Nationalization: The Cure To Colonization

A people who do not know who they are will eventually surrender what belongs to them.

Colonization has never been merely about occupying land.

Land is only the physical territory.

Before a people can be successfully colonized for generations, something deeper usually has to happen. Their understanding of themselves has to be disrupted. Their history must be rewritten. Their national identity must be weakened. Their institutions must be subordinated. And eventually, the resources beneath their own feet must somehow become the property of somebody else.

That is the part of colonization that does not receive nearly enough attention.

A country can raise its own flag and still have its mines controlled from another continent.

It can elect its own president and still have its oil extracted primarily for foreign profit.

It can sing a national anthem while its banking system, land, currency, transportation infrastructure, mineral wealth, and intellectual institutions remain dependent upon powers outside itself.

That is why political independence and actual independence are not necessarily the same thing.

And it is why Nationality and Nationalization belong in the same conversation.

Noble Drew Ali understood something profound about the first half of that equation.

Long before discussions about identity became fashionable, he was teaching his people that a population cannot properly understand its political position until it knows its nationality.

One of the governing principles associated with the Moorish Science Temple declared that its members must proclaim their nationality. Scholars examining the movement have recognized that Drew Ali's teachings deliberately attempted to move his followers away from identities based primarily upon phenotype and into an understanding of themselves as a people possessing history, heritage and nationality.

That distinction is enormous.

Because race tells you what somebody classified you as.

Nationality asks:

Who are you?

What people do you belong to?

What is your history?

What civilization produced you?

What obligations do you have to your people?

What political community are you part of?

What inheritance are you responsible for preserving?

Those are fundamentally different questions.

And history reveals something fascinating:

Whenever colonized nations seriously attempted to reclaim themselves, the struggle frequently moved from national liberation to national control of resources.

In other words:

First came the nation.

Then came nationalization.

Colonization Has Always Been an Economic Arrangement

European colonialism is frequently presented as though it were primarily an adventure in exploration.

It wasn't.

Empires crossed oceans for resources.

Gold.

Copper.

Rubber.

Cotton.

Sugar.

Oil.

Timber.

Diamonds.

Labor.

Land.

Shipping routes.

Markets.

The colonial system was extraordinarily efficient at creating situations in which the people living on resource-rich land remained poor while wealth extracted from that land accumulated somewhere else.

Political domination made economic extraction possible.

And once formal colonial governments began disappearing during the twentieth century, many newly independent nations discovered that removing a colonial flag did not automatically remove the colonial economy.

The administrator could leave while the corporation remained.

The governor could disappear while the concession remained.

The army could withdraw while the mine remained foreign-owned.

That produced one of the central questions of the postcolonial world:

What does independence actually mean if another nation still owns the economic machinery upon which your country depends?

Several leaders answered that question with one word:

Nationalization.

Egypt: Nasser Took Back the Suez Canal

Perhaps there is no more dramatic example than Egypt.

The Suez Canal sits inside Egypt.

Egyptian labor helped create it.

Egypt endured decades of British occupation in large part because the canal had become strategically indispensable to European imperial power.

Yet control of this incredibly important artery of world commerce rested with the Suez Canal Company, whose interests were heavily British and French.

Then came Gamal Abdel Nasser.

On July 26, 1956, Nasser announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company.

Egypt would control the canal running through Egyptian soil.

And the revenue would help finance Egypt's own development, including the Aswan High Dam. Contemporary Egyptian historical accounts explicitly connect the nationalization to recovering Egyptian sovereignty and economic independence.

Britain and France were furious.

Think about what happened next.

Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt.

Not because Egypt had invaded London.

Not because Egypt had occupied Paris.

Egypt had declared control over infrastructure inside Egypt.

The response itself tells us how important economic sovereignty was to colonial power.

Even U.S. diplomatic records from the period acknowledged that Nasser's action dramatically strengthened anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment throughout the region.

This was bigger than a canal.

Africa and the broader colonized world were watching.

Egypt had effectively said:

Political sovereignty must mean something economically.

That message traveled.

Tanzania: Julius Nyerere and the Arusha Declaration

Eleven years later, Tanzania made its own attempt.

Under President Julius Nyerere, the Arusha Declaration of 1967 established a national program built around socialism and self-reliance.

That second word deserves attention.

Self-reliance.

Because independence without the ability to sustain yourself creates dependency.

Within days of the declaration, Tanzania nationalized private commercial banks and moved major industries into public ownership. Nyerere later explained that bringing major sectors under Tanzanian control reduced the amount of wealth leaving the country in the form of profits and interest.

Whether one agrees with every economic decision made under Nyerere is secondary to understanding the principle.

The question Tanzania was attempting to answer was:

Why should Tanzanian wealth perpetually leave Tanzania?

