The Maafaa Requires The Denial Of African Humanity — Dr. Wade Nobles

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:30]who has been seriously reconnecting and doing it in a place where there are a myriad of problems. And he refused to move up into the hills and he stayed in the valley in his neighborhood and in our community building the family black family life center, maintaining his position at San Francisco State in Black Studies alongside brothers like uh Dr. Oba T'Shaka and maintaining his work in the field of African consciousness working with the the melanin consortium as they opened up the first melanin conference in San Francisco working with the Association for the study of classical African civilizations working with the National Council Black Studies. He was with me, Rosalyn, and others in Ghana last year.

[00:01:17]And this year his profession that he has chosen psychology his brothers and sisters his African support system has crowned him their chief pharaoh their nana the president of the Association of Black Social Workers of Black Psychologists and I present you my brother, my partner doing yeoman work with the Hawk program in McLymont's uh center yeoman work Dr. brother Wade Nobles the husband of Vera Nobles.

[00:02:05]>> [applause] [applause] [applause] >> The best part of what uh my brother said about me is that I am Vera's husband.

[00:02:31]Uh You you may not really understand how significant that is.

[00:02:38]Uh because we don't understand what makes us human.

[00:02:44]And what I hope to do this evening is talk about what makes us human in the context of education.

[00:02:52]Before I do that, you all know I must ask you all to allow me to assume the posture of reverence and respect where I give praise and credit to the source of all knowledge and all truth. And I do that by saying out loud that the almighty who is sometimes called Amun and is sometimes called Auset and is sometimes called Ptah and is sometimes called Seshat and is sometimes called Jehovah and is sometimes called Obatala and is sometimes called the Christ and is sometimes called Oshun and is sometimes called Shango and is sometimes called Allah and is sometimes called Oya and is sometimes called Olodumare and is sometimes called Atum that almighty God Amun Ptah Ra although hidden is the source of all knowledge, all truth, and all wisdom. And I pray in what I share with you this evening that Amun Tehuti Olodumare will be satisfied.

[00:03:52]>> [applause] >> I am supposed to through protocol bring you greetings from the National Association of Black Psychologists that uh I have the honor of leading as their national president from the Department of Black Studies in the School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture and I bring you greetings from these places because these are the places with the addition of ASCAK that has nurtured the thinking that I believe is going to be critical in the liberation of the African mind. I am not going to talk to you about uh the the the battles that are happening in California under the guise of the uh the initiatives that are looking at how do we begin to talk about as a policy question African-centered education for the state of California. That is something that is an interesting battle, but it's one that that um I have decided not to talk about tonight because it really is a political battle that has to do with with policies and strategies and and those are issues that we need to talk about uh in another kind of session. Uh strategies and tactics are not public forum information.

[00:05:08]Uh I'm not going to talk about the McLymont's project even though I think that is an exciting endeavor that we have been able to to have a school district in California to to designate an entire high school as a place where that is predominantly uh serviced by the black community to be a school that is designed to be a science, culture, and technology high school with an African-centered foundation. I think it's exciting that we are able to marry Afrocentricity with science and technology in the service of educating black children. I don't want to talk about that this evening because I think that that's also an important experiment and important project, but what's more important is for us to look at this question that I've been given in terms of uh my topic multiculturalism and African-centered education, the meaning for Africans.

[00:05:57]And I want to put that aside very quickly because I think that the discussion about multiculturalism is one that can be handled easily. Uh it doesn't exist. Um and um we don't need to talk about it. We don't need to talk about it other than to say that in a free and open society multiculturalism should be the foundation of good education.

[00:06:22]End of question.

[00:06:23]We don't have a free and open society.

[00:06:26]We have a society that has seen fit to its own understanding to talk about the destruction of African people and therefore Africans to talk about multicultural society is is tantamount to the the kind of insanity that you all need to have black psychologists address. Uh So so so so I will go on record. If you if you talk about multicultural multicultural education in a non-free and open society, then that's an indicator of uh of uh of pathology. And that we need to really talk a different way of looking at it.

