June 25, 2003 - August 18, 2003
The Planet is called "Juyá" and not "Wayú"
Posted: Monday, August 18, 2003
How to transcend the spatial-temporal Chains of Illusion, the Global Positioning System
By Franz J. T. Lee
"The winning weapon of the American assault on Iraq, like that of World War II, depended on a technology first imagined by Einstein, with some help from Poincare. Not nuclear weapons of mass destruction, but the Global Positioning System, by which the four dimensions of space-time can be so precisely measured as to direct a bomb or a soldier to within 50 feet of any spot on earth."
(WILLIAM R. EVERDELL, New York Times, 17/08/03)
Friends, definitely, if here in Mérida, Venezuela, we could discover Juyá, a planet, rotating beyond Pluto, then surely we could easily develop a Real, Original Science and a True, Authentic Philosophy of the Bolivarian Revolution, directed against the global horror and terror, against the "awestruck" of the White House, the Pentagon, NASA and NATO, against any global positioning system or weaponry.
As "starting point", it is worthwhile to note that long before Einstein, Poincare and Tesla, Immanuel Kant has made us aware of something very significant, within the universal fatherland, something really fit for celestial, transgalactic emancipation.
As we know, Adolf Hitler made it very clear what precisely is necessary for exploitative body and dominating mind control: If you want to control a people, control its education! Thus, after having accomplished this mental holocaust, of course, the Metropolis won't even need "awestruck", or painstakingly directed mortal uranium depleted cluster-bombs. However, this is not a brilliant historic discovery of Corporate America -- already Plato in his "Republic" made the philosopher-kings aware of this cock-sure weapon; furthermore, already billions have been "formed" and "informed" across the millennia precisely via ruling class "education"; the intellectual result, as we can see globally in the context of contemporary infowarfare, especially here in Venezuela, across the mass media of the "opposition", is fatal for the species man, especially for the physically labouring, obsolete billions of "non-human beings". Nobody seems to notice the real mental holocaust, the destruction of the human mind. Nobody speaks about mental massacres, intellectual genocide. To be able to do this, it would be necessary to see how across fatherly space and time we were permanently bamboozled from the cradle to the grave, from morning till night, perfectly indoctrinated and manipulated.
But, talking about the Intellect, Verstand, Kant, but also Hegel, the German philosophers of the Enlightenment, threw light on something that is imperative. Precisely Space and Time are not real, they do not exist independent of the human mind, of society, in the "objective world"; they are just philosophic categories, inventions and creations of the ruling intellect, of ruling class mind, of Reason alias Capital, for production purposes, for exploitation, domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation. They are parameters for death; the only way to die on Earth is within Space and Time, within these universal limitations.
A uranium depleted cluster-bomb falls on your head, and it kills you in Space and Time. There is no other way to die -- the latter are the real, true, universal assassins. However, on the other hand, because they are the talk of the town, it seems that Orwell, like Big Brother, is still very much alive, not even to mention Plato and Jesus Christ. Because of our wonderful "education", of our exclusive "information", no matter how hard we try to understand the above, its quintessence is well-nigh impossible to grasp.
However, Hegel and Kant were not crazy, they were not yet stark "mad cows". The problem is that most of us, thanks to religion and ideology, are already well-conditioned productive, reproductive, docile slaves of Space and Time, innocent victims of all sorts of universal master-servant non-relations; unknowingly, because of cruel dissocialization processes, across our youth, most of us have already totally swallowed all genres of spatial-temporal models of culture, norms, traditions and rituals -- especially of production, distribution, consumption, accumulation, profit-mongering and ruthless destruction of nature and society -- all, hook, sinker, bait and poisoned shark.
The majority of us knows no other reality than a virtual spatial-temporal world. We cannot imagine anything different, or even trifferent. For millions anything else is madness -- for the adherents to the "opposition" in Venezuela, the historical fact, that the Bolivarian Revolution is democratic, just, peaceful and humane, is simply a fairy tale, they know much better, it is "dictatorial and tyrannical" -- this is the logical result of a mental holocaust of more than 40 years in Venezuela, not even to mention the centuries of feudalist Roman Catholic indoctrination, of the venom of the private mass media, of the toppled oligarchic classes and of the United States' "war of ideas", as disseminated by CNN.
