Russell Rickford

“Kazi is the Blackest of All”: Pan-African Nationalism and the Making of the “New Man,” 1969–1975

or socially irrelevant forms of knowledge were objectionable. “We must avoid developing pseudo-revolutionary intellectuals . . . [who] close themselves in ivory towers,” Malcolm X Liberation University’s Owusu Sadaukai cautioned. A stringent ethic of work and practice was to shape the pedagogy of black consciousness and define its regimens of reconditioning. Steadfast labor was the antidote to “do your own thing” permissiveness. Correct education would promote “work, holy work, noble work” as the creed of nation building. “The only way that we will win our liberation,” the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), a PanAfrican nationalist group, insisted, “is by working for it: w-o-r-k-i-n-g for it.” This doctrine was enshrined in the motto of the Congress of African People’s 1972 conference—“Kazi is the blackest of all.” As former Congress of African People (CAP) member Michael Simanga later recalled, the slogan was “an absolute affirmation of the belief within the organization that our commitment to liberation was demonstrated by our willingness to work harder than anyone else or certainly not any less.” Even the names of many independent black institutions (Atlanta’s Pan-African Work Center, Ahidiana Work/Study Center of New Orleans, and Houston’s Kazi Shule) highlighted the value of unfaltering political labor. While the Black Panther Party and other contemporary groups also established “liberation schools” to socialize black youth according to revolutionary ideals, it was the organizers associated with CAP and CIBI who made “kazi” a cornerstone of their campaigns of cultural advancement. “Chakula” (“food” in Kiswahili) time at Shule Ya Watoto, an independent school in Chicago, 1975. Like other organizers of Pan-African nationalist institutions, leaders of Shule Ya Watoto encouraged a strong work ethic as part of their effort to instill values that could lead to Black America’s cultural and political rejuvenation. Photo courtesy of Juba Kalanka. 102 The Journal of African American History As early as 1970, however, some militants suspected that the black insurgencies of the previous decade—and the revolutionary fervor thought to have fueled them—were dwindling. Though a variety of grassroots struggles continued nationwide, several forms of mass activity waned, including urban insurrections and campus revolts. The fledgling Black Studies Movement experienced a series of setbacks. State repression of the Black Panthers and other radical groups intensified, and a small army of black dissidents found themselves facing prison terms or exile. In 1970 the staff members of Washington, DC’s Center for Black Education acknowledged a general diffusion of revolutionary energy. Using a homophobic epithet to describe the process of social enfeeblement, the Center’s theorists noted that, “drugs, sissy clothes and degeneracy” had proliferated. Concerns about black cultural alienation and anomie mounted. The surge of urban street crime fueled a larger sense of social disarray. The attraction of the African American working class to so-called Blaxploitation films dismayed many activist-intellectuals. “Can you imagine a nation being built from Superflys, Slaughters, and Shafts?” one writer asked. Some suggested that the freedom movement was experiencing a “lull.” Even in 1972, a year that witnessed popular gatherings like the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, and African Liberation Day rallies in multiple cities, some militants worried that they might soon “watch the remnants of the mass movement wither away in our hands.” The specter of black hippies (or “nippies”) deepened their concern. Like many Americans, most Pan-African nationalists viewed flower children as the insolent offspring of white affluence and as abject symbols of cultural decay. Debates about whether hippies constituted potential allies or mere nuisances divided some black radicals. Former SNCC worker and social critic Julius Lester noted the irony of “dashiki-clad, Afro-coiffed” blacks denouncing “long-hairs” as vehemently— and in much the same terms—as did Alabama Governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace. However, for figures like activist and poet-playwright Amiri Baraka, himself a former Greenwich Village bohemian, the counterculture was simply a “great deluge of nakedness.” Some black nationalists reserved special scorn for African American hippies, whom they accused of emulating white depravity. Black members of “the flower carnival,” a Liberator contributor asserted in 1967, were simply “dupes.” Writer John Oliver Killens later lamented that some African Americans had “tripped out to Haight Ashbury or down to Greenwich Village and joined white youth in the drug culture, seeking what they thought to be revolutionary insights.” At least one veteran black nationalist reinforced the critique. In 1971 Amy Jacques Garvey, widow of Universal Negro Improvement Association leader Marcus Garvey, wrote