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Are you tired of every “black” political party on the African continent? Are you tired of bad “black” leadership? Are you tired of always being told what your life should be like by the very same people who colonised you a few years back?

Hello. My name is Sizwe Mabanga and you may be having a Ntu Consciousness moment.

The African continent is in turmoil largely because of two geo-political dynamics most pertinent to the immediate African situation:

1. The West and parts of Asia are working very hard to embed themselves as a global technocracy and they need African resources to do so.
2. Thina abaNtu forgot our true history and are therefore not self-aware and deliberate in our actions as a nation.

The only thing that can stop Europe, USA (The West) and Asia’s (The East) griphold on African resources is not “Black Consciousness” or “African Consciousness”, but “Ntu Consciousness”. Thina abaNtu are a nation 1 billion large and we inhabit most of Africa. In the umbrella group of abaNtu we exclude the Afro-Asiatic peoples that took over the North of Africa. We include all Niger-Congo, Nilotic and Khoisan tribes who generally share very similar stories and cultural practices as abaNtu.

This umbrella nation of abaNtu is a geo-political force to be reckoned with. If we begin acting as the nation that we are, the geo-political landscape would change overnight.

This book is designed to give you, young Ntu, new ways of seeing yourself. Your current context is “modern society” which has designed itself around a very individualist form of democracy, racialism (racism) and capitalism. Modern societies have recently tended to claim individualism and capitalism as the source of human progress. This is despite clear history and some recent research showing that collectivism and socialist (tribalist) economics that spread risk at group levels are what have gotten humans this far. 

The West has succeeded in replacing effective tribal and social structures with their own ineffective and largely predatory structures. They have succeeded because their racial paradigm plus their ambitions of being the master race has them doing many inhuman things in order to prove their supremacy. They fight dishonourably and lie far too easily. They call their barbaric treachery  “cleverness and modern ingenuity” when they “win”.

In this manner they have taken over most of the world and think themselves to be everyone’s envy when in fact they are everyone’s most oblivious enemy.

It is quite likely that it is up to you, young Ntu, to stop the West and their neo-colonial ambitions from racially exploiting our people in the name of their individualist, capitalist cult.

And you can achieve this by remembering that isiNtu is a collectivist, socialist culture with built-in, risk-efficient economics. You, young Ntu, will champion the adaption of industrial/technological production methods of today to isiNtu in a way that works for us, in order to re-ignite true African industrialisation and Ntu custodianship of Africa. 

You, young Ntu. You and all the young Ntu around you are the protagonists of this story. We will do this as a single nation of Ntu spanning all of Middle,Western, Eastern and Southern Africa. 

You, young Ntu, are the main character. The fate of our world depends on you rising to the occasion and changing much of your learned behaviours.

Intro

AbaNtu are people who practice isiNtu. UbuNtu is an ancient culture of intrinsic democracy practised by abaNtu. The loveliest part of the word isiNtu is its unassuming nature. It makes no statement other than: to be human. It is with “being human” that all things began and, surely, will end. Over many years the meaning of “being human” has evolved to include unspoken rights such as dignity, community and agency. 

UbuNtu is thus a reference to a kind of human experience that has dignity, community and agency. When you clearly possess these qualities, amongst the Zulu it is said “unobuNtu” which loosely translates to “you possess Ntuness”. This concept of “Ntuness” is so pervasive amongst all our tribes that even when our societies break down and we go back to living in the forests and savannas we maintain a simple society that works to grant dignity, community and agency to all within it.

UbuNtu is a deep rooted culture spanning many, many tribes – each with an epic and long history. We practitioners of isiNtu are an ancient people with ancient blood in our veins. The culture of isiNtu is the epitome of human civilization and a still unmatched standard in the longevity and social satisfaction it lends to its practitioners. Ubuntu is the culture we have lived by for many thousands of years because isiNtu is an effective and adaptable culture that has helped us weather many, many storms. 

Today, abaNtu are still a nation that spans half of the Earth’s second largest continent. We inhabit most of Africa and span twenty or so African “countries”. 

In all of these “countries” we Ntu are economically disadvantaged. In all of them we have political power that is not translating into economic power. 

You might ask: why?

And the answer is simple: we are no longer practising our own culture: isiNtu. We are not working to guarantee dignity, community and agency for all of us. We are instead all working individually to accrue personal wealth. This change in priorities is at the core of our failure to resist neo-colonial programs of indoctrination because it is much easier for colonisers to deal with self interested individuals than it is to deal with a dignified community with a sense of its own agency. 

We lost generations of Ntu stand today in the storm of storms.

A new global context is being forcefully introduced by the West and its imperial efforts. And it often seems to me that we remain strangely calm in the face of this storm of storms. Is it because we know that within us, the seeds of a new Ntu empire have been patiently waiting for the right time to take root again? Is isiNtu the reason why even though we are colonised and exploited, we remain a kind and empathetic people?

But we are definitely not practising isiNtu in the manner we ought to. This is largely because of colonialism and its successor neo-colonialism. For the purposes of this book, let’s think more broadly about colonialism as how both Asians and Europeans have spent thousands of years stealing land and wealth from abaNtu and neo-colonialism is the process by which abaNtu have been made to forget ourselves, our long history and by which we have been made to think of ourselves as “blacks”.

Sadly, a lot of our current forms of “black” economic empowerment as instituted by neo-colonial African countries are aggressively dissociated from our Ntu tribal identities. African “black consciousness” and “emerging black economies” often compete with and destroy tribal Ntu identities and Ntu tribal economies. Our tribal economies are currently failing because our tribal languages are not  being used as languages of instruction, business or engineering. Our tribal markets are therefore not developed enough to integrate and compete in the fast-moving, technology-rich modern global market on equal footing. 

In order to restore our tribal markets, in this book we will be introducing and exploring new concepts such as Ntu Consciousness and Ntunomics as better alternatives to “black consciousness” and “Black Economic Empowerment” (BEE). 

What must come through clearly to you, reader, is that isiNtu is ours while “blackness” belongs to the neo-colonialists. “Blackness consciousness” and its programs are, ironically, very much Western and Asian programs that support the racialized worldview – which in turn supports their colonial structures and institutions.

AbaNtu

The 6500 year old racialized worldview actively promoted by many Asians and Europeans has become ever more popular in recent times because it is useful in justifying their incursions into Africa. It is crazy to think that just 400 years ago we Ntu were certain that Europe was inhabited by a barbaric bunch of long-haired white-skinned warring tribes. For many hundreds of years before that the Europeans had been periodically appearing on our shores wanting to trade something or other and we granted them many trading outposts on African shores… but we never dreamed it would turn out like this. 

The fact that this very same bunch of European tribes has conquered and connected the world in ways that have truly caught us Ntu by surprise is surreal, fantastical and comically dystopian.

How The West Detribalised Us

The story around how the pale-skinned sea-faring barbarians of Europe turned all the tables and won the whole world is a very interesting one. I needed to understand it in my search for solutions for Africa. It is closely linked with our own recent history of the past seven thousand years and is also where the racial narrative of humanity begins to take root.

If I can reduce this racial narrative to a really simple story it goes like this: it began about 6500 years ago along the banks of the Nile as “white” skinned Asians began to infiltrate, interbreed and compete for spaces in Africa alongside the “black” people. The simplest explanation of the emergence of “white” people is as a direct result of the ice age which ended about 11,500 years ago.

During the ice age, Africans who had settled furthest north of Europe and Asia got separated from the rest of us for what must have been thirty thousand years. In that time these “prodigal sons” who were living in horribly cold pockets of northern Europe and Asia acclimated to the ice age and lost the need for pigmentation (melanin) that protects humans from direct sunlight in warmer climates. Their lack of melanin began new genetic branches of humanity with a light skin tone which became the basis for “whiteness”. “White” became a new human grouping and with it came a toxic new narrative based on pitting those of “white” skin against those of darker or “black” skin.

As it was back then, it was impossible to not see that those of “white” skin came from cold, inhospitable parts of the world while those of “black” skin inhabited areas of good climate, farming friendly conditions and advanced technological civilisations such as ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Kemet. This accidental circumstance may be at the core of the toxic racial narrative. 

As the ice melted and we were reunited, first with the “whites” of Asian descent and later those of European origin, the relative prosperity of the “blacks” became all too “problematic”. The “white” Asians slowly and systematically began to attack and overtake lands occupied by “blacks” beginning, most notably, in what is now known as the Middle-East, then reaching into Northern Africa via Egypt.

The sustained infiltration of Africa by Asian “whites” is therefore the real MVP in the story of Africa’s downfall. The European “whites” conquest in Africa only featured fairly recently in comparison. 

Phoeneicians, Greeks and Romans invaded an Africa already compromised by a 4000 year old Asian onslaught. In fact, Europe’s conquest of Africa was only possible because it found the “black” civilisations already weakened. The Ntu civilisations that we had built along all the Nile river were at the tail end of a long losing streak in our conflicts with invading Asians. Many Ntu had even already chosen to abandon the lands and cities of their forefathers in upper and lower Egypt. Many of us had long ago began migrating back south into the Congo and further yet down to Africa’s southern tip from whence we originally came.