In conclusion, whether you agree with me or not -- and this surely is not and cannot be the sincere objective of this openminded commentary -- it is high "time", is already the eleventh hour, for true revolutionaries to leave some emancipatory, free "space" in their totally occupied lives, to permit serious intellectual reflection about the above mentioned thoughts; and, consequently, of, by and for themselves, as Authentic Exodus, to try to act, think and transcend this earthly fascist vale of nazi woe by means of expatrian, exformative excellence, in which Past, Present and Future are just relative, related, transhistoric fleeting moments of human flowing truth, reality and aspirations. With Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and "The Reign of Terror" the emerging bourgeoisie (and proletariat, although betrayed later) forever toppled the decaying nobility and moribund clergy; to be really successful, we have no alternative but to develop something fresh, filled with aurora, with the "alba", something far more omniscient, omnipotent: an extra-original Práxis, an authentic-innovative Theory and excellent, realizable Emancipation, to wipe away Global Fascism from the face of our Milky Way.
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The Moral Degradation of White Privilege
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003
by Rootsie, www.rootsie.com
What happens when you approach life itself with a sense of entitlement, rather than a sense of awe?
You get all the relationships wrong.
With the natural world: its forces, its cycles, its creatures.
With other people, places, and things.
With your own self.
Since you feel you are entitled to all good things you can imagine,
you are constantly functioning with lesser or greater levels of disappointment. You do not treasure what you have, but always crave more.
Since you are probably aware of the comparative deprivation of many,
even if you make no conscious connection between their situation and yours, the natural injustice does affect you. You can make many choices here, from engaging in 'charity', to indulging hedonistically in things that stimulate your pleasure centers so you don't have to think. Diversions and distractions keep you from focusing on the truth of our situation.
In terms of natural law, ignorance is not an excuse. Just because you exist in the condition of privilege does not mean you exist outside of natural laws. Causes have effects, whether you are aware of them or not.
You may engage in rationalizations or justifications which all boil down to this: you are privileged, we are, because we deserve it, while others do not. Whether you bring forth religious justifications, nationalistic ones, historical ones that paint your people in a positive light as opposed to 'them', this engagement with illusion contaminates any efforts you may make to develop yourself, spiritually or otherwise.
In the realms of love and romance, your fantasy probably swirls around some variation of 'happily ever after', since this is what your sense of entitlement leads you to expect. If difficulties arise, you are unwilling to engage them. In fact, all efforts requiring time and patience are equally elusive: most often you want what you want and you want it now. This is the message being constantly beamed at you by the various media. All you desire is available to you. Now.
You are tied to matter, and this leaves you ignorant of the subtle treasures of heart and soul that lie beyond the realms of matter. Your things become idols. You covet them more and love them more than the truth. You comfort and console yourself with them, for the state of misery you are in is real, and unbearable otherwise.
You expect to be welcomed with open arms wherever you go, and you react with surprise and anger when this is not so. You believe that if you just say something, that makes it true. 'I am not a racist.' 'I am black on the inside, where it counts.' 'Race does not matter.' 'I have many black friends, so I know what it means to be black.'
You may believe that racial inequality is a thing of the past, and that the evils whites committed in the past have nothing to do with you now, or you may cite your own personal ancestry, and point out that your people had nothing to do with the past 500 years of slavery and oppression.
But injustice for many is injustice for all: it cuts both ways. You did not choose to be white and to live in the West. You do not want this privilege, and yet it is yours. You are aware that in the present equation, pleasures for you mean pain for others. Well, no matter how you feel about it, until you move to do something about it, real happiness will elude you. It doesn't matter if this seems fair to you; this is simply how it is.
Further, it is impossible for you to be truly happy living with excess while others try to live without enough. You have to give it back. And not in the form of pity or mercy or charity, which are evil things as long as vast systems persist which maintain inequality. Charity is simply another one of those diversions that makes you feel good for a second but does nothing to address the disease in the long-run.
The way to give it back is not to run screaming away from the land of plenty and play poor in 'the third world' either. Another illusion, and simply dishonest.
The only thing to do is to devote your excess beyond what you need to live to activities which will dismantle this system of privilege. It is unnatural for people to work against their own interests, but white privilege is not in anybody's interest. If the purpose of life were to accumulate material possessions in such excess that others literally die so that you may possess them, that would be one thing. But no one really thinks that is our purpose here.
Our prevailing religion entreats us to 'love another.' It does not teach that we should love some more and others less. There is a profound personal price to be paid for hypocrisy. And thus agrees that same religion.
To benefit, willingly or not, from an immoral system of privilege taints everything in your life with immorality. This is monstrous, but it is true.
