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We must always be political. I think that culture, for example is always very political. It always has been and always will be….because a culture represents the values, the values for which one fights. If one is fighting for a revolution, one is talking about more than just changing governments and power, and that is changing the value system. What carries that value system is one’s culture….Culture is a cohesive force. It is what keeps people together. Culture is very important in the fight, because a lot of people have fought against their oppressors yet maintained the culture of their oppressors, and culturally they are the same as their oppressors. They haven’t fought for anything actually. All they have done is change powers, but that is not a revolution. You have to understand that changing powers is not a revolution. Black people in America, Africans who live in America, especially must understand that and begin to alienate our people completely from the culture and values of Western society. That is going to be particularly difficult because all of us live within those values and it is going to be very hard for us to root them out. I mean that it is like people who say that they want to be be black. But being black is an awfully hard job in the United States. It is very, very difficult, and we have to constantly try to understand the rejection of Western values and the pickup of new values. It is very, very difficult. But our first task is all the more to alienate our people at every chance we get from the Western culture and values, because once they are alienated there will be no influence over them. That is what we are seeking. We are seeking to stop all influence of Western culture on our people — completely.
Kwame Ture “Pan-Africanism — Land and Power” (via hatshepsutspeaks)
