I think - particularly in terms of the destiny of Africans in North America - our destiny has also been shaped indelibly by global alliances.

Cuba was in some ways a de facto state of the United States before 1959, given its proximity and given its neocolonial status.

In the era of slavery, you could be a so-called Afro-Cuban one day and a so-called Black American the next day, or vice versa. I mean there was all this back and forth, and there was a lot of opposition in Black America to slavery in Cuba in particular, because slavery in Cuba lasted until the 1880s.

It is only with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement that you begin to see different examinations of not only Reconstruction but slavery itself, and there is a lesson to be drawn here about how the times influence the writing of history, something that we should never forget.

I think we need to de-center the idea of US sovereignty.

Africa, being the major target of colonial plunder, therefore becomes a major source of conflict.

Germany had come late to feast at the table of colonialism and did not feel that the division of colonial spoils at that particular moment in time reflected its true strength and its true weight in the imperialist world.