depopulated; there was a 20% African