-Black people have never had a history.
It is what the colonial and slave
master did that was history.
History is William Wilberforce and not
the revolution in Haiti.
African history is not Kwame Nkrumah and the Ghana movement
and Tafawa Balewa and Nelson Mandela.
It is how we, here in England, the whites,
allowed Nelson Mandela through the gates.
That's where history and the disfigurement of the history
of black people comes.
That's why we are so revolutionary.
That's why we fool so much.
There's nothing.
We come with a blank sheet.
And all of history is what we were helped into doing,
not what we did.
What I say to black youth?
I have seven children.
So that's a direct speak to them, right?
It's not back youth in general.
You have to know where you come from.
Otherwise you don't know where you are going.
You are led by a donkey by a rope from the neck.
My slogan is all movement comes from self movement
and not from external forces acting on the organism.
That's how history represents itself in people, you know.
Not in books, not in Black History Month.
It's an attitude.
History is a critical understanding of your past.
It is not a sentimental understanding of your past.
Black History Month, what do I see?
I am what I am because of what I have been.