The Black radical tradition is rooted in African metaphysical consciousness, not plantation experience

Evidence

Further on, he would make the point again, only differently and more to our immediate point: “ ‘Outlandish’ Africans often reacted to their new condition by attempting to escape, either to return to Africa or to form settlements of fugitives to recreate their old life in the new land. These activities were not predicated upon the Africans’ experience of plantation life, but on a total rejection of their lot.” Such was the stuff from which legends were made among the Africans. Where to deny to one’s self the eating of salt (the “ocean-sea”?) was a guarantee of the retention of the power to fly, really fly, home. All of it was a part of a tradition that was considerably different from what was made of the individualistic and often spontaneous motives that energized the runaway, the arsonist, the poisoner. It more easily sustained suicide than assault, and its ideological, psycho-social, cultural, and historical currencies were more charismatic than political. When its actualization was frustrated, it became obeah, voodoo, myalism, pocomania—the religions of the oppressed as Vittorio Lanternari put it. When it was realized, it could become the Palmares, the Bush Negro settlements, and, at its heights, Haiti. But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 835

Categorization

• XREF: Defines the anti-colonial, Africa-oriented strand of Black radicalism as metaphysical rather than materialist, contrasting with the Marxist materialism Robinson will critique.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the tradition’s grounding orientation — the mind, ideology, metaphysics — from the materialist framing of Western radicalism.