And even as the civilisations of Ntu Africans have lost form and power rapidly in the last 2000 years, the powers of Asia and Europe grew through their close study of Egyptian culture and belief systems. The Asians, beginning about 6000 years ago used arts and skills learned in Egypt to build civilisations alongside Egypt and about 3000 years ago the Caucasians moving into southern Europe just across the Mediterranean from us also figured out how to copy Egypt and build their own civilisations. But even as they copied Egypt they also repeatedly invaded Egypt, coveting all that Egypt stood for. Their constant and ultimately combined invasions forced us Ntu Africans to migrate further and further south.

This large migrating group met and sometimes conflicted with other Ntu tribes already inhabiting the interior and south of Africa. The great migration to the south has not been easy on us and is a big contributor to our current unpleasant circumstances. All of our attempts at rebuilding the glory of old that we had on the banks of the Nile were hampered by many difficulties such as: 

• arid lands not suitable for our traditional forms of sustenance farming, 
• fundamental breakdowns in Ntu social structures and group cohesion caused by our new and dynamic nomadic life and
• internal conflicts over land and scarce resources.

The Asian invasion of Africa that currently has all the North of Africa inhabited by Asian semites continues to this day and is an ongoing process that will not stop until they have all of Africa or we make a stand. 

From as long as 1000 years ago intrepid Europeans began making permanent outposts on East, South and Western African shores. Unfortunately we Ntu Africans failed to pick up that we were being completely surrounded from all sides as we bickered amongst ourselves. 

European intrepidness, along with their suspiciously spectacular industrial revolution from about the 1600s, has fueled an era of great geo-political success for them. The last 500 years or so are characterised by a truly global European imperialism and colonialism that Greeks and Romans only dreamt of.

It turns out that the real architects and heroes of modern Western geo-political success are the unlikely bed-fellows of: 

• the Roman Catholic Church and 
• Martin Luther, the German founder of the Protestant church. 

Between the two of them they can be credited with accidentally creating this very successful (if somewhat viral) Western Culture that produces people with a very different psyche and worldview than our Ntu one.

The Roman Catholic Church, in its bid for power over the souls (wallets) of men, made many new mandates that introduced very big changes in how the christians of Europe lived. The Roman Catholic Church, in retrospect, is the architect of Western individualism. 

While the Roman Catholic Church was fighting its long time enemies: 

• European monarchies, 
• their tribal constituencies and
• the clan-based tribal social structures that backed them, 

it inadvertently created the conditions for people to detach their sense of identity from their clan and tribe. It did this by: 

• banning cousin marriage, 
• enforcing the strictest monogamy and
• prohibiting divorce.

Religiously enforcing these new marriage rules destroyed the ability of clans to maintain their complex inter-marriage and kin-based social and economic structures. The new rules promoted small, independent, nuclear families. These smaller families, over time, became less attached to their clans and far more likely to travel towards urban centres to look for work and new opportunities.

This individuality and mobility is what sparked new classes of people outside of the usual peasantry, gentry, clergy and royalty. The merchant class and the scholar class that began to emerge were from small families that travelled to find good trade deals or quality scholarly works. 

These new classes have, over the centuries, weakened the role of tribal structures within European societies and even royalty has since taken a death blow. These new classes and their rampant individualism prefer democracy and impersonality to strong kin relationships and would rather grant authority to abstract ideas than other people. This last attribute, the shift of power and authority in Europe from humans to ideas, is mostly attributed to the Protestants movement and one of their main protagonists: Martin Luther.

Martin Luther and the Protestant Church’s opposition campaign against the Roman-Catholic Empire sparked a literacy revolution that cemented him as one of the true fathers of modern life. Research has shown a high correlation between the early centres of the European industrial revolution and Protestant movement. The protestants made efforts to get men and women of the 1500s to embrace literacy so that they may form a personal relationship with their God and loosen the grip the clergy had over the bible. Protestants intended to bypass the Roman Catholic clergy who presented themselves as indispensable middle-men to christian salvation and fleeced many families and clans of generational wealth.

This increase in European population’s literacy led to a further increase in renowned scholars and successful merchants. To this day, the correlation between literacy rates and economic success in many populations globally remains uncannily close.

Research then went even further to show that widespread literacy, over time, had jarring cultural and even physical effects on the societies that embraced it. It created the peculiar Western psyche that is currently driving global living standards and technological advancement at a surprisingly brisk pace.

These, mostly European, populations that have practiced widespread literacy for generations display a preference for analytical and  chronological thinking. At the same time, they are no longer so good at remembering faces or forming lifelong meaningful relationships. I’m not making this stuff up; the above interpretation of history is actually backed by a number of studies across multiple disciplines as presented by Joseph Henrich in his amazing book “The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous”.

The long and short is that this combination of changes in: 

• marriage and family practices, 
• religious attitudes and 
• widespread literacy in protestant populations 

is what led to the changes in people’s economic behaviour that accelerated the industrial revolution for Europe. This is important to remember as we go forward, young Ntu, because these are the very mechanisms that are now being employed against our clan, tribe and extended family structures in order to divide us. 

Many Ntu are now of the opinion that they are christian or muslim and that the customary practices of their Ntu tribe are barbaric and backward. They are taking on the religious and political practices of the West and the East but completely failing to take on the economic practices of the same. 

Ntu Revitalism

Many things can happen when one tribe or group completely dominates and defeats another. And while historians love to focus upon the tactics, carnage and brutality of the conquering group’s campaigns, it is important to keep in mind that the aftermath of conquest often held new possibilities for the losing group.

Throughout human history’s relentless cycles of conflict, many losing groups have had to let go of all that they used to be after being conquered. Other losing groups were actually lucky and had an opportunity to watch their conqueror operate. They got an opportunity to incorporate new things that made their conquerors superior, into their own culture. 

In time, some of these losing groups that had an opportunity to “upgrade” themselves, were able to survive and thrive to the point of surpassing their erstwhile conquerors. 

This is the cliff edge we stand at as abaNtu. We can surrender completely to the onslaught of Western domination and ultimately let go of our Ntu self… or we can learn what it is that enabled them to conquer us so completely and use it to “upgrade” ourselves without losing our Ntu self. 

This book is entirely about how we achieve the latter, quickly and painlessly. And clearly what is missing in Africa is: 

• a sense of collective cooperation and identity that transcends the modern (colonial) country based identities forced upon us and 
• an industrial revolution that accelerates our ability to build competitive, modern, commercial and logistical infrastructure across Africa. 

The first issue above is solved by us remembering our tribal identity and the journey we have been walking together for thousands of years. The second issue is solved by us learning from our oppressor.

It is thus the position of this book that we need to shed our current colonial African borders and create a single country called KaNtu that spans all of Sub Saharan Africa. It is also the position of this book that the Ntu industrial revolution will have to be based on widespread Ntu literacy. Any industrial revolution that happens in Sub-Saharan Africa that is not born of widespread Ntu literacy is just further colonisation and cultural eradication. 

Arabia, Russia, Japan and China have increased their literacy to be on par with Europe and Northern America. Furthermore, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Chinese literacy was achieved using their own languages and alphabets that developed alongside European systems of literacy. Having high literacy in non-European languages and non-European alphabets has helped make Arabia and Asia difficult to colonise and helped them foster their own independent industrial revolutions. 

This leads to the realisation that our lack of high literacy rates in Ntu alphabets and Ntu languages is actually at the core of Ntu economic failure and the reason we remain in neo-colonial states. The crazy part is that we Ntu are no strangers to high literacy rates in our own language and our own systems of writing. We claim the rights to the writing systems of Kemet and Nubia which gave birth to the writing systems of Egypt and, likely, the world. 

If we Ntu have created writing systems and created literate populaces before, we can do it again.

This change, though, is dependent on our ability as abaNtu to remember who we are, observe the conqueror, then work together to adapt and grow.

Proposal 1: New Ntu Cultural Pillars

Should we choose to adapt and grow, we can rebuild our Ntu social structures and economic power the right way: by adding to isiNtu the most useful traits of the European and Asian colonists. 

I have attempted to express my understanding of how we will mix isiNtu with the useful part of Western culture as a set of 5 core attitudes that help us navigate a modern sort of isiNtu. This list  of core attitudes is therefore not magic or voodoo or anything like that. It is simply my attempt at summarising a lot of conversations with a lot of people from all walks of Ntu life who recognise the need for us to re-emerge as custodians of Africa.

These core attitudes will help us remember what it means to live ngesiNtu while re-approaching and fixing our collective economic woes with new cultural strategies.

