Ujamaa, ujamaa. This is Dontie S. Mitchell, better known as Mfalme Sikivu, reporting to you from Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York.
Ujamaa is a Swahili word that roughly translates into kinship and sharing. In traditional African culture, your tribe was a part of your extended family. Although your tribe might be thousands, tens of thousands, or even a-hundred thousand-strong, each member of the tribe can trace their lineage to a common ancestry. Within each tribe communalism was the overall practice, especially at the clan and family level. If one family or clan suffered some sort of calamity, other families or clans of the same tribe would band together to help them out. This isn’t to say the idea of ownership and personal property didn’t exist. It just wasn’t the defining character of traditional African society. The same can be said of Native American societies in North America and South America, as well as in the Caribbean.
Ujamaa has also been used to describe African socialism, which builds upon the practice of communalism. Ujamaa is also the fourth principle of Kwanzaa, and is translated as cooperative economics. The Kwanzaa definition of Ujamaa is “to build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and profit from them together.” UFD [United Fraternal Dynasty] has a slightly different has a slightly different translation: “To work together to achieve collective financial power.” When I founded UFD, the idea was to find a way to empower Black people socioeconomically, and those who joined with us, and to reverse hundreds of years of socioeconomic injustice. In reading various self help books, particularly those about achieving personal financial success, I then began viewing the problem from that perspective. The solution, as I saw it, was to increase financial opportunities for disadvantaged people by teaching them principles of success and giving them a platform upon which to apply them.
Common to the success literature I have studied is the idea of bringing people together in a spirit of harmony. Napoleon Hill calls this the Mastermind Principle. Stephen R. Covey calls it interdependence or synergy. Mark Victor Henson and Robert G. Allen refer to it as the leveraging of mentors, networks and teams. UFD combines all of this with Ujamaa to come up with our Conscious Money Philosophy, which teaches love for self and kind, brotherhood and sisterhood, mutual self-improvement and combining our knowledge, efforts and resources to achieve mutually beneficial goals.
Not only do I believe that the Conscious Money Philosophy is a tool to reform and rehabilitate prisoners, it’s also a way to help disadvantaged people achieve their American dream of personal financial success while finding spiritual fulfillment. At the core of the Conscious Money Philosophy is love for self and kind, which means taking personal responsibility for oneself, while recognizing an obligation to help others. I am so very eager to bring this message to the world, and therefore cannot wait until I am released. Tune in again for more. Follow me on Facebook at Free Dontie Mitchell. Share your questions and comments. If you’re interested in volunteering to help or to assist me, holla at me. Thank you for listening. God bless.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
