From an interview with rap artist Killah Priest in the Fall 1998 issue of Transition, a journal published jointly by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University and by Duke University Press. The interview was conducted by Kelefa Sanneh, the journal's assistant editor:

Kelefa Sanneh:

Why do you rap so much about outer space?

Killah Priest:

Because that's where we're from! Black people come from space. When you look at the sky, it's black. Without sunlight, forget it: it's black. In the beginning, there was darkness.

Sanneh:

Elijah Muhammad wrote that Earth was created when the moon was deported from this planet 66 trillion years ago. Is that "the beginning" you're talking about?

Killah:

I ain't talking about that. I'm talking about pure facts. In the beginning, "darkness was upon the face of the deep." Man was made on a certain day, he went and got corrupt, and he's been corrupt ever since. He's been destroying the world, he's been hiding identities, he's been lying, stealing—all of that. But space travel is real. When they speak of unidentified flying objects, a lot of people don't understand what that means. Ezekiel saw UFOs back then, only they were IFOs, because he identified them. He knew what they were. They were chariots of fire. They call them spaceships now. That's where the old Negro song comes from: "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home."

Sanneh:

Are these spaceships different from the Mothership that the Nation of Islam preaches about—the craft that abducted Louis Farrakhan in Mexico in 1985?

Killah:

No, it's the same. People call it Mothership, chariot, UFO, but it's all the same thing.

Sanneh:

Fard Muhammad taught that despite the Mothership, the true home of the Original People was Earth. Do you believe that this spaceship is going to take African-American people someplace else?

Killah:

That's what's been predicated. Christians talk about the rapture, Christ coming back and the sky cracking up. The American government says that if anything comes out of space, we should all help fight it. The whole world has gone mad: one group of people is waiting for a spaceship, while another group is waiting to shoot it down. Isaiah 66:15: "the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind." He's going to come and wreak vengeance, because there are a lot of lies out there.

Sanneh:

Are you talking about movies like Independence Day? The Nation of Islam's newspaper The Final Call attacked that movie as a racist perversion of the Day of Judgment.

Killah:

Word. Like the movie Independence Day. There are people who know what's going to happen. They are part of the elite 10 percent of society, the ones that know truth and hide it. When you talk about religion, there's always a righteous 5 percent and a devious 10 percent—the other 85 percent of people are ignorant.

Sanneh:

The government—that's the 10 percent, right?

Killah:

Yeah. And I have to watch myself, too. When Christ spoke out like this, they came against him.

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