from Jamaica to urge a young, African American editor to “[t]ell our Youth Pan-African Nationalism and the Making of the “New Man,” 1969–1975 103 that they cannot afford, and must not, follow the decadent Youth of the white race; they are on the decline, we are rising, and must rise with strength, vigor, clear brains, and courage and determination to carry on. Drugs and sex abuse must not be their pastime, leave that to white degenerates.” To these thinkers, the counterculture exemplified the mysticism and individualism that threatened a potent sense of African American collectivity. Far from a path to nirvana, “do-your-own-thing” hedonism heralded spiritual doom. “Is This Your Thing?” asked Kasisi Yusef Iman, an artist associated with Amiri Baraka’s Committee for a Unified Newark, in a 1972 pamphlet that depicted a ghoulish heroin addict, a syringe jutting from his arm. Mounting evidence of social and cultural dissipation, from the drug plague to black hippiedom, convinced some activist-intellectuals that new campaigns of moral vigilance were needed. Preserving nationalism’s tenuous hold on black expression required a reinvigoration of political culture. Only a firm code of social commitment could combat the ethos of self-gratification. Pan-African nationalists found an emblem of such dedication in the ideal of the new man. “The focus of revolutionary education is the conscious super-imposition of the New World upon the Old as the mode of revolutionary struggle,” John Churchville of Philadelphia’s Freedom Library Day School declared in 1969. “It seeks to create New Men with a New Consciousness, and New Values.” Founders of Brooklyn’s Uhuru Sasa Shule, an independent primary and secondary school, circulated a 1972 pamphlet that called for purposeful black education geared toward “the development of a new man.” Writing in the Black Scholar a year earlier, radical New York City mathematician Sam E. Anderson espoused a code of selflessness and revolutionary ethics designed to “bring forth the new man.” Similarly, in the early 1970s, the Congress of African People, the California Association for Afro-American Education, and other Pan-African nationalist formations in the United States strove to identify the precise combination of attitudes, social values, and behavior necessary to engender the “new African man,” the ultimate model of black political virtue. The tropes of the new man and new African man recalled earlier efforts by African American thinkers to launch a cultural renaissance. In 1900 Booker T. Washington and other black intellectuals had proclaimed the emergence of a “New Negro for a New Century,” an attempt to refashion the image of African Americans, in part by vanquishing demeaning plantation stereotypes thought to impede the cause of racial progress. The “New Negro” revival of the post-World War I period was a far more direct precursor to Black Power’s new man. Like the later ideal, the New Negro motif heralded a militant new race consciousness and drew upon global influences (including the Bolshevik Revolution and the arrival of Caribbean immigrants) to reconstruct African American identity. 104 The Journal of African American History Modern African American conceptions of the new man reflected several contemporary influences. One was Malcolm X, whose narrative of personal evolution from street hustler to international freedom fighter helped establish the leader, in the aftermath of his 1965 death, as Black Power’s premier model of self-emancipation. Malcolm’s “self-transformation was exemplary,” the scholars of Atlanta’s Institute of the Black World, a center for research and engaged social theory, stated in 1970. “He became in his lifetime the quintessence of a free man. He was the ‘New Black Man,’ ahead of his time. And his self-development through hard choices and resolute change pointed the way for all of us.” Pan-African nationalists also celebrated the “new black man and woman,” or, in keeping with the contemporary idealization of African identity, the “new African.” Barbara Huell of Atlanta’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Community School predicted in 1973 that, “From our children, a new African people will emerge—a people prepared to take control and implement a new world order.” This theme appealed to cultural nationalists and others who regarded “We Are an African People” as a sacred pronouncement, and who insisted that black America required re-socialization (or “Africanization”) based on cultural mores drawn from the African past. Borrowed from African nationalism, the ideal of the new African suggested political autonomy and modernity and was almost indistinguishable from the trope of the new man in the lexicon of Black Power. This 1974 flyer from Afrikan Free School in Newark, NJ, promotes a youth play, “The Unity of Work and Study,” that likely exemplified Pan-African nationalism’s veneration of political and physical work. Courtesy of the R. F. Kampfer Revolutionary Literature Archive (online). Pan-African N

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