These Seven Principles are essential standards of personal and social excellence directed toward building and sustaining moral community, and strengthening and maintaining the community's capacity to define, defend and develop its interests in the most positive and productive sense. In addition to being standards of excellence, the Seven Principles are also categories of priorities and categories of human possibilities. As categories of priorities, they tell us some of the most important things in our lives, identifying a key set of views, values and practices which we should, even must, put first in our personal and social life. And as categories of possibilities, the Seven Principles, offer us a set of principles which encourage thought and practice which help define, develop and enhance our humanity in the context of community and the world.

 

1. Umoja (unity) to strive for and maintain unity within our family, community, nation and race.

2. Kuichagulia (self-determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.

3. Ujima (Collective Work and responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers and sisters problems our problems, and together we solve them.

4. Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses, and profit from them together.

5. Nia (Purpose) to make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people back to their traditional greatness.

6. Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in any way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

7. Imani (faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our elders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

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