This is a society of addiction, of violence, of abuse, of grotesque consumption. It maims and mangles everyone in it. Appearance becomes reality, because reality is unbearable for most.
www.rootsie.com
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Emancipation: Dead Men Talking
Posted: Tuesday, August 5, 2003
by Susan Edwards
Trinidad and Tobago
It is said that a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
But what of the minds that are not awake!
Another season of Emancipation lectures and radio programs began and the selection of topics to empower Africans is once again lucid, logical and legitimate. However, one cannot help but question the veracity of "Some" of those Vessels who conveyed messages of freedom.
Messages that says to us "There is no race", we should "Forget History" because we cannot change it. "Black people are their own worst enemies.". Invitation to "Eat a meal for about $300. while exchanging sentences and sentiments that never filters down to the grassroots. Hypocritical mockers who never merge, communicate or listen to the views of the ordinary citizens.
It was dreadfully disturbing to see watered down human elements of oppression decorated in sacred African garments shadowing our tribal vibrations when their hearts were not singing the same song. Ordinary people should develop their minds to a level of "Uncompromising Consciousness." Too often we feel honoured by what was programmed to appear dignified in our eyes. It is this counterfeit dignity that drains the true essence of our connection. Deliberate tools dressed to defeat the truth of our focus.
Spiritual rebirth must first begin with the mind. This would be evident by the conscious choices we make and the quality of respect we exchange with each other. Black people after struggling so hard for so long should leave no space in their brain for foolishness. The celebration of emancipation should be complimented with an understanding of the evolution of the human mind. Our people would do well to remember that the genius within cannot be motivated by foolishness.
We should be firm in our pursuits never contributing to ignorance or systems of oppression. Like a rock, you should be aware of those things that are put in place to manipulate your consciousness.
It is decidedly insulting to the blood of our ancestors when we take respect, honour and appreciation away from those who were... and those who are still the live wires of our struggle... and give it to certain vampires in section VIP. I long to see the day when we truly honour our common people in section VIP. What about the Drummers, Singers, and dancers from Laventille, Morvant, Belmont and Tobago. Some of the people honoured as VIP in our various celebrations and those we often patronize financially would not invite an ordinary African to eat with their dog. Why do we constantly honour those who never extend to us invitations to their functions? Ordinary Africans are never significantly important enough to be given a back seat.
African people must learn the importance of respecting each other with the same quality of respect we show to others. Less emphasis should be placed on paying tribute to the unconscious speeches of dead minds and more wisdom should be applied in showing appreciation to the many living sacrifices still among us.
As African people it is imperative that we pay close attention to who or what influences our decisions. In celebrating our liberation more honour should be given to the common people who kept the vision alive, without their participation our villages would be like graveyards. Dare us to discern the difference between illusion and reality in consecrating thanks to those who gave us their best.
The Emancipation Support Committee should solicit assistance to establish "African Gardens of Remembrance" in every County in Trinidad and Tobago. Where each Month every District would have the responsibility of honouring its citizens living and deceased in a style and setting similar to that at "The Lidj Yasu Omowala Village". Where, our VIP sections would be filled with the ordinary people who we know kept the culture active and sacrificed to build our communities. In so doing we would be keeping the vibration alive all through the year commemorating our struggle, constantly learning of our history and untying ourselves from the many pettiness that so often beset us, at the same time proving the sincerity of those who pretend their affiliation to African Culture once a year. With the Grand annual gathering at the Lidj Yasu Omowala Village, Queens Park Savannah. Positively mastering our journey towards excellence.
To the youths who must carry the cords of consciousness forward I say... it is your mind that would take you where you want to be. Develop your mental focus... be strong. Always honour the 'Truth'.
It is not only important to positively define your own destiny. You should develop your mind and refine your character, that your life will influence the destiny of the world.
http://www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/Susan.html
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The Real U.S. Policy for Africa
Posted: Saturday, July 19, 2003
www.blackcommentator.com
"Our policy with respect to the continent of Africa at best has been a policy that is inconsistent and incoherent," said NAACP Executive Director Kweisi Mfume, in Miami Beach last weekend for the organization's annual convention. "We've looked away in many instances because Africa was not politically correct or politically cute."
Mr. Mfume is wrong. United States policy towards sub-Saharan Africa has been consistent since August of 1960, when President Eisenhower ordered his national security team to arrange the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Congo had been nominally independent from Belgium for only two months, yet Eisenhower, far from looking away from Africa during his last months in office, was already embarked on a relentless policy of continental destabilization, one that has been fundamentally adhered to by every U.S. President that followed.