Without further ado, these are the core attitudes that will ensure that abaNtu regain sovereignty and economic power:

1. UbuNtu is a system of human culture that holds  each human, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and all the stars in the sky as living Gods amongst a pantheon of past and present Gods in many different forms. At Ntu lore’s very core is that we Ntu are part of a deeply intertwined inter-galactic lifecycle and ecosystem that is itself alive. We know there are other worlds with other Ntu who look like us and other Ntu who do not. We know that the Earth is a living being whose lifespan and aspirations are unimaginable to us. The attribution of life to the Earth and other heavenly bodies leads to a much less lonely system of scientific knowledge. From this richness of life within our vicinity we arrive at a universe more compassionate and reciprocative than the Western scientific outlook of cold universal laws and accidental life on an accidentally perfect hot rock floating through space around an even hotter rock. We Ntu know that the whole universe is alive and wants to live. So you, young Ntu, are a God within God amongst other Gods. This attitude serves as a spiritual core for isiNtu.
2. Ntu Consciousness is remembering that abaNtu are a nation of young Gods spanning all the West, middle and South of Africa, with the power to change the Earth. We are the children of Kemet come home, and in calling ourselves abaNtu and practising isiNtu we are remembering who we are. We are the original people, hence the way we introduce ourselves, ‘abaNtu’, easily translates to ‘humans’. We live on our mother Earth, who gives us the means to live – but all that is consumed must be paid for, even to the Earth. Just as we benefit from being on Earth, the Earth must benefit from our presence on her. The Earth is family and so are all the animals we share her with. Furthermore, a tribe is made up of villages and vast lands inhabited by clans consisting of kin groups which are made up of multiple nuclear families. These structures are the vehicles by which we Ntu integrate with our society’s politics and economics and these structures are self-similar at each level. Social justice, political engagement and economic agency are practised at all these levels and not just at the individual and government/corporate level. Ntu Consciousness demands that each of us remember our tribal identity and how it fits into our tribal reality and the cosmos. Ntu Consciousness is remembering our tribal identities and tribal social structures allowing us to quickly and easily take back our politics and economy from the neo-colonialist. Ntu Consciousness is a mental power stance and is the basis of Ntunomics. 
3. Ntunomics is a behavioural economics framework built on our Ntu tribal identities and using tessellating (fit into each other side by side), fractal (self-similar at different scales) kin-based social structures to enable tribal structures to operate in the new global economic scene. Ntunomics is how we will ‘upgrade’ isiNtu to create a new Ntu industrial, technological and economic block. All cultures are a form of social programming and each time an individual human decides to make conscious changes in their behaviour it contributes to the act of reprogramming our society and reality. This is the seat of your Godhood. This is how you and I are going to ‘reprogram’ isiNtu to suit our modern environment. Your conscious economic decisions are going to build economic power at the family, village, tribe and nation levels. The greater goal is making the Ntu people an economic block and a geo-political force again. The first step towards this will be ensuring that all Ntu, young and old, are literate in Ntu languages and are proficient in Ntu ways of writing. On the back of this Ntu language based literacy we will spur a revolution in Ntu industrialism, scholarhood, technology and commercialism that will change the face of the earth as we know it. Again.
4. A new tribally structured “nation-country” called KaNtu, allied with other African tribes, nations and indigineous peoples outside of Africa will defend itself from highly aggressive nations, cabals and oligarchies that represent Western and Eastern economic interests based on frivolous concentrations of power and wealth. These interests wish to continue using Sub-Saharan Africa as a source of raw materials and labour. Our current Sub-Saharan African “countries” that were established during outright colonialism can only produce false leadership (“presidents”) who, no matter how “woke”, will over time hand economic power back to colonial interests. We Ntu must end this neo-colonial false leadership by dissolving these “countries” and creating our own nation: KaNtu. Only then can we win this socio-economic war within our lifetime. This is urgent because the enemy is already within and their influence on us is already far too strong. Once we have solved for true Ntu sovereignty we can begin global economic activity on an equal footing with our geopolitical competitors.
5. UmuNtu, is a title of power. To call yourself UmuNtu is to commit to being the custodian of earth and all the creatures we share her with. As UmuNtu, you will change Ntu economics by creating Ntunomics within your community. You lie at the core of this book. You. You are the living flesh of God. To create new, prosperous futures for abaNtu, you will not ask others (neither politician nor coloniser) to change. Instead it is you who must evolve and change and embody the brave new Ntu. And you will do this because you understand that people will only change when you change. This core attitude is designed to acknowledge and empower you, young Ntu, as a supreme co-creator of our shared reality, and the responsibility that comes with that. And in this book we hope to remind you of the magic you have as a God. 

In the following chapters we explore the above principles and attitudes and their resultant changes in Ntu economic behaviour in greater depth. If you read this book and still do not know what you must do differently from now onwards to change your fate and that of your people, then I have failed you. 

Please read on.

UbuNtu

UbuNtu is a philosophy of human design and social self-programming. All you are about to read is already documented in your blood. I am just reminding you. My own return to isiNtu after growing up christian is testimony to this. 

My Literacy in IsiNtu

I began to dislike christianity when I went to a Catholic primary school that made me confess sins to a priest inside a claustrophobic wooden cubicle. All due respect to Roman Catholicism but my genuine experience was that it all seemed theatrical to me. In high school when I attended a less religious school I disavowed christianity and became atheist (at least inside my own mind – my mother wouldn’t let me).

In university, circa 1998, I discovered Buddhism and the Bhagavad Ghita of the Hindus. It was love at first sight when I read the freely given, unconditional teachings of Buddha. While still at university I was also introduced to Rastafarianism, which I was attracted to because of its focus on justice and equity for African people. 

I was Rastafarian for a good four year stretch, all the while disliking the fact that Rastafarians also used the same christian bible and were thus actually a christian sect, but I stuck around for the social justice stuff. At the end, though, I grew tired of the dogmatic, deity-based, approach to everything Rastafarian and distanced myself from it.

I became atheist again, but still with a need for a spiritual connection. And as I met individuals of all sorts I realised that the spiritual connection I was looking for was in other people. I realised that having quality relationships and interactions with the people around me was far more spiritually satisfying than praising and worshipping a God. So that is what I focused on. I let go of all preconceptions of what spirituality is and concentrated on the people around me.

It was only later that I realised that I had, quite naturally, stumbled on to the very core of isiNtu. UbuNtu puts humanity on the same level as godhood and thus treats other humans, past and present, as living Gods deserving of the same respect, love and reverence that christians reserve for angels, saints, popes and the holy trinity. I also realised (with great and hearty laughter) that ubuNtu was the true nature and final form of democracy. The constitutional democracies practised in Europe and the West pale in comparison to UbuNtu which enshrines democracy into it’s very cultural pillars, religious practises and day to day human interactions.

I had, despite indoctrination into foreign religions and mindsets, returned to my Ntu roots, because they simply made sense to me. I realised that the rituals that my elders performed when I was young where they made offerings and spoke to our ancestors were actually beautiful, community based events where this truth of isiNtu was constantly reaffirmed: we are nothing without each other and with each other, we are everything.

A lot of young Ntu people question the validity of our traditional practices such as speaking to our ancestors and animal sacrifice. These things are difficult to understand under normal circumstances let alone in the face of invasive religions and cultures intent on erasing your culture and belief system.

My personal understanding of why our traditions exist is to connect people and families on this journey of life. Living our lives amongst each other and getting to know each other in our different ritual settings is what makes us learn to love each other in a way no constitution nor institution could. In speaking to our ancestors we acknowledge the journey we have travelled over time and decisions taken by those before us that have led to us being here today. 

In spilling the blood of an animal we momentarily give that life to our ancestors so that they may “live” and be with us for the night. It is both metaphorical and real because, in death, when the spirit leaves, there is a release of energy from the body. This is the very real energy our ancestors will use to listen to us and do what they must do for us. It is metaphoric because when we speak to the ancestors we speak in a deeply intimate voice that reflects our innermost wishes and needs (ancestors are not judgemental and you are in fact secretly sure that they are just as confused as you about a bunch of stuff). And speaking our innermost wishes and needs out loud makes them clearer to us and those speaking to the same ancestor. It puts us on the same page with ourselves and our family.

In this way our culture, ubuNtu, and its rituals are a way of connecting to the magic of you through the eyes of not only those you are alive with today but also those who came before you.

Children of the Stars

It took me a while too but I eventually did some real research on Ntu origin stories. I, inevitably, learned that our earliest ancestors quite literally come from the heavens. I slapped my forehead upon realising that “abeZulu”, which translates to “of the heavens”, is a statement of my people’s origin. 

In the origin stories of nearly all Ntu tribes, the first people come down to earth in silver eggs or boats, always near rivers, marshes or oceans, and there beget human life. There is nothing metaphoric about this.

If we are saying that isiNtu is a system of knowledge then our origin stories must be held as fact. And our system of knowledge does not separate science from culture, science from religion or religion from culture. Ntu culture, science and religion are indistinguishable parts of a single system of knowledge that helps abaNtu make sense of the world we are born into. Separating culture from science from religion sounds… painful.

