The Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976 did not just drop from the sky. The Black students of South Africa did not wake up one day and begin resisting Bantu Education. The uprising was carefully organized and led secretly by leaders of the underground political movement, most of them militants of the banned Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC).

Racism has succeeded not just in making anti-Black violence a part of normal human existence, but it has also succeeded in making Black people numb to their own pain and suffering, and in many instances, made it normal for Black people to become participants in their own oppression.

In his new book, South African academic Ndangwa Noyoo contends that Africans can longer continue to attribute their underdevelopment to the machinations of Europeans and other foreigners. Africans themselves are to blame for their own failings. An excerpt.

The famous college, the oldest institution of higher learning in West Africa, is collapsing under the weight of incompetent leadership, poor facilities and lack of capacity. Only urgent, thoughtful intervention can save Fourah Bay College from imminent death.

Kwame Ture was initially resistant to raising the slogan but after his unjust arrest took the podium and said "We Want Black Power!" The enthusiastic response would usher in a new era in the African American liberation struggle impacting the political discourse for at least another decade.