U.S. policy in Africa is anything but "incoherent." Rather, too many of us have "looked away" from the clear pattern of U.S. behavior and intent – a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African development at every opportunity and by all possible means – including the death of millions.
War on African civil society
Belgians murdered Prime Minister Lumumba on January 17, 1961, no doubt with the collaboration of Eisenhower's men. Lumumba presented a danger to European and American domination of post-colonial Africa precisely because he was not a tribal figure, but a thoroughly Congolese politician, a man who sought to harness power through popular structures. As such, Lumumba personified the threat of an awakened African civil society – the prerequisite for true independence and social development.
A popular and long held belief among Africans and African Americans is that the prospect of continental (or even global) African "unity" is what terrifies Washington, London and Paris. We wish that were true. However, the neocolonial powers know they have nothing to worry about on that score, having begun the era of "independence" with a clear understanding among themselves that conditions for meaningful unity would not be allowed to develop. African civil society itself would be stunted, hounded, impoverished – rendered so fundamentally insecure that, even should "leaders" of African countries band together under banners of "unity," few could speak with the voice of the people. Only leaders of intact civil societies can unite with one another to any meaningful effect – all else is bombast, and frightens no one.
Tribalism is, indeed, a problem in Africa. For Americans and Europeans, it is an obsession – the game they have played since the Portuguese planted their first outposts at the mouths of African rivers in the 1400s. However, there are limits to the effectiveness of tribal manipulation. Many "tribes" are very large – nations, actually. Setting one tribal group against the other, while suppressing the social development of each, is a tricky business. The colonizer must not to allow the "favored" group to accrue, through privilege, sufficient social space to aspire to nationhood. In that event, the formerly favored group must be crushed by the colonizer's own military force – a brutish and costly business.
These are generalities, and Africa is a big place. Numerous colonial powers at different times employed the full mix of coercion, manipulation, favoritism, and raw (including genocidal) force.
After World War Two, and for a host of reasons, the colonial arrangement had become untenable. Europeans would continue to engage in tribal manipulation in the new political environment, while the U.S. preferred bullets and bribes as it assumed overlord status among the imperialists. However, it was clear to the old masters – and especially to Washington – that the formal structures of independence would inevitably lead to the growth of dynamic civil societies that could impede the operations of multinational extraction corporations and agribusiness. Civil societies can become quite raucous and demanding, even in countries in which there are tribal divisions. Therefore, the process of African civil development had to be interrupted, not only in those new states that were economically valuable to Europe and the U.S., but in all of Africa, so that no healthy civil model might emerge. If this could be achieved, there would be no need to fear the actions of assembled heads of African states – an irrelevant gaggle of uniforms and suits, standing in for nations, but representing no coherent social force.
Assignment: crush the people
To thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa, the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African Strong Man. Although both the neocolonial masters and the Strong Men themselves make a great fuss about indigenousness – albeit for somewhat different reasons – these characters arise from the twisted structures of colonialism. Their function is to smother civil society, to render the people helpless.
Joseph Desire Mobutu is the model of the African Strong Man. He was an American invention whose career is the purest expression of U.S. policy in Africa. With all due respect to the NAACP's Kweisi Mfume, there was nothing "inconsistent and incoherent" about Mobutu's nearly four decades of service to the United States. From the day in August, 1960 when Eisenhower ordered the death of Lumumba (Mobutu, Lumumba's treasonous chief of the army, deposed his Prime Minister the next month and collaborated directly in the murder) to his death from cancer in 1997, U.S. African policy was inextricably bound to the billionaire thief. It can be reasonably said that Mobutuism is U.S. African policy.
Mobutu and nine U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower through Clinton) utterly and mercilessly poisoned Africa, sending crippling convulsions through the continent, from which Africa may never recover. With borders on Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville), and a land mass as large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi, Mobutu's Zaire was an incubator of never ending war, subversion, disease, corruption and, ultimately, social disruption so horrific as to challenge the Arab and European slave trade in destructive intensity.
Mobutu's reign began in the heyday of European soldiers of fortune, allies of his like "Mad Mike" Hoare. By the time of his death, more than 100 mercenary outfits operated in sub-Saharan Africa, safeguarding multinational corporations from the chaos that Mobutu and his American handlers labored so mightily to foment. So integral have mercenaries become to Africa, a number of Black governments depend on them for their own security, forsaking any real claim to national sovereignty. This, too, is the legacy of U.S. African policy. (American mercenary corporations garner an ever-increasing share of the business.)