We Ntu know that our origin stories are not mythical. We know, unequivocally, that the Gods of old were space travellers with advanced technology. We know that when we say “God made us in his own form” we mean that there are other Ntu peoples who look just like us on other planets out there. This is common sense and, to me, is far more approachable than a single (as in unmarried), omnipotent, invisible and (very selectively) interventionist God creating a single world exclusively for humans who serve him. That sounds… inefficient.

The Ntu concept of God is multifaceted. We have always known that stars and planets are living, god-like-beings with their own story spanning billions of years. Because of our short lifespan, their stories are largely invisible to the human perspective. Yet we Ntu are grateful for the life we live on and amongst them like generations of tiny ticks on the backs of long lived elephants. AbaNtu know that the stars, planets and moons around us owe their own existence to an even greater living God residing at the centre of the Milky Way. 

We also know that the entire universe is beaming with life and that this is the fundamental nature of the more abstract “God of all”. God is life and everything is alive through God. But there is no use in focusing on and only acknowledging this “God of all”. This God is too abstract for our day to day purposes, to be honest. Thus abaNtu do not actively promote monotheism. And, in retrospect, every time a pharaoh, chief, religious sect or arch priestess has insisted on monotheism it turned out to be a power grab. This too is documented in your blood, remember?

Christianity, islam and judaism are rogue sub-sects of isiNtu that have chosen to do exactly that. They create societies that concentrate spiritual power into an abstract “God of All” then they assign that God a personality that suits their aggressive outlook and insatiable needs for power and dominion. This abstract, anthropomorphised and co-opted “God of All”, I suspect, is at the core of their individualistic mentality which loves to create frivolous concentrations of power and subjugate others to their will. 

This is an important starting point of your journey into changing Ntu economic behaviour. Ntu changes in economic behaviour must be rooted in the knowledge that our economic actions are aligning to a stunningly beautiful, multifaceted universe which is vibrant with life and Gods at every corner. Your Gods are alive and around you and beaming life-giving energy at you everyday. Your Gods are also your community and you are a God amongst them. 

The big idea is that, every day, you take this God-given gift of raw life-energy and do interesting, beautiful things with it with your fellow Ntu. This is the very core of isiNtu. 

In recognising ourselves and other humans as Gods we put ourselves above the mechanisms of culture and religion and see them as mere tools that we use to achieve our earthly goals. This is the true nature of democracy. When we forget our Godhood and think we are just men, democracy, culture and religion become immutable cages we can never escape, looming above us and decreed by “God” and “order” that is above us. UbuNtu raises you out of these cages and is therefore the true seat of your Godhood, young Ntu.

In my personal journey towards Ntu consciousness I’ve realised that isiNtu is a philosophy and psychology of courage. It takes courage to treat your neighbour as you would be treated yourself. It takes courage to lift others above yourself in the hope that they will then turn, pull you up and lift you onto their own shoulders. It takes courage to give others the rights you give yourself. This courage is what transforms a bunch of individuals into a community of self-directing, self-sculpting Ntu Gods. 

It is with these living, present Gods in your community, in your ancestry and in your night sky that you will find the courage to change yourself, and change the fate of Earth. 

It is with this courage that I write these words today. The following section reinforces the concept of Ntu Consciousness as a collective consciousness, before delving into your individual economic and tribal behaviours in the following chapters.

Ntu Consciousness

Group minds and collective consciousness is key to any group of people’s strategies and plans within the global context. In order to be competitive on the global stage it is important to have a very good group that you come from. People in general belong to multiple groups in their lifetime and act accordingly within the context of that group. A tribe is a type of group. A country is another. In Europe the concept of country and tribe overlap. In Africa they do not. In Africa the new dividers are country and race. I’m now “South African” and “black”, before I am umuZulu wakaNtu.

This is a great source of weakness for us Ntu. We must definitely play it differently this time. Identity and cultural heritage are a source of power for those who have colonised us and it should be the same for us!

Individual vs Group Consciousness

Ntu Consciousness reminds you, Ntu,  that you are not just a bunch of isolated, backward individuals and villages found subsistence farming by entrepreneuring Europeans in deep dark Africa. You are, in fact, an epic network of related tribes with a great history and, now, a plan for Africa, Earth and our collective future. 

Our Ntu ancestors spread into the world and created countless civilisations that rose and fell like waves against the shores of every continent. We explored many new horizons and recorded it into the blood that runs in us today. Together. As a tribe of tribes.

But today Ntu tribes and all things Africa are demonised and tribalism is internationally understood to be the source of all the woes of Ntu people. This is the result of very clever and deliberate colonial strategies to promote the idea that the different Ntu tribes are constantly at odds about everything and could never work together to achieve anything of import.

Today, tribal consciousness is further and actively eroded by modern African economic behaviour. We Ntu no longer practise tribal activities because we no longer have clear economic incentives that support tribal activities. Tribal economic activities included things like 

• Tribal ownership and custodianship of land,
• tribal collective farming and mining systems, 
• tribal markets and 
• tribal rituals that convened the entire village and promoted strong internal economic networks.

Modern African economies along colonial country lines incentivise bad, individualistic economic behaviours in abaNtu such as: 

• extra-communal job-seeking, 
• wage dependence and 
• migrant labour that benefits European, Asian and American backed capital-rich corporations and their major shareholders (which is never us). 

As a result, our countries show no signs of the independent internal economic networks that would create economic independence.

Our work in Ntunomics is to counter this economic behaviour that has us behaving as economic individuals in a “country” rather than as Ntu within a tribal economic network. 

Much research is being done in the space of collective consciousness or “group minds”. This research all inevitably points out what we Ntu have always known: a culture is a living being made up of humans in the same way that a human is a living being made up of cells.

Belonging to a culture is the basis of human psychology and is the fundamental group from which an individual joins other groups. It is thus important that each person know and respect which culture they come from while rejecting inferior forms of culture such as “black culture”. To abaNtu, there is no such thing as “black culture” and if it does exist it is not defined by us.

Not Black

In the country called South Africa, the liberating “black” political vehicle, the African National Congress (ANC), aggressively de-emphasises tribal sovereignty in order to foster nationalism and patriotism towards “South Africa”. This strategy has led to the disastrous dilution of our tribal and Ntu Consciousness and has led to the prominence of the term “black people” in reference to abaNtu. This has been a grave error on our part that has cut deep into our collective psychology.

Even one of our great recent intellectual leaders, Steve Bantu Biko, made the serious error of calling what was then our most advanced intellectual opposition to colonialism “Black Consciousness” instead of “BaNtu Consciousness” or more simply, “Ntu Consciousness”. In retrospect his error is made even more tragic and comical by his middle name being Bantu.

“Black Consciousness” has turned out to be a false consciousness ensuring its practitioners remain enthralled by “White Supremacy”. “Black Consciousness” is a construct made necessary by “White Supremacy” and is therefore incapable of ever being independent of “White Supremacy”.

“Black” and “White” are both unhealthy constructs to attach one’s sense of self to. If you ever find yourself writing your bio and you open with “I’m a white guy”, “I’m a black girl” or some variation of that, you are attaching to toxic ideas that automatically turn you into a racist.

To be honest in the past my understanding of racism was wrong. I believed that we Ntu (black) people should not be accused of reverse-racism when we say mean things to “white” people because we Ntu are not building systemic exploitative economic infrastructure along racial lines. I was arguing that we should limit our definition of racism to systemic racism so that we can deal with it where it matters. I have since changed my thinking around this and now believe that we Ntu are absolutely racist and responsible today for perpetuating racism.

My new definition of racism is: perpetuating a simplistic worldview where the peoples of the world are grouped and allied by skin colour. 

By calling ourselves “black” and teaching our children that they too are black we buy into a racialised view of the world and perpetuate that worldview to the next generation. This is nonsensical because people are naturally grouped by tribe. Tribal groupings are natural. Racial groupings are a tool of Western and Asian imperialism.

We cannot allow another single generation of Ntu children to call themselves “black”. The word is toxic to our minds when used in reference to ourselves. Far more so than benign insults such as “kaffir”. 

Get rid of “Black Consciousness” entirely and replace it with Ntu Consciousness whether you are Ntu in Africa or are Ntu diaspora several generations deep. Get rid of all “black” epithets, titles and praises because they are demonstrably false and harmful to our psychology. We are not black. We never have been. We are Ntu. We are Nguni. We are Shona. We are Kongo. We are Lemba. We are Kikuyu. We are Venda. We are Be’emba. We are Sotho.

We are Ntu. SingabaNtu.

We are giants of old times. We fought global wars together alongside living Gods against other living Gods and their tribes and we have lived to fight another day in a history that is tens of thousands of years long. It is we who came out of the South of the African continent in the most ancient of times and built Kemet and Egypt. It is we who think of all other civilisations, including those of Asia and the West, as our children.

