Solidarity Is Not a Hashtag

What the Ancestors Already Built: Ubuntu Economics and the Wisdom of the Collective

Long before “impact investing” became a phrase in board rooms, African communities had already invented cooperative economics in the Black community — and they called it many names.

The Chama Savings Group: Kenya’s Quiet Economic Revolution

The Chama savings group in Kenya is one of the most powerful forms of an African women’s cooperative in the world — where members gather regularly to contribute money into a shared pool that rotates to each member. No interest rates. No credit checks. No exclusion. Just collective trust. Today, Chama groups manage billions within Kenya’s informal economy and have been the launching pad for countless women-led businesses across East Africa.

The Susu Savings Circle: Diaspora Roots

In West Africa, it’s called Susu or Esusu — a Susu savings circle in the diaspora that moves from Nigeria to Trinidad to Brooklyn and back. These are not relics of a poorer time. They are sophisticated technologies of mutual aid that predate colonial banking systems — and that those systems intentionally sought to dismantle.

Ujamaa: Collective Economics as Covenant

Julius Nyerere of Tanzania called it Ujamaa — familyhood. Ujamaa collective economics held that the village was not just a social unit but an economic covenant. That wealth circulated within the community because to hoard was to harm, and to share was to survive.

The most powerful modern proof of what that template could build — and what becomes the target when it succeeds — is the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street: over 300 Black-owned businesses, a self-sustaining ecosystem of economic power, deliberately burned to the ground by a white mob and government forces in 1921. That is Ujamaa made real, and that is what those with power have always sought to destroy when it succeeds.

Ubuntu Economic Philosophy: I Am Because We Are

This is the Ubuntu economic philosophy in its fullest form: I am because we are — and therefore what I accumulate must circulate back to the we that made my prosperity possible.

In practice, this means: when we build businesses, we hire from within the community first. When we invest, we prioritize enterprises that feed back into the village — whether that village is a block in Harlem or a hillside in Uganda. When we have surplus, we ask: who needs it before I keep it?

This is not charity. This is not poverty consciousness. This is sophisticated, ancestral wisdom that the global financial system has spent centuries trying to discredit — because it works without them.

We don’t have to invent a new model for cooperative economics in the Black community. We have to remember the ones we already carry.

Solidarity in Action: What Economic Empowerment Actually Looks Like

So what does real solidarity look like — in the flesh, in the present tense?

It looks like Ubuntu Village’s solar initiative in Uganda, where we don’t arrive with charity, but with resources for communities building their own futures. Solar kits for 100 households are rolling out now, with at least 300 more to follow. Women-led households are prioritized — because energy independence, the ability to power your own home, run your own small business without paying a colonial utility company — is economic empowerment made tangible. This is community investment in the diaspora, in action.

That is solidarity: not writing a check and walking away, but resourcing a community to own its own infrastructure.

It looks like East Harlem, where Ubuntu Village is rooted — a neighborhood with a 40% poverty rate sitting within miles of some of the wealthiest real estate on earth. Real Black economic justice here doesn’t mean gentrification-with-good-intentions. It means investing in the businesses, the healers, the elders, and the children who have always been there — and making sure the next chapter belongs to them.

The act of giving itself carries ancestral weight. Tithing to the Future explores why giving to community-led work is a spiritual practice — not charity, but covenant.

What Ubuntu Solidarity Looks Like as Community Investment in the Diaspora

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  Spend with intention, every day. Choose community-owned businesses consistently — not just in February or when a hashtag trends. Every dollar you redirect is a vote for whose community thrives. That is cooperative economics in the Black community, one purchase at a time.
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  Invest in cooperative structures. Chamas, Susu savings circles, community land trusts, worker-owned enterprises. These are not exotic ideas. They are the economic DNA of the African diaspora, waiting to be reactivated. Join one. Start one. Resource one.
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  Support organizations building true partnership. Ubuntu Village works in genuine solidarity with communities in Uganda, Kenya, and East Harlem — not extracting stories, not arriving with solutions, but showing up for the long run. This is what a solidarity economy in Africa and across the diaspora looks like in practice.

But there’s an obligation in that phrase that doesn’t always get named. If I am because we are — then when we suffer, I am diminished. And when I thrive, my first question must be: how does this wealth circulate back to the we?

That is economic empowerment in the African diaspora. That is solidarity without a sunset. That is the work.