“The laws of gravity are called Newton’s laws, in America,” Kwame Ture succinctly explained, “but you can’t think that Newton invented that a body falls at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared — Newton cannot invent that. The best we can say about Newton is that he was an astute observer, that’s all. If I’m in Timbuktu, doing any experiment with the laws of gravity, I’d come to the exact same conclusion that Newton came to… “Karl Marx cannot invent socialism,” continues Ture. “It’s a universal truth. The best we can give him is an astute observer. Because any man, any woman — if I’m sitting in the desert of Libya, in North Africa, looking at the relationship between capital and labour, I will come to the exact same conclusion as Karl Marx: that wherever capital tries to dominate labour, there will be a ruthless struggle against capital, by labour, until labour comes to smash capital, and dominate it!”⁶

Marx venerated Indigenous political systems and was acutely aware of slavery and colonialism.

Kwame Ture described Pan-African socialism as a “universal concept,” an objective that “was stopped by capitalism.” Ture argued that the “the very values of socialism come from communalism,” practiced everywhere for centuries.

“We don’t need to read Karl Marx or Adam Smith to find out that neither the land nor the hoe actually produces wealth,” wrote Julius Nyerere, “and we don’t need to take degrees in Economics to know that neither the worker nor the landlord produces land… We must, as I have said, regain our former attitude of mind — our traditional African socialism — and apply it to the new societies we are building today… The European socialist cannot think of his socialism without its father — capitalism! Brought up in tribal socialism, I must say I find this contradiction quite intolerable… We, in Africa, have no more need of being ‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being ‘taught’ democracy. Both are rooted in our own past — in the traditional society which produced us.”¹²

“I think that we have to acknowledge something: our people’s revolution doesn’t begin somewhere in the early to mid-1800s, after Marx and the rest of them came out with this ideology, that other people then came and either endorsed or added their own particular stamp to… We didn’t need a European guy to come to us, to the ‘dark jungles’ of Latin America and Africa, and explain to us the ‘complex’ concept of sharing. We knew what collectivism was for thousands of years. It’s the way that all of us stayed alive.”¹³