Millions died in Zaire-Congo and neighboring states as a direct or indirect result of policies hatched in Washington and executed by Mobutu – and this, before the genocidal explosion in Rwanda in 1994, leading to an "African World War" fought on Congolese soil that has so far claimed at least 3 million more lives, belated victims of the policies dutifully carried out by America's African Strong Man.
Bush cultivates more Mobutus
For 43 years U.S. governments have empowered Strong Men to do their bidding in Africa. The geography and riches of Congo-Zaire allowed Mobutu to wreak continent-wide havoc on Washington's behalf, while growing fabulously rich. However, many lesser clients have been nurtured by successive U.S. governments, their names and crimes too numerous for this essay. They and Mobutu's outrages are the logical product of the neocolonialist program. The actors come and go, but the underlying design remains the same: to prevent the emergence of strong civil societies in Black Africa.
The Strong Man's job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and demoralized societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the fortunes of the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose little threat to foreign capital.
The African Strong Man model suits the purposes of European imperialists and the United States, perfectly. Their overarching concern– especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union – is for the multinational mineral and petroleum-extracting corporations – what Europeans and Americans are actually referring to when they speak of their "national interests" on the continent. Representing himself and a small base of supporters/dependents, the Strong Man can be counted on to bully civil society into steadily narrowing spaces, snuffing out all independent social formations, while at the same time stripping the society of the means to protect itself outside of his own, capricious machinery. The nation itself atrophies, or is stillborn, as in Congo. Where nations have not had the chance to take full root or have been deliberately stunted, the Strong Man wraps the thin reeds of sovereignty around himself, denying the people their means of connectedness to one another, except through him. The state is a private apparatus and – from the standpoint of civil society – there appears to be no nation, at all. The people act, accordingly – that is, they do not act as citizens of a nation.
Thus, the Strong Man's most valuable service to the foreign master is to retard and negate nationhood through constant assaults on civil society.
What is commonly described as American "neglect" of Africa is nothing of the kind. Over the course of the decades since the end of formal colonialism, the governments of the corporate headquarters countries have arrived at a consensus that a chaotic Africa, barely governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least troublesome environment for Western purposes. The extraction corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are insecure.
In Congo and Liberia-Sierra Leone, this unspoken but operative policy has plunged whole populations into Hell on Earth. African Americans typically criticize the U.S. for failing to treat Black lives as valuable – in other words, Washington is accused of neglecting the carnage in Central and West Africa because of racism. The reality is far worse than that. American policy is designed to place Africans at the extremes of insecurity, in order to foreclose the possibility of civil societies taking root. This policy has always resulted in mass death. Moreover, the U.S. did not simply sit idly by while genocide swept Rwanda and "World War" wracked Congo. Instead, the American government initially thwarted a world response to the Rwandan holocaust, and has prolonged the carnage in Congo through its two client states, Uganda and Rwanda, which have methodically looted the wealth of the northeastern Congo while claiming – falsely, according to a report to the UN Security Council – to be protecting their own borders. Uganda's list of "proxy" Congolese ethnic armies reaches into every corner of Ituri province, where "combatants…have slaughtered some five thousand civilians in the last year because of their ethnic affiliation," according to a Human Rights Watch report. "But the combatants are armed and often directed by the governments of the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda and Uganda." ("Ituri: Bloodiest Corner of the Congo," July 8.)
Zimbabwean officers have also plundered the country, but have been involved in far less killing in their role as protectors of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government. Angola and Namibia also went to the Kinshasa regime's aid. The United Nations and African countries labored for five years to untangle the mix of belligerents – with only the most pro forma cooperation of the United States.
Prolonging "Africa's World War"
Had the U.S. wanted to end or at least scale down "Africa's World War," there is no doubt that Washington could have reined in Rwanda and Uganda, who received a steady stream of American military and economic assistance during the conflict. The Congolese (DRC) government, on the other hand, has suffered under severe sanctions from both the U.S. and the European Union.
It would have cost Washington far less than a billion dollars in bribes to quarantine "Africa's World War" – slush money for a super-power, and a fraction of the bribes Washington was willing to pay for favorable votes on Iraq at the UN. Instead, the U.S. provided aid to key combatants. That's not a lack of policy, nor is it indifference. In the larger scheme of things, Washington believed that prolonging a war that weakened and debased Africa was in its "national interest."
