Requiem for a Revolution Black Power Pan Africanism (BPPA) #5 October 6, 2007 Ifayomi hi: Thanks for your thought-focusing Requiem and its stimulating questions. Here are my responses: Q1] We dont have to wait for another Garvey to come along. We should help produce a galaxy of Garveys, and a Cabral in every village/town of Global Black Africa. Q2] These e-technologies and tele-technologies are actually a handicap to mobilizing our people. They seductively confine our activism within the virtual reality domain, making us virtual activists asphyxiating in virtual reality. They, and especially the internet, are good for political education and information distribution, which is a first and vital step. But until the educational activity in virtual space gets connected to real time street activity, nothing will actually happen. Garvey worked in the street. His effect/impact was on the streets, in real time, not in cyberspace. Too many of the conscious Afrikans I know today are passivists who seem too contented with admiring their conscious condition to go forth and do something with it in real time. That has to be changed. Q3] Certainly, it was easier for Garvey to galvanize multitudes who inescapably saw and felt white enmity daily. Today the white power enemy operates from behind the facade of blacks in office. So it is necessary to get our people to see these black fronts of white power for what they are: Black colonialists and enemy agents and, therefore, as the enemy within. [For backgrounding, I will later, when I finish editing it, send you my interview on Black colonialists] Q4] Yes, we are comfortable in our oppression. We dont even see our oppression. We believe we are already free--one of the illusions of independence and civil rights. Besides, all too many of our activists are buppie activists controlled by enemy funding. They have been neutralized by their buppie life styles, bought off with little crumbs from the table of imperialism. Cabral warned against that specific danger. Mao did too when he warned his cadres not to be felled by the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie. Their counterparts in Garveys day-- the Du Boisian talented tenth that were dependent on funding by white philanthropists/managers-- also had limited impact. They couldnt mobilize masses of people. We need to mobilize hundreds of millions of Global Black Africans, and we need to invent techniques for doing so on the street and in the villages, and without funding from the grant givers/cont rollers. Q6] Yes, I sense that most Black Africans have unconsciously given up! Theyve given up on the possibility, not just of our victory, but of our being able to do anything about our collective plight. Struggle seems to have become an end in itself. But the struggle has been undirected or directed at mostly secondary and tertiary issues: murders by skinheads, shootings with impunity by police, the harassment, the attacks and insults. These, though traumatic, are not the source of the problem. And unless we get rid of the source, they will not stop. Imagine someone who is being disturbed by flies from a shit bucket near him. He has two choices about how to get rid of the flies. He can go about swatting fly after fly after fly till he collapses in exhaustion; or he can move the shit bucket away, and dig a hole and bury it. I think our struggle has become the equivalent of swatting flies instead of the equivalent of burying the shit bucket in a hole. Which is why we get burned out without achieving an end to racism. Why is that? I submit that our notion of racism confines us to struggling against the symptoms of racism rather than to sweeping away the white supremacist system that keeps reproducing the detested symptoms. Skinheads and police will not stop harassing or murdering black people because of our protests against incidents of racist behavior. Our weakness invites 2 such treatment. They will stop only when we have built a black superpower that will teach the world to automatically and routinely respect black people. Only a superpower in black Africa that can punish such behavior can frighten and deter them. That would be the equivalent of burying the shit bucket. Only a countervailing black African power will teach the enemy to respect black African humanity anywhere on planet earth. We should not forget that there was a time when the Chinese were treated with contempt by the Europeans, just like we black Africans still are. But those days are long gone for the Chinese. What changed things for them? Like Mao said, China ‘stood up’. It defeated the Japanese and European invaders, expelled their Chinese collaborators, closed its doors to foreign interference, and set about turning itself into the great power it has become. So, the best thing we can all do, is to focus on the project of building this black superpower somewhere in Africa. All these protests and ‘struggles’ that burn us out should be made secondary to a concerted effort to build at least one industrialized and militarily mighty black African superpower starting yesterday. To motivate and mobilize us for the job, we need a Black Power Manifesto that will rival the Communist Manifesto in provocativeness and motivating power; that will overcome the ideological feebleness and flaws of Pan Africanism. We need an ideology that will overcome our devotion to crass materialism, our mania for consumerism and our addiction to physical comforts; that will inspire us with the fighting spirit and give us something worth living and sacrificing ourselves for. This is what black Africans have lacked ever since the anti-colonial struggles got perverted into Black Comprador Colonialism. So let us shift from swatting the flies of white power and focus on building the countervailing Black African power that would negate this global white power. To create space for a black superpower, we must organize and defeat and expel the Black Colonialists from the countries of Black Africa, and take over the territories of ECOWAS and SADC and reconstruct them politically, economically, culturally and militarily into 21st century superpowers of G-8 rank. We should note that there is no Black Power movement anywhere today, not even in rhetoric. We need to start it by seizing the opportunities provided by challenges like Darfur, South Sudan and Mauritania --where we are up against Arab enslavers, colonialists and land grabbers--and Zimbabwe, where we are up against European settlers who refuse to give back the lands they stole. We should first organize to expel Arab land grabbers from Darfur and Mauritania. We need to raise funds and gather arms and funnel them to the Darfur liberation movements and Black African liberation movements in other parts of Sudan. And we must protect them with a bodyguard of propaganda that will block the AU, UN etc from messing them up. We should be inspired by the example of Black solidarity when Italy invaded Ethiopia in the 1930s. This initial and urgent project to defeat Arab colonialism should help build our muscles for the job of building our