Editor’s Note
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of an invited talk Shaka A. Shakur delivered at the 2nd Annual Global Summit on Self-Determination organized by CalExit. You can watch a recording of Shaka’s speech at the bottom of this page or here. Please make a tax-deductible contribution to the Freedom Campaign here!
Opening Remarks
My name is Shaka Shakur. I’m a New African political prisoner member of the New African Independence Movement and serving a 62-year sentence for the wrongful conviction on an alleged attempted murder of a police officer.
I’m currently being held in domestic exile in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where I’ve begun my 23rd year of captivity, and 13 of those years were served within solitary confinement unjustifiably.
I would like to thank the CalExit Organization for this opportunity to participate within this Summit and would love to hear from some of the other participants and movements that are involved. You can reach me at Shaka@ShakaShakur.org.
Let this event be a bridge to cultivate strategic alliances and open up serious lines of communication. This is my presentation:
Free the Land: The Republic of New Africa.
A colonizer doesn’t have the right to impose a false citizenship or nationality upon the colonized or the people that the colonizer has enslaved.
What is nationality? What is a plebiscite vote, also known as a people’s vote? What is historical development or historical continuity within the context of a specific people? What is national origin, and how does such differ within the context of a specific people?
What is national origin, how does such differ within the context of a Birthright? When talking about National Independence or movements for National Liberation, these are questions that need to be asked and answered. They’re not abstract or rhetorical. Why? Because the correct answer and analysis of these questions gives rise to a correct ideology and political practice.
In March of 1968 in Detroit, Michigan, over 500 New African revolutionary nationalists and activists came together and formally gave name to the New African nation and its historical Development. Led by the first lady of the nation, Queen Mother Moore, they officially served notice on the colonized and settler nation of the United States by issuing a declaration of independence at new African Creed designating the national territory with the mandate to free the land by any means necessary.
It is this mandate that helped give further rise and credit and credence to the New African Independence Movement, better known as NAIM, and subsequently the New African People’s Liberation Army, NAPLA. Black/New African people began to metamorphosize and transform into something new.
Reborn and reshaped from our first hostile contact and interaction with the colonizer on the continent of Africa and throughout the diaspora, we were still African and representative of our ethnic and tribal origins or distinctions, but it was this contact that forced new social relations where we developed new social reflexes to a new form of reality coming in the form of colonial genocide and super exploitation.
This reshaping, this reconfiguration, this forging of many into one people into a Black Fist with a survival backbone and steel, is in the essence in essence the origin of the New African nation and the people in continuing battle for land, self-determination, independence, and for the right to be free. The rhythm of an internal motion of a people never stopped, whether it be in the bowels of slave ships traveling across the Atlantic, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, or the middle of marches surrounded by screams and shouts that Black lives matter.
As the descendants of Freedom Fighters and in the tradition and legacy of the Maroons and our ancestors, we have a historic right and duty to land, and the right as a people to decide what we want and whether we want to declare our separation from the u.s. government and it’s oppressive authority. Every social, psychological, physical, and spiritual ailment-hurt, pain, degradation-that we suffer as a people can be traced back to our particular social and economical relationship to the u.s. government and regime.
Always remember that an oppressive power does not have the right to impose second class citizenship upon an oppressed people through force or manipulation, nor do you have the right to amend the people into a constitution that such people had no participation in or representation in drafting.
If you do not think this struggle is real today listen to the Trumpers talk about Project 2025. Listen to his minions talk about redefining birthright. Listen to the language they use when they talk about mass deportations and mass detention centers and use of the military and military bases. Pay attention to how similar this language sounds like World War II and Nazi Germany.
Lastly what is the difference between a revolutionary and an activist?
A revolutionary has an ideology and a strategy geared towards removing or overthrowing an oppressive power or entity and replacing such with a more humane and just social order; whereas an activist is issue-oriented and generally reformist-oriented, and not necessarily committed to going to the extreme to remove that oppressive power. They just want change or to reform the existing power and social relations and dynamics, whereas we want to destroy them and reveal something better for New African people and humanity as a whole.
With that I say: Free the Land! All Power to the People!
Shaka Adiyia Shakur.
I would like to add suggested readings:
- Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings, by James Yaki Sayles
- Stand up, Struggle Forward: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings on Nation, Class and Patriarchy, by Sanyika Shakur
- Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State, by Edward Onaci
- “The Roots of the New African Independence Movement” by Chokwe Lumumba
Peace