Many of the texts of the Christian bible, the Bhagavad Gita, Vedic scriptures and other ancient records are in fact the stories of our Ntu ancestors. And as we moved across the plains of time ever did we group ourselves as tribes of tribes that spoke similar languages, saw the world the same way, practiced similar rituals and shared the larger territory.

As I write this many “South Africans” who call themselves “black” are of the opinion that  other “blacks” from other African “countries” just north of us such as Zimbabwe or Mozambique are actually not wanted in “South Africa”. This to me is a sign of how much this racial narrative combined with neo-colonial country nationalism has fooled us. We consistently organise ourselves along neo-colonial lines, use neo-colonial systems, then fight amongst ourselves for seats at the neo-colonialist tables.

If we were thinking about it from a Ntu perspective we would realise that any Ntu tribe that is suffering in any African country is our collective problem and our view on “illegal aliens and immigrants” would be one of empathy and solidarity.

Rebuilding Ntu Consciousness

A lack of Ntu Consciousness is why we find ourselves at an all time low in our fortunes. By any objective view, our continent is still invaded and divided up into colonial territories called African “countries”, within which: 

• our tribal identities are villainised and tribal economies deeply compromised,
• we are told to call ourselves “black” instead of “abaNtu” and 
• our economic input is limited to cheap labour at best instead of the self-sustaining merchants, warriors, philosophers, inventors and artistic beings we knew ourselves to be.

It is because we lack Ntu Consciousness that we, both on the African continent and as diaspora, are the unwitting agents of European tribes’ aspirations of wealth and supremacy. The Europeans, the Americans and recent debutants the Chinese are successfully exploiting Africa’s people and resources beyond all their wildest dreams (with a special shout out to Portugal and Spain for their pioneering efforts, Belgium for brutal execution and China for innovative efficiency on this front.)

And I must say, the colonialist’s collective work ethic and focus is impressive. They have toiled for centuries at the above and have made great progress. As I write this book in english from a suburban home in the Southern African colonial city of Johannesburg I can see a world where Ntu history and essence is completely abandoned in favour of modern, colonial, individualised modes of living.

Unfortunately for them, the colonial strategy has definitely reached an upper limit in effectiveness. Ntu Consciousness stands blocking its progress. Ntu Consciousness is abaNtu rebuilding the tribal infrastructures that are encoded in our very blood. Ntu Consciousness is each child of Ntu reconnecting to tribal roots and building Africa as a strong Ntu tribe made up of even stronger Ntu tribes, clans and families. 

Ntu Consciousness outright rejects any notion of building a strong Africa by building strong African “countries”, which is at least an interim goal of Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism reaches towards but falls far shy of the clarity of purpose Ntu Consciousness is presenting. 

Rejecting country-invested Pan-Africanism means that all of our current native political movements and parties that participate in national elections are actually unwittingly working against the interests of the Ntu they claim to serve. I have hope that some of the more courageous of these “country-invested” native political movements and parties may be open to pivoting towards a Pan-Ntu framework of Tribal Sovereignty while dismantling the current set of disjointed, misaligned African “countries” and their failed attempts at restoring our dignity.

In a tribe-of-tribes political, social and economic system, the core economic unit is the tribe. We measure a tribe’s social and economic resolve, strategy and sovereignty. We ask the tribe’s people about the quality of their economic lives within the tribe. We measure the tribe’s economic durability, sustainability and trajectory. We practice tribal economics.

Ntunomics

In this chapter, let’s explore the core thinking behind Ntunomics and the underlying tribal economic frameworks. In beginning to think about the economics of a tribe-of-tribes, we need to take the time to understand the different approaches to running sovereign economies. 

Modern Capitalism is not your Friend

In Ntu understanding, capitalism and communism alike try to guarantee nationalised and  individualised economic rights (individual and national property rights) through central planning and bureaucratism. They are both heady, crazy trips. The idea that bureaucratic governments can guarantee individual rights and regulate markets (capitalist or communist) presents as a pleasant utopia in theory but fails to deliver in practice. 

And while capitalism and communism are sworn enemies who’ve even pretended to be at war for decades, they are in fact birds of a feather. They both decimate local independant economies and markets in favour of large, nationally regulated economies and markets.

The Ntu definition of an economy is a network of cooperative markets that sustain the needs of all within the network. This definition steers clear of any ideas around currencies, countries and their governments and corporations. Capitalism and communism are centralised power and control institutions that use currencies, countries and their governments and corporations to get people to externalise their economic agency.

In Ntu understanding, both capitalism and communism are testimony of the failure of large scale central planning and nationalism. The failing we accuse both capitalism and communism of is that of being economic philosophies that are micro-and-macro-and-nothing-in-between. Their emphasis on individual rights and governmental powers creates brittle societies held together by political and corporate theatrics rather than interpersonal relations and group economic dynamics. 

A person who can disconnect from the community they are a part of and swear allegiance to some political party, country or corporate brand is dangerous to that community, whether they are capitalist or communist.  Both capitalist and communist systems produce the type of people who would betray their tribe if their own safety is guaranteed by some politician, government or corporation. They are disconnected from the people around them and connected to the system that guarantees their individual rights. 

And in these ways capitalism and communism both are the antithesis of Ntunomics.

The Ntu are a group of people who do not put individual or abstract interests above those of the community they are from. They connect fundamentally with the people around them. This deep connection with each other and the land they collectively inhabit gives birth to economic behaviours which emphasises economic sovereignty and agency at family, village and tribal levels.

UbuNtu aims to produce the type of people who would consistently choose not to betray the people around them for individual economic benefits. UbuNtu is rooted in our love and respect for abaNtu. UbuNtu keeps you connected to other humans around you and defines all economic success as collective economic success.

The Markets are the Glue

The act of trading is a sacred one. I can imagine 400 years ago, a weathered old lady of the Mbundu tribe on the west coast of Africa perhaps a 100km south of the mouth of the Congo River, in a small village called Nzeto in what is now called Angola. She sells fish, the same as about 80 percent of the stalls along the road adjacent to the coast. Her’s, though, is interesting because she has spiced and sun-dried it using a generations old clan method. 

She generally has good business on any given day and has started to think about how to increase her volumes. 

A strange boat set anchor about 20km north of the great river mouth three days ago and has been the talk of the every village since. It is big and has a different design than any they have seen before. Now an energetic looking young man dressed in strange clothes and with a large backpack is approaching. She does what she can to seem uninterested.

He approaches and inspects her fish, then moves about ten steps back, takes off his backpack and begins to offload it’s contents. He first lays down a grass mat with a pattern she recognises as the work of the Kongo people from up the Congo River. She briefly wonders how far up the river they went before she turns her attention back to what he lays on the mat before her.

He takes a moment while unpacking to unwind the scarf wrapped around his head covering all but his eyes. She is not surprised to see his skin is similar to the beach sand, but she is surprised by how long his hair is. It easily falls down to his waist and is of a colour similar to the tall grass of the inland. So these are the pale-skins of legend, she thinks, famed for their strange craftsmanship and dangerous weapons. 

She does not fail to notice that he has laid down some metal serving trays amongst some rusty looking grey cutlery, some other pieces of metal that must be tools of some sort, and a couple of bound pieces of paper with a bunch of markings she does not recognise. 

She quickly looks up in the hope that he didn’t notice her looking at the trays, but finds him looking directly at her. He knows she wants the trays. But she too saw how he looked at her fish display as he walked up. She knows he is a sailor and recognises the inherent value of dry food, and may have even been directed by one of her regular customers to her. She assumes the referral was a positive one and still feels confident in her ability to trade with this long-haired young man.

I leave it to you reader to imagine how these two people who do not share a language come to agree on an exchange of a certain amount of spiced and dried fish for some metal trays.

The point of the above exercise is that a currency-less trade happened. These currency-less trades are an age-old ritual that has been happening between individuals, families, villages, tribes and communities since the dawn of humanity. These currency-less trades or transactions are the cornerstone of all markets. In Ntunomics they are sacred.

Currency-less trades are a deeper human conversation than that of having a set price within a particular currency. True value is quite personal and does not conform to currency.

This is the nature of a village too. Within a Ntu village many life sustaining transactions must happen where currency is intentionally not involved. Food and water are produced by the village as part of the commonwealth. A culture, language and a structure of knowledge is made available to the young as part of the commonwealth. Decisions and actions are made that benefit the whole village and grow the commonwealth.

Villages and their commonwealth are a shared economic risk model based on the relationships we have with each other within the village and our agreements to work and build the land we share. They achieve this by explicitly not putting currency values to neither the land they live on nor the shared work of the village to produce the commonwealth. This also plays out at the clan and at the extended family level. This shared risk model insures and ensures the livelihoods and means of sustenance across a meaningful and large group. This is not communism. It is tribal economics. 

It is the economics of being human and it is the shared risk model that tribes of Ntu have practised for thousands of years. It is this very Ntu tribal model that must be revitalised and reinstated in the modern context through the practice of Ntunomics. 