own superpower. It’s like a preliminary project, a training session, the heats. After that, the main event. Suggestions- What we need to start doing a) Conceptualize our future We need to start to focus on our future as a people, to conceptualize our possible futures and how to actualize those we desire and prevent those we dislike, taking care to avoid defining our aspirations by the expectations of others. This would help wean us away from an excessive and disabling focus on our past, on our great and remote past in Kemet etc, on when we ruled. That much needed effort to rehabilitate our past in the context of our amnesia and the gross enemy distortions and disparagement has gone on for too long. We seem to be stuck in it. While we need to constantly draw psychic sustenance from our rehabilitated past, we need to get on with the all-important task of rescuing our future. Visualizing our desired future should help us work out how to get there. If we do not take care to avoid defining our aspirations by the expectations of others, we might end up building for ourselves a dungeon where we languish in voluntarily servitude to enemies who have manipulated our aspirations. 3 (b) Shift to a new and illuminating conceptual framework A blind man hitting wildly with his stick has little chance of winning his fight. Just as we change lenses when our old ones become blurry, we now need to employ a new conceptual framework to help us see our reality correctly. The main concepts with which we still apprehend our reality are now obscurantist. Among these obscurantist concepts are independence day, postcolonial, development, and the African continent. Here are ten new concepts that we need to start using: 1] UN imperialism 2] White expatriate colonialism 3] Black comprador colonialism These three concepts clarify the fact that imperialism is not over but continues through the UN system; that though White expatriate colonialism ended in each country on its so-called Independence Day, far from being in a ‘post-colonial’ era, black Africans are actually in the era of Black comprador colonialism. 4] G-8 Bantustan – this concept clarifies the fact that Black African countries today, far from being independent, are the Bantustans of the G-8 system; and that ‘Independence Day’ is really Bantustan Day. 5] Arab racism 6] Arab Expansionism 7] Arab Colonialism These three new concepts help to clarify what’s been going on for the last half century in South Sudan, Mauritania, Darfur and the entire Afro-Arab borderlands along the Sahelian zone. 8] Black Africa: Thinking and talking of black Africa instead of Africa or ‘the continent’ will free us from the deadly identity confusions spawned by Continentalist Pan Africanism and its odd preoccupation with the continental land mass rather than the indigenous black African peoples. 9] Industrialization: Since industrialization is at the core of development, and development without industrialization is but maldevelopment; thinking and talking of industrialization instead of development will help focus our efforts where they should have been for the last 50 years—on the rigorous program of industrialization whose fruit would have been the development we declared was our goal, and which still eludes us. 10] Race War: this unacknowledged fact has been the basic context of the lives of black Africans for the past millennium or more! The trans-Sahara ‘slave trade’ to Arab lands was race war; the trans -Atlantic ‘slave trade’ was race war; Colonialism was, and still is, race war! South Sudan is race war; Darfur is race war; Mauritania is race war; AIDS is race war; USofAfrica is race war. Until we realize this, what chance do we have of surviving, let alone winning, a war every phase of which we have lost thus far? To survive this 21st century, let alone prosper, we need to acknowledge and act on the fact that we have been in a long race war with the aggressor Arab and European branches of White Power. c) Move the ‘revolution’ from virtual reality and into the street To minimize the isolation, sense of futility and tendency to burn-out among activists, they should organize themselves into a social movement with a conscious and overarching goal -- an organized community of committed agents of change whose hearts are free of cowardice; a living mini-society with its own structure of institutions and an exciting subculture of its own; a miniature alternative society gestating within the larger and hostile society; an alternative society with a full and satisfying life of its own: its own study groups, weekend schools, Young Pioneers, social clubs, picnics, concerts, Film and video screenings, radio stations, newspapers, festivals, protest marches, street demos, mutual help associations, recreation centers, guest houses, songs, drama troupes, meeting halls; task forces for fundraising, letter-writing and other 4 campaigns; social welfare units bringing help to the needy; neighbourhood sentinels who ensure security on our streets, leadership training outfits, bookshops, reading rooms; community shops, restaurants and other businesses that fund the movement. To minimize burn out, we need to enjoy what we do, and we need to form a warm and supportive group for that. We’ll do much better political work if we do it in high-spirited teams that enjoy what they do. Much could be learnt from the culture of British trade unions, Oliver Tambo’s ANC, Cabral’s PAIGC, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam, Mao’s base areas, etc. And also from the evangelical missions and how they envelope their members in a total living community. Since all our problems of the last thousand years are rooted in the lack of black African power, I would suggest that this real-time movement be the Black Power Pan Africanist (BPPA) Movement—a movement of Black Africans building Black African Power wherever Black Africans find themselves on earth; building the power to define, defend and advance the Black African interest locally and globally: in the home and in the workplace; at the levels of the street, the city block, the neighborhood, the ward, the municipality, the village, the county or Local Government Area; and upward at the state/provincial and country levels; and eventually at the levels of ECOWAS and SADC, and at the inter-country level of a global Black African League of Nations, Communities and States—our own equivalent of NATO and the defunct Warsaw Pact. c) Anchor “the struggle” in Political education The foundation of the political education that black Africans need should be the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Amilcar Cabral and Steve Biko. To that core should be added the works of Mao Tse-tung and Noam Chomsky, as well as Afrocentric studies of Arab Racism, Arab Enslavement of Black Africans and Arab Colonialism in Black Africa. Furthermore, we should study the modes of unity and the ways and means of building each type in Black African ~ Dr Chinweizu
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 10:55:49 +0000
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