The Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was a revolutionary Black nationalist project founded on March 31, 1968 in Detroit, Michigan. Led initially by the Imari and Gaidi Obadele, the RNA extended a longstanding argument that Black people in the US constituted a colonized people, but rather than seeking to replicate the project of repatriation to Africa, the RNA organized members around a vision of founding a Black nation-state on the land that currently constitutes the five states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. They sought to create a space whereby the Black people who descended from enslaved ancestors, New Afrikans, could live free from the destructive and exploitative systems of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Members of the RNA firmly believed the construction of their nation-state would end these oppressive systems and guarantee material freedom.

The RNA sought to forge a new political agenda for Black people by reintroducing the concept of internal colonialism. In particular, the RNA recognized that Black people were an internally oppressed nation within the US. The construction of the Black nation was in part expanded by the RNA for uniting around a central demand to meet the daily needs of Black people that the US government was never interested in providing. The RNA’s political project attempts to address the historical, systemic inequity of the descendants of enslaved Africans in a material way. Their formation began the development of the broader New Afrikan Independence Movement, which linked various other formations in the country around this collective New Afrikan identity towards building a Black nation-state in the US South.

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The Republic of New Afrika was founded in the right of self-determination for Black people in the United States. Its name refers to the five states in the South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina) that Black people developed and enriched with their labor and where they have lived for more than four hundred years. Because of this history, these states form the land base of an independent nation for whose liberation Black people fight. The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PG-RNA) was formed in 1968 at a conference in Detroit. 

-Excerpt Taken from The War Before by Safiya Bukhari