If, young Ntu, you: 

• find yourself paying money for a piece of land in the place where you come from or grew up, 
• find yourself strangely disconnected from the people you live next to and
• don’t know any of the people who farm and process the food you eat

then you may “come from” a neo-colonial area which has toxic individualist economics that individualise risk and require us to assign monetary value to almost all human interactions.

To fix this you must ensure that you band together with your immediate family to reconnect with your root Ntu tribe by whichever bloodline you wish to claim (mother or father or both). Once you have reconnected and established ancestry, ask the local tribal council for some space within the village commons to build a home and start contributing to the commonwealth. 

If you cannot find such Ntu ancestry because of multi-generational neo-colonial displacement then I would suggest you get a bunch of people in your same situation and start a new Ntu tribe with them. Become a band of families that settles in a land and builds a shared risk economy where the true currency is the interrelationships of the people within the group and how you collectively work the land you chose to settle in. 

Stop living your entire lives and raising your children in neo-colonial areas, young Ntu. Neo-colonial areas produce people with an entirely different psychology than that of people who come from a village/tribal childhood. It produces Ntu adults who:

• excel in individual competitive spaces more than in collective co-operative spaces (compare social dynamics within modern corporations with the social dynamics within nomadic Khoisan tribes in the Kalahari desert),
• Have an implicit goal of amassing personal wealth and power within a context outside of family, tribe and clan, and
• have externalised and individualised their economic risk to corporations and governments that operate exclusively on currency.

New Ntu Economic Behaviour 

Shit is simple: economic agency is a game of economic risk that we humans all have to play. We all have to risk our assets and actions of today against an output in the future. And in the game of economic risk, collective risk models outperform individual risk models all the time. 

It’s a bit of a no-brainer. This is why neo-colonial contexts have insurance companies as one of their pillar types of enterprise. It is a mechanism of collectivising economic risk within the monetary context that modern individuals and companies operate. 

Ntunomics is a fundamentally human approach to economic risk that collectivises economic risk at village, family and clan levels by creating non-monetary economies within those contexts. When practising Ntunomics we create simple, durable economic and natural social networks that self-replicate at scale (yes, fractaly) so that we become many voices of a beautiful and powerful song of new Ntu economic behaviour. 

The tribal economic imperatives of Ntunomics remain the same at each group level just working with different quantities and different timespans.

The economic imperatives of Ntunomics, in no particular order, are:

1. Collectivise and localise economic risk by building smaller, socially aligned economic entities that produce enough to sustain themselves and trade surplus goods. Aligning commercial entities and commercial activity at a family, village and clan level is one way of collectivising and localising economic risk. Ntu families, clans and villages must all always be selling something in exchange for something else as part of daily life. The absolute worst way to engage the commercial market is to sell your time to corporations and government institutions for wages. Corporations and governments themselves are inefficient risk models that expose people to higher individual risk than any other time in our history.
2. Secure lands for Ntu peoples. Villages that are economically functional must have land where they can source their own water and farm their own food. Villages that cannot achieve the above two are unviable. Viable villages must build an economic and technological sovereignty that includes a holistic self defence strategy for the lands in question. 
3. Create physical and digital Ntu marketplaces. This is the equivalent of a mall but the supply chain for that mall is exclusively Ntu. From a digital  marketplace perspective it would be like Amazon but specific to aggregating and distributing Ntu products. 

When the above imperatives are ruthlessly and tirelessly upheld by abaNtu at family, village and tribal levels we will gain the geo-political power we need in order to change the face of geo-politics…

But anyway, I’ve made a few big claims in the last few chapters. I’ve claimed that we Ntu are the Godly children of ancient space beings and have an epic, global history that is much older than this silly modern racial narrative. I’ve claimed that we are on the cusp of reclaiming our place in the world by turning the southern two thirds of Africa into a sovereign economic block. In the next chapter we will show how a nation aligned country, KaNtu, is a key component to creating that better tomorrow for Africa.

KaNtu 

I have a friend who keeps asking me the same question whenever these subjects of Ntu consciousness, Ntunomics and isiNtu come up: what can a young Ntu do differently tomorrow? What exactly must a young Ntu do differently tomorrow in order to create the change that we are talking about.

I think my friend wants a bullet point list something akin to:

• Spend your money with Ntu owned and operated business entities only.
• Actively participate in municipal politics and ensure a Ntu aligned representative is elected.

Unfortunately it will not be that easy nor simple. This is because it is currently impossible to tell who is Ntu aligned and therefore very easy to fake Ntu alignment. It is also undesirable to elect Ntu aligned politicians for the same reason. 

The true measure of Ntu Consciousness is a deep knowledge of isiNtu and our history and the deep love of abaNtu. We cannot build anything substantial together without remembering our journey together, with the good and the bad, and realising that through it all we have been a beautiful and strong people who just happen to be going through the most recently.

Without a deep love of each other as a Ntu group we shall not build anything of substance. This is thus the true first step for any young Ntu who asks himself what they must do differently tomorrow in order to secure our future:

• Learn our history and customs,
• Operate at a family, village and clan level and
• Love our people, flaws and all.

All else, like creating a new geopolitically significant “nation-country” which federalises economic and technological sovereignty while collectivising and localising economic risk along loose tribal groupings within it, will come naturally. 

Geopolitical Considerations for KaNtu

There are several ways of picturing what forces are shaping our world. One of the most useful is a geo-political view that maps all human populations into 4 or so groups with different goals and strategies. These groups will span across multiple countries and even continents. In this section I’d like to share my understanding of these core geo-political groups, each their goals and strategies and their expected attitude to the formation of KaNtu. 

The West

The West as a group can claim origins across most of Western Europe and North America. They are currently the most powerful geo-political group on the planet and set the tone for geo-politics across the globe. They overlap heavily as a group with the racial grouping called caucasians or “whites”.

The West’s goal is total global domination as we have seen them colonise, directly and indirectly, almost every corner of Earth. The West wants global domination because they covet a high standard of material living (read: they want to be filthy rich at the expense of everyone else). To this end they have created a global network of companies that own farms, mines and factories where they source cheap materials and cheap labour to support their economic wealth concentration goals.

It has become abundantly clear to any politically conscious person that the West is actually predatory in nature even though it works hard to present as an ally. All of the West’s military interventions and economic aid are aimed at further extracting wealth from those that they claim to help.

The West would be highly opposed to the formation of KaNtu because it would directly disrupt their ability to continue sourcing criminally cheap materials and labour from Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is a source of material and labour without which the West would experience a definitive drop in material lifestyle.

BRICS

BRICS is a loose agreement between 5 nations to oppose, gain independence from and, for new/smaller nations seeking political/economic partnership or enablement, provide an alternative to the West. 

Brasil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are all large to mid-sized economies that aim to pool resources and provide support to other nations that seek to escape the West’s chokehold on global resources. Each of the countries in BRICS has its own dynamics and a unique history but all of them have had horrible run-ins with the West. They are fully aware of how the West operates in order to extract wealth from target regions and recognise the need for said regions to have an alternative to depending on the West.

While this is a pleasant ideal on the surface, they too often find themselves becoming that which they hate. The competition with the West is brutal and often forces these countries to put the imperatives and urgencies of the competition above the people they meant to serve.

South Africa is a unique part of the group because the country is economically aligned to the West but joined BRICS during the presidency of Jacob Zuma who sought to dislodge the West’s chokehold on South Africa’s economy. 

BRICS would largely be opposed to the formation of KaNtu for the same reasons as the West: Sub-Saharan Africa is largely seen as a resource that they compete with the West for and have no appetite for it to become a sovereign geo-political force unto itself.

The Middle-East and Islam

This geo-political group is a religiously aligned group of nations that occupy a space spanning North Africa and SouthWest Asia. They are by far the most entertaining geo-political group (from an antagonist-that-the-protagonist-needs-for-their-narrative point of view). 

The Middle East is the West’s flashy new bitter enemy. Except they aren’t new at all. Russia or China as the West’s villain is always just an interlude to the West’s all time bestseller: the Islamic Arabs in the Middle East are the villains. One might even see the current antagonism of the West towards the Middle East as a direct continuation of the Roman Catholic Empire’s “Holy” Crusades against the Islamic Caliphates that had established control of the regions around Jerusalem, which is Christianity’s spiritual capital.

The whole point of Israel sitting in the middle of the Middle East is that the West, as the geopolitically dominant force, is exercising it’s complete control over Jerusalem and its surrounds. The Arabic caliphates are being shown flames as the West establishes military superiority and sets up dummy democratic governments after dummy democratic governments within their regions. This is causing them to fight amongst themselves and be largely docile, if entertaining, on the geo-political stage.

Their most glorious times were when they were defeating and taking over the lands of “black” Africans. It is actually a part of many of Arabic Islamist’s fundamental world view that “black” African’s, even those who follow Islam, are below them.

They would be vehemently opposed to KaNtu as that would halt their goals of expanding their dominion further into Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Third World

The 3rd World are a diverse bunch of tribes who find themselves being told that they must conform to country structures.