That is not a European question.

It is not a capitalist question.

It is not a socialist question.

It is a sovereignty question.

And that question still confronts resource-rich nations today.

Zambia: Who Owns the Copper?

When Zambia achieved independence from Britain in 1964, copper dominated its economy.

But much of the industry had been controlled by foreign mining corporations.

That created an obvious contradiction:

Zambia possessed the copper.

Yet possessing copper geographically and controlling copper economically are two entirely different things.

Kenneth Kaunda's government began changing that arrangement.

By 1969, Zambia had returned mineral rights to the state and acquired majority stakes in its two major copper companies. Academic histories of the Copperbelt describe the program as an internally driven nationalist effort to obtain meaningful control over Zambia's mineral economy.

Again, notice the pattern.

Colonization externalizes ownership.

Nationalization attempts to internalize it.

The copper beneath Zambia was no longer treated merely as something located inside Zambia.

It was being treated as part of the national inheritance of Zambians.

The experiment later encountered enormous economic problems, particularly when international copper prices collapsed. That history should not be hidden. Zambia's nationalization policies did not magically eliminate poverty or economic vulnerability.

But poor execution or unfavorable economic conditions do not erase the underlying question:

Who should ultimately control the natural wealth of a nation?

That question remains.

Algeria: Independence Was Not Complete Until The Oil Came Home

Algeria's experience makes the relationship between colonization and nationalization even clearer.

France colonized Algeria beginning in 1830.

What followed was not simply foreign administration. Algeria became deeply incorporated into the French imperial system, with European settlers occupying enormous amounts of land while French interests gained extraordinary influence over the country's resources.

Algeria fought an extraordinarily brutal war for independence and finally became independent in 1962.

But independence created another question.

Who would control Algeria's petroleum?

In 1971, under President Houari Boumédiène, Algeria nationalized its hydrocarbon resources.

The country's national energy company, SONATRACH, describes February 24, 1971 as the moment Algeria reclaimed sovereignty over its hydrocarbons and assumed control over oil and gas fields, pipelines and production assets previously controlled by foreign interests.

That is economic decolonization.

France could recognize Algeria's flag.

France could recognize Algeria's borders.

France could recognize Algeria's government.

But Algeria was saying:

You must also recognize Algeria's ownership of Algeria.

That is a considerably more consequential definition of independence.

Libya: Oil Beneath African Soil

Libya confronted a similar contradiction after the overthrow of its monarchy in 1969.

Foreign petroleum companies had enormous influence over Libyan oil.

The revolutionary government pushed aggressively for greater Libyan ownership and participation.

By the early 1970s, Libya was acquiring controlling interests in foreign petroleum operations, nationalizing certain companies that resisted and forcing others into majority-Libyan arrangements. A Library of Congress history records Libya's 1973 decision to take 51 percent control of many remaining foreign petroleum operations.

Whatever judgment one makes about Muammar Gaddafi's later government—and there are many legitimate criticisms—the economic sovereignty question remains separate from the personality of the leader.

Who owns African oil?

And why should merely asking that question ever have been considered radical?

This Was Not Only An African Awakening

The same pattern appeared throughout the colonized world.

In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the assets of foreign petroleum corporations in 1938 after prolonged disputes involving foreign oil companies, Mexican workers and the Mexican government. Mexico subsequently created PEMEX and placed its petroleum industry under national control. Before nationalization, foreign companies dominated Mexican petroleum production and exported much of its wealth abroad.

In Indonesia, political independence from the Netherlands did not immediately produce economic independence. Dutch enterprises continued occupying enormous positions within the economy. Beginning in late 1957, Indonesia took over Dutch-owned enterprises, ultimately formalizing their nationalization as part of a larger struggle to complete economic decolonization.

Different nations.

Different cultures.

Different religions.

Different political systems.

Same fundamental question:

Can a nation truly call itself sovereign when the essential wealth of that nation belongs somewhere else?

This Is Where Noble Drew Ali Becomes Relevant

And this is where I believe Noble Drew Ali's philosophy deserves considerably more serious consideration than it generally receives.

Drew Ali was speaking primarily to a people who had experienced one of the most devastating forms of denationalization imaginable.

Their ancestors were removed from societies.

Separated from languages.

Separated from indigenous institutions.

Separated from ancestral political identities.

Placed into racial classifications created and administered by other people.

Then generations were taught to understand themselves principally through those classifications.

Noble Drew Ali's answer was radical in its simplicity:

Recover nationality.

Not as hatred for another people.

Not as racial superiority.

Not as permission to escape lawful civic responsibility.

But as the restoration of a people to an understanding of themselves.