[00:07:01]I have suggested that in in in my own work that that that the question for us that so critical and that frightens me almost daily is the issue of us having intellectual clarity that guides our struggle. And too often I think, and it may be just my problem, but too often I believe that our struggles end up failing because we haven't taken the time to to struggle with the intellect before we struggle with the conflict. And because we don't do that, we end up uh losing a great deal more than what we should lose. In my work I've argued that power is the ability to define reality and to have other people respond to your definition as if it were their own.

[00:07:44]That's an important definition in and of itself. Power is the ability to define reality. And I would suggest to you this evening that the most important reality to define is the meaning of our own human beingness.

[00:08:01]No other reality is important to define than how we define what it is to be a human being.

[00:08:08]All the systems that we create, educational systems, family systems, political systems, military systems, social systems, psychological, all the systems that we create, if we don't first take authority for defining the meaning of our own human beingness, then all those other systems will not serve us well. And education is prime example of not serving it well.

[00:08:31]When I was asked to talk about multiculturalism by brother Lionel, I told him I don't know if I wanted to do that. Uh that I thought it was easy. I mean, it takes a minute to do that. It doesn't exist. Go back to California.

[00:08:42]Now, I didn't want to come all the way here and just say that and go back to California. And so I sent him another topic that that I thought I wanted to talk about and I want to use that as a way of of looking at this question of intellectual clarity. I thought that it would be important to give myself an opportunity to talk about the Maafa or the black holocaust African-centered education or multiculturalism, a quest for clarity and truth.

[00:09:08]And I want to use this notion of the Maafa as a way of talking about clarity because the issue of what happens to us and what we determine to happen to us has to be driven by clarity. Has to be driven by truth. And for a long time we have taken the strategy as intellectuals of simply putting black in front of it and saying that is our fundamental essential theorizing. That's the best that we could do. We took black and put it in front of it. So whether it was Marxism, we put black in front of it and say we we can do that. If it's social, we put black in front and say we can do that. We even take this notion of of our atrocity and put black in front of it and say that that represents our issue.

[00:09:56]We did not experience a holocaust.

[00:10:01]We did not experience a black holocaust.

[00:10:05]Other folk have had a holocaust, and it is in fact a tragedy that they experienced. But our tears cannot be shed for someone else's tragedy.

[00:10:16]But more importantly, we cannot put our experience in someone else's paradigm and call it black and make it our tragedy.

[00:10:28]Marimba Marimba Ani Marimba Ani serves our community well when she suggests in her analyses that the Maafa is better as a concept for representing what in fact happened to African people. It is not a black holocaust. The Maafa, according to Marimba, is a great disaster of misfortune, of death and destruction beyond human comprehension and convention. Now, you need to hold on to that notion. Experiencing a system of death and destruction beyond human comprehension and convention.

[00:11:10]A holocaust literally comes from the Greek meaning holocaustos, to burn whole.

[00:11:17]And because some folk get mad at their own relatives and decided as a political strategy to burn them up whole, is their family business.

[00:11:27]It ain't none of our business. We are not guilty of it. We are not responsible for it. We don't have to worry about it.

[00:11:34]They should take care of that issue.

[00:11:36]Our experience, from our own authentic voice, is to recognize that we experienced a system of death and destruction that was beyond human comprehension and convention. And what made it beyond human comprehension and convention is that the Maafa the Maafa requires the denial of the validity of the humanity of the African.

[00:12:02]Let me say that again cuz that's an important point. The Maafa requires the denial of the validity of the humanity of the African.

[00:12:13]Some African get up and start talking about some Afrocentric education.

[00:12:17]The response that is required is that you must be in opposition to that because you must deny the humanity of the African. And only human beings recognize that their divine responsibility is to reproduce and refine the best of themselves. That's what education is.

[00:12:41]Education is a process by which we reproduce and refine the best of ourselves. And so by African saying we wanted African-centered education, will we center the development African people in an African understanding of the world? That that read too much