Ntu Nation Federation

We wish to introduce the concept of a “nation-country”. A “nation-country” is a country whose tribal identities are aligned to governance, economic sovereignty and territorial borders.

While this entire book is firmly directed towards my Ntu nation, I believe the tribal reality to be globally applicable. That is because we all come from a tribe. Even the United States of America (USA) who are the paragon of “countryhood”, consists of people who, when asked, will tell you their tribal roots to varying degrees of accuracy. The African Americans might tell you of their vague Western African roots and your caucasions might tell you that they are patrilineally third generation Irish. The native Americans might tell you their tribal name, their clan (nation) name and show you the plains where their ancestors used to hunt.

Tribal identities all over the world remain strong and refuse to be overridden by the march of country-based identities. What stops many tribal groups and identities from competing with country based identities is modern services such as providing identification documents, central currencies, import/export mechanisms and, most importantly, the ability to defend the tribal lands.

Should a tribe be able to: 

• provide tribal ID and international travel passports to all tribal constituents, 
• issue localised tribal currencies that can operate on international transactional platforms, 
• sustain internal markets that produce enough to trade with other international markets and
• defend tribal lands from all external force and influence

it will for all intents and purposes be a nation operating like a  country in an internationally recognised fashion. This is what we are after. This is the prize that the countries within the European Union have built for themselves but denied Africa when they drew Africa’s country borders and destroyed tribal sovereignty.

And this is not to say everybody needs to go back to some old tribal identity they no longer identify with or understand. New tribes are formed all the time by all sorts of big events that have taken place over the history of abaNtu. I imagine the “coloured” people of Southern Africa with their mixed heritage and affinity to the Afrikaans language can be thought of as a new tribe that will, or rather must, seek to have it’s own sovereign lands and economy. 

I imagine even African-Americans may do the same and form their own new nation systems. Cities and urban areas that have a large mix of tribal identities may decide to behave as a nation too. The most common attributes that make a nation a nation are a shared language and a sovereign economy. We have choices about which tribes we wish to belong to and I suspect some people will find themselves belonging to multiple tribes. 

The point, for us Ntu anyway, is that this is a collectivised economic risk model that localises political and economic sovereignty at village, family and tribal levels that align with our Ntu identities.

In order to do this we will need to create a new type of political leadership immediately distinguishable from our current, failing political leadership.

Creating New Ntu Political Leadership

There has been much talk about communities and tribes and changes in economic behaviour and it may not yet be clear to you, young Ntu, what will sustain these changes and groups going forward. Well now we talk about political action. The “how to” part of this book.

In order to ensure that we create a new Ntu political leadership that is immediately distinguishable from false African political leadership we must create the leadership ourselves and not hope and pray that it emerges.

The act of creating leadership is fundamentally different to that of accepting leadership. Our Ntu communities must actively create leadership through internal programs where leadership is forged as iron is forged. Within our communities we must meet regularly to discuss all matters pertinent to our community, especially in light of the plight of Africa and the Ntu peoples.

I need to emphasise what it means for any group of Ntu to meet regularly. 

First, it means at least once a week. Anything less than once a week for people in our situation will not allow us to get the group momentum we need to change our situation. More than once a week would be great if sustainable and everyday is preferable, especially in times of collective action or crisis.

Second, meaningful groups of people in the context of clan, village or even family can get big and big groups find it difficult to have meaningful conversation. Ntu culture has traditionally solved for this by stratifying into 5 main age groups:

1. The greater elders from 64 onwards are responsible for wisdom and reference.
2. The elders from 42 to 63 are responsible for governance and oversight.
3. The adults from 22 to 41 are responsible for projects and building.
4. The older children from 14 to 21 are tasked with exploration and training.
5. The younger children from 7 to 13 are tasked with learning and experimentation.

These groups are expected to meet regularly amongst themselves and will typically have one or two representatives that then would form part of a council that spans all groups and makes decisions for the entire family, clan or village.

It is during the regular peer group meeting that representatives of the people will be forged by the people. These representatives will be picked and forged for their ability to clearly represent the will of their peer group through word and action. These representatives of the peer group will be one of many who can fulfil the role but will have been given the mandate at that time.

But the picking of individuals is not “the magic” in the mechanisms being presented above. “The magic” is that the group or community that meets regularly to discuss all matters pertinent to them is the leadership. “The magic” is the complete move away from individualised leadership to a communal leadership model where everyone is leading by contributing to the conversation and communal decisions. 

Picking individuals to be the current representative is simply in order to expedite communications with other groups and oversight of internal group projects. In this model, the representative is in no way empowered to make strategic decisions on behalf of the group. Tactical decisions can be made by a representative in the heat of the moment but those decisions will be subject to review at the next meeting. 

Nor does the individual who is currently the representative have any assurance that they will remain the representative for any time period because they can be removed by the community and replaced at any time should the community see fit to do so.

The type of leadership proposed here is immediately distinguishable from our current leadership because our current leadership colludes with a group of like-minded individuals called a “political party” to get themselves elected as decision makers on behalf of a people that they have never personally met nor engaged in ongoing conversation. These “elected officials” then have a certain guaranteed period to make decisions on our behalf without ever being forced to interact with the community they “lead”. 

In future books I will go into greater detail about the nature of communal meetings, how to run the agendas and how to tell if your group/community is having a successful meeting. Of great interest to us is how this will scale to run greater groupings such as a tribe made up of multiple villages or nations made up of tribes. 

The mechanism of group leadership is an important one but we cannot afford to let it outshine the core principles of this book which are designed to revitalise your understanding of what it means to be umuNtu and what collective economic risk models look like for abaNtu.

I am also avoiding being too prescriptive in my presentation of these ideas because there are many different ways to achieve the goal of creating KaNtu. I have great faith in you, young Ntu, that you will gather around the principles herein while acting in manners appropriate to your own group and situation.

I also have faith that you will act in a manner befitting the title of UmuNtu. To that end I have penned the following chapter speaking directly to individual motivations in our fast changing world.

UmuNtu

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Igama nto = “Ntu”;

uma (nto) {

bhala(“Hello, ” + nto + “ World”); 

}

>>>“Hello, Ntu World”

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Your Story. (mina)

The great conspiracy of humanity which is actually at the core of all the other conspiracy theories, is that you, young Ntu, are helpless in the face of rising man-made, large-scale catastrophe.

This is not the case. 

Man-made catastrophes, genocides, wars, ecological disasters happen, in fact, when you, young Ntu, feel helpless in the face of it all and thus abdicate your power. The truth is you are the most powerful force in the world and, potentially, the universe.

By being a point of free will you, young Ntu, are never truly helpless. You can always try something different, which means you are vested with the power to bring change to any situation. This God-like power to introduce change to the world has only the natural limitations of courage and imagination. UbuNtu without courage and imagination will often backfire or have unintended consequences.

A young Ntu with courage and imagination quickly realises that humans have always created their own reality by trying new ways of doing things and that our individual powerlessness is an illusion that we created ourselves. This modern sense of individual powerlessness is being exploited and magnified by neo-colonialist who use your power for their own benefit. But you, young Ntu, are never really stuck where you are. With every new thought that you have and every new thing that you try, your courage and imagination present the opportunity to knock on heaven’s door itself.

With courage and imagination, isiNtu, Ntu Consciousness and Ntunomics will help you, as an individual, rise above your current situation by ensuring that we, as a collective, rise above our current situation. When you rise without the collective is when you are easily compromised and co-opted by neo-colonial interests.

In another metaphor, courage and imagination are the pen and paper you use to write your story. It is important that you know how to use your pen (courage) and that you have enough paper (imagination) to tell your story. In this metaphor you, young Ntu, need to ensure that you are the writer of your story. This is called owning your story and it is one of your most sacred gifts in this life. 

Many, many Ntu who have been raised in neo-colonial mindsets are far too ready to let governments, corporations and modern mass media tell them their own story. The stories are immediately distinguishable as “not our stories” because they emphasise Africa’s “surprising” poverty and how sad the life of “black people” is all over the world because of “greedy black politicians”. 

When you, young Ntu, own your story then there is no: 

• “bill of rights” or 
• “investigative journalism” or 
• “scientific research result” 

that can make you change your story because your context is firmly rooted in isiNtu which demands you build your own mindset from your observed reality that you share with those you live your life amongst. 

I want to single out modern journalism in particular because it is another economic pillar of neo-colonial economies. Modern media institutions have the explicit job of manufacturing cowardly and unimaginative “black” political narratives that revolve around us “blacks” being perpetual victims caught in increasingly self-made economic problems that we just can’t seem to “think ourselves out of”.

They do this by creating a complex web of good guys and bad guys, with the good guys inevitably turning out to be those who pay the journalist’s monthly salary. More on this in this next chapter.

Our Shared Story. (thina)

Young Ntu. Rise above simplistic concepts such as who is good and who is bad. It becomes clear that in most situations there are no clear villains or heroes. It is mostly just people who don’t understand each other for a variety of reasons leading to the comical and often violent deterioration of the situation in a way that benefits no one. 