One scholarly examination of the Moorish Science Temple notes that Drew Ali coupled Moorish identity with participation in American citizenship rather than teaching that followers should simply abandon civic obligations.

That matters.

Nationality properly understood is not isolation.

It is position.

You cannot participate honorably among the family of nations while simultaneously believing you are a people without a national history.

You cannot protect an inheritance you have been taught does not exist.

And you cannot easily organize collectively when the primary vocabulary through which you understand yourself was manufactured for someone else's convenience.

This is why the question of nationality is deeper than changing what box somebody checks on a form.

It is a transformation of consciousness.

Colonization Begins With Denationalization

Here is the deeper pattern I want us to recognize.

Before resources are nationalized, people must become nationalized in their thinking.

Colonial domination frequently required the opposite.

Denationalization.

Disconnect the people from who they were.

Teach them that their history began with conquest.

Replace nations with racial classifications.

Replace indigenous names with colonial ones.

Convince them that civilization arrived aboard the same ships that arrived to exploit them.

Then build an economic system in which the conquered eventually perceive foreign ownership of their own resources as normal.

That is colonization at its highest level.

You no longer need soldiers standing everywhere.

The conquered mind begins policing the boundaries of the colonial arrangement itself.

It begins asking:

"Who are we to control our own resources?"

"Who are we to define ourselves?"

"Who are we to build our own institutions?"

"Who are we to determine our own destiny?"

And that is precisely why nationality becomes dangerous to colonial thinking.

Nationality answers:

We are a people.

And once a people consciously recognize themselves as a people, the next question becomes inevitable:

What belongs to us?

But Nationalization Alone Is Not Enough

History also gives us a warning.

Putting the word national in front of something does not automatically liberate anybody.

A corrupt government can exploit its own population just as surely as a foreign corporation can.

A nationalized mine can be mismanaged.

A state-owned company can become bloated.

Political leaders can enrich themselves.

Resources can be nationalized while the people's minds remain colonized.

That is why I am not proposing nationalization as some magical economic formula.

The deeper principle is national sovereignty coupled with national responsibility.

A nation must possess the knowledge, institutions, discipline and moral character necessary to administer what it reclaims.

Otherwise you have merely changed managers.

True decolonization therefore requires more than removing foreign ownership.

It requires developing a people capable of governing themselves.

And that brings us directly back to Noble Drew Ali.

Nationality Before Nation Building

You cannot build strong national institutions without producing people who possess national consciousness.

That means knowing:

Your history.

Your ancestry.

Your civic duties.

Your relationship to your fellow citizens.

Your responsibility to future generations.

Your relationship to the land upon which you live.

Your relationship to the institutions that govern you.

And ultimately, your relationship to humanity.

This is why I believe Drew Ali's teachings regarding nationality deserve to be revisited outside of the narrow caricatures through which they are often discussed.

He was dealing with a fundamental problem:

What happens to a people who have forgotten that they are a people?

History gives us the answer.

Someone else names them.

Someone else defines them.

Someone else educates them.

Someone else interprets their history.

Someone else controls their institutions.

And eventually—

Someone else owns their resources.

Nationalization: The Cure To Colonization

So when I say Nationalization is the cure to Colonization, I am speaking about something much greater than the nationalization of an oil company.

I am talking about the nationalization of consciousness.

The recovery of identity.

The recovery of history.

The recovery of institutions.

The recovery of land.

The recovery of resources.

The recovery of responsibility.

And ultimately—

the recovery of self-determination.

Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal.

Algeria nationalized its hydrocarbons.

Zambia nationalized its copper.

Tanzania nationalized strategic sectors of its economy.

Mexico nationalized its petroleum.

Indonesia nationalized major remnants of Dutch colonial economic power.

These movements differed enormously, and none created paradise.

But every one of them forced the world to confront the same uncomfortable proposition:

Independence means very little when somebody else still owns the inheritance.

And perhaps this is the lesson we should recover today.

Colonization taught people to look outward for their definition, validation and administration.

Nationality turns the consciousness inward and asks:

Who are we?

Nationalization then asks:

What responsibility do we have for what belongs to us?

One concerns the nation within.

The other concerns the property of the nation without.

Both are ultimately questions of sovereignty.

A colonized people are administered.

A national people administer themselves.

A colonized people are classified.

A national people know themselves.

A colonized people supply the resources from which somebody else's civilization is constructed.

A national people turn their inheritance into institutions for their children.

That is why the recovery of nationality cannot simply be another intellectual conversation.

It must become a principle of civilization.

Because the greatest victory over colonization is not merely removing the colonizer.

It is producing a people who no longer require one.

Nationality is the consciousness.
Nationalization is the economic expression.
Self-determination is the objective.

And that may be one of the most important lessons Noble Drew Ali left for us to reconsider.