Realising the above is realising that you gain little to nothing from creating narratives that encourage opposition and blame. In isiNtu we acknowledge that every great thing humanity has done we have done together or not at all. In isiNtu there is little tolerance for those whose leadership becomes a narrative that overshadows their people.

For us who practice isiNtu there are no bad people or evil people. Too long have we clung to the blanket categorisation of other people as evil. We love to categorise ourselves and the small group of people we love as good, though, without considering how slim the chances are that you and yours have some sort of monopoly on righteousness and goodness. Without considering that the other and their “evil” ideas might simply be different models of reality that may be useful to you one day.

The other is not evil because the other is us and has always been us.

And without evil people to blame when things go wrong you start realising that complexity, existential risk and the silently screaming depths of the night sky, not evil people, are the real monsters we collectively face. 

There are no bad or evil people. The Ntu God standing within you already knows this. All the things that happen to and around you are neither good nor bad. They are simply inputs that, if necessary, must be dealt with with courage, imagination and available resources.

The problem with judging people or situations as bad, or with framing them in an oppositional narrative, is that it kicks in old, hardwired cognitive instincts that manifest as mental, emotional and physical aggression towards those that we have judged as bad or as opponents within our narratives. 

This old cognitive instinct, especially when it happens without you realising it, is called a cognitive bias. 

Cognitive biases are failures in human situational perception and behaviour where one is unable to see the different perspectives to situations or one is unable to see where other people are coming from because you have attached to an outlook that frames situations and other people in a narrow, oppositional narrative. These narrow, oppositional narratives usually take root in one’s mind at a very early age through: 

• casually inheriting narrow, oppositional narratives from parents, teachers, friend networks, etc, 
• joining or identifying with groups that base their group identity on narrow, oppositional narratives and
• attachment to personal goals and life outcomes that depend on narrow, oppositional narratives.

The 6,500 year old racial narrative is a fantastic example of a narrow, oppositional narrative that ensures that all who accept it are caught in a giant maze of cognitive biases that play out as racist behaviour and feelings of self-hate. This is why my primary attitude towards racists is one of empathy leading to the need to help them out of their misery, even as they fight and insult me.

Your work as umntwana wakaNtu practicing isiNtu is to avoid these self harming cognitive biases. Young Ntu must break out of the current neo-colonial oppositional narratives which have demonstrably not been working for us. Young Ntu must create for themselves a base narrative where all humans are just as valid as any other human and in which your value is never measured in comparison or competition to other humans, especially economically.

In isiNtu, the value we create as humans is always a collective enterprise that strives for inclusivity in assigning merit and credit. The day we young Ntu collectively learn to base our narratives around healthy, reciprocative, non-transactional human interdependency is the day we free ourselves of the neo-colonial oppressor’s cognitive holds over us. 

Understanding and purging one’s self of cognitive bias is like cleaning and tidying the bedroom of your mind by throwing away the things you’ve been tripping over (but no longer need) and forcing the curtains and windows wide open. It makes you less likely to fall prey to or base one’s sense of self on: 

• shallow good vs bad narratives (like ones that frame “white people” as villains), 
• silly and unimaginative conspiracy theories (like the one that large “democratic” governments can guarantee individual human rights) and
• cowardly pyramid schemes (like capitalism and communism). 

This mental cleansing will make you more likely to base your sense of self on the network of quality relationships you have actively built within your communities and tribes and the fucking amazing things you do together as a result thereof.

The day we purge ourselves of all cognitive bias is probably also the day we sing our most beautiful song yet and turn into beings of light and fly off into the heavens. Again.

uMuNtu, Music and Magic. (sonke)

By the above logic of avoiding sad narratives we realise that there is no evil “white man” or evil “neo-colonialist” cabal in the classic narrative sense. All there is is a bunch of people who are themselves trapped in their own narrow, oppositional racial narratives that sadly but necessarily prevent them from engaging in new, courageous and imaginative modes of being human.

Their narrow-mindedness drains them of the inherent magic and Godhood of being human and that is why they are forced to use deception to centralise fear-based power over other humans. They stop being able to make music and lose the ability to motivate people around them with anything other than fear.

The Ntu ability to harness music, and at its core, sound, as a tool of technology and magic is our most treasured gift. At the beginning there was always music and our ability to hear it and manipulate it is like access to the mainframe that runs the universe.

According to the christian bible, at the beginning was the word. This is not far from the truth but we practitioners of isiNtu know that, more fundamentally, at the beginning was the music – a beautiful sound that reverberates to this day and shapes our lived reality. 

AbaNtu know that music is the fundamental nature of the universe and that music is a fundamental, direct metaphor for reality. The universe is a rich, multilayered song whose vibrations create and destroy the very physical matter that makes life and our delightful exchanges of energy possible.

By the above logic, our Ntu music which expertly interacts with the music of the universe by amplifying certain sounds and cancelling out others, is our most potent ability to affect and reshape the universe – even as the universe affects and shapes us through its music. Music is actually a universal magic but we Ntu are claiming competency in it. Music is the platform upon which we will stand and declare our universal presence.

It is therefore no surprise that Ntu music will be our most potent weapon as we reclaim Ntu custodianship of Africa and subsequently earth. Music surpasses spoken and written word in conveying a collective mental attitude. The greatest philosophers and their greatest thoughts cannot begin to touch the amazing depths of visceral feeling and relatability of a people’s music.

Indeed even as Ntu industrial prowess surpasses all other geo-political nations, our Ntu music and the isiNtu behind it will remain the number one export of abaNtu. We will practise many types of music from: 

• communal choral songs performed collectively at tribal and family rituals to 
• commercial songs that express the most full range of human emotion and experience to
• sounds that can cut any material into any shape we wish to 
• sounds that can cancel out the effects of gravity.

It thus also follows that the most direct way to change oneself is through song. Even when you are not singing, there is still a “song of you” that is heard only by you.

My message to you, young Ntu, is: sing it. Sing the song of you loud and clear every opportunity you get. The song of you is your only true gift to yourself and the world so sing it with skill, gentleness and passion unheard of. 

Sing it such that when your people and your ancestors hear you they immediately feel, deep in their own heart, that you lived with courage and imagination befitting the title of UmuNtu.

Thank you

Thank you, young Ntu, for reading this far. 

And, yes, some of the changes you are being asked to make in this book are deeper than you expected. I know.  It’s that deep identity stuff that easily makes people angry when they think they are being invalidated or made to feel “less than”. 

Ntunomics is asking you to rub out those deep, deep lines a younger you drew in the sand of your soul; the lines that people cross at risk of incurring your deepest wrath. Ntunomics wants you to rub those out and draw new ones.

The new lines that you draw in the sands of your soul will make it clear that you, young Ntu, are a God standing, however one looks at it. And as a God amongst Gods you, in collaboration with your family, village and tribe, have the power to create new, practical economic frameworks that support your individual and collective earthly goals. 

Ntunomics is a better alternative to African nationalism (as a colonial legacy), to communism, to socialism and to modern imperialist “free-market” capitalism and the clunky “democratic” governments that prop it up.

Ntunomics is just fancy talk for a very simple fact: a tribe that does not have economic sovereignty won’t be a tribe for much longer. Thus, for any who wish to actually call themselves a tribe, “tribal economics” is a survival imperative.

This book will have reminded you of the deep core attitudes that we Ntu need to have before we can call ourselves Ntu to begin with. It also intended to map out the simple and straightforward, actionable economic behaviours you, young Ntu, can introduce to your life that will improve life for your tribe, your clan and ultimately all of Africa, practically overnight.

The Ntunomics logo on the front of this book is designed to remind you that we Ntu have ever been protectors of earth and custodians of the spear of time. It is clear that now is the time for us to act like it.

Perhaps an even more concrete first step for you would be to get a friend or family member of yours to also read this book so that you may discuss with them the concepts around Ntunomics.

Thank you.

About uSizwe the MadKingRat wakaBongani waseTholeni kwaMabanga

I’m patrilineally Zulu. I grew up in Soweto, Johannesburg in the South of Africa. I have good relations with people of all walks in Africa because I like them. I like the people around me, whether Indian, coloured, Japanese, Chinese, christian, muslim, jewish, Irish, atheist, bisexual, transexual, ugly, beautiful, greedy, stupid, clever or even the spiteful. 

Mostly I see normal people who got caught up in some pretty heavy ideas about themselves and are maybe ready to peel back the layers of identity that are no longer as useful as they used to be. 

I’m rooting for you. You can do this. 

I write this book in the hope that the sales and royalties will allow me to quit my job and begin my true life as a supervillain out to destroy all New World Order/Government types that practise pyramid-scheme economics that expose humanity to individualised economic risk and rampant poverty. 

I am very open to a patron billionaire (or two) with a taste for chaos. Despite the orderly ideas presented above, I assure you, I am chaos. It’s why they call me the MadKingRat (they don’t).