Uganda and Rwanda have reciprocated, shamelessly. "Recently Uganda publicly backed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, defying the African position to endorse a UN-sanctioned war," reads the current message of the official State House website of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's government, in Kampala.
Rwanda's Ambassador to the U.S., Zac Nsenga, was even more obsequious when presenting his credentials at the U.S. State Department, May 8:
"The Rwandan Government reaffirms its commitment to join forces with the United States and the free world to combat acts of terrorism wherever it rears its ugly head. The events of the 1994 Genocide and September 11th has taught us that we have to stand together as Nations to defeat these evil acts against humanity. For this very reason President Kagame stood firmly in support of the U.S. led attack on Iraq, not only to root out a terrorist dictator but also to free the people of Iraq."
Three million dead in Congo mean nothing when compared to two eager clients in the heart of Africa, who are more than willing to both defy "the African position" on Iraq and help keep Central Africa chaotic – Mobutu's old job.
As for Charles Taylor, the Liberian Strong Man responsible for the death, dismemberment and displacement of hundreds of thousands in his own country and neighboring Sierra Leone – at the time of this writing, Bush was still playing games over whether Taylor should leave for Nigerian exile before or after an African peace keeping force arrives to secure the capital, Monrovia.
Concerned American progressives debate what their positions should be if Bush sends significant U.S. forces to help pacify the country. He will not. If history is any judge, U.S. involvement on the ground in Liberia will be token, if any, and brief – just enough to show the flag. Had Washington desired stability for Liberia and its neighbors Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, it would have eliminated Taylor years ago. He was allowed to live because he served U.S. policy, whether he knew that or not. Eternal warfare is the most effective way to smother civil society.
Americans may also one day learn this horrible lesson.
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Why Bush wants troops in Liberia
Posted: Tuesday, July 15, 2003
By Monica Moorehead
The Bush administration has sent a military team of 32 Marines and specialists to Liberia to assess whether the U.S. should send more troops to this impoverished West African country. The reason given is that they may be necessary to end the civil war that has plagued this country for more than a decade. The real reason is oil.
President George W. Bush has repeatedly said that he will accept nothing less than the departure of the elected president of Liberia, Charles Taylor.
On July 6 Taylor met with the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, at the airport outside the Liberian capital of Monrovia, where an agreement was made to provide Taylor temporary asylum in Nigeria if he leaves.
Taylor helped to lead a rebellion against the previous Liberian president, Samuel Doe. The rebellion lasted from the late 1980s until the mid 1990s, even though Doe was assassinated in 1990. Taylor was elected president in 1997 and has faced armed opposition to his presidency since 1999.
The real prospect that U.S. troops will be sent to Liberia comes at a time when Bush is on his first trip to Africa. He plans to visit five countries within five days: Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria. South Africa and Botswana are among the countries in the world with the highest percentages of people living with the HIV virus and AIDS.
Bush is using the carrot and stick maneuver, offering billions of dollars in aid to pressure each country to open its markets to U.S. imports and its military and police to collaboration with the U.S. in the so-called war against terrorism. Washington heavily subsidizes U.S. agribusinesses. If African countries were to change their agricultural policies and allow in unlimited quantities of cheap U.S. agricultural products, local farmers would be destroyed.
The U.S. military presence in Africa is more ominous than ever. Rapid deployment troops and semi-permanent forces from the Army, Air Force and Marines are now stationed or will be stationed in the Horn of Africa as well as countries in North and West Africa. A command base with 2,000 troops was established in Djibouti in May.
Lisa Hoffman of Scripps Howard News Service wrote on June 13: "Little noticed among the Pentagon's plans to radically reshape the U.S. military presence overseas is the groundbreaking possibility of basing thousands of American troops in or around West Africa.
"Under discussion: everything from positioning a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group off Africa's vast west coast to establishing one or more forward operating bases in Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Equatorial Guinea or the tiny island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.
"The spurs for what may prove an unprecedented U.S. military beachhead in sub-Saharan Africa are the region's instability, potential attractiveness to terrorists and, most pivotal, its rich oil resources, Pentagon officials and Africa experts say.
"As much as 15 percent of America's oil now comes from West Africa--about the amount imported from Saudi Arabia. By next year, the West African portion is expected to jump to 20 percent."
The U.S. seeks to overtake its European imperialist rivals as the dominant power in areas of Africa where oil is plentiful, like Nigeria.
Nigeria is home to one-fourth of the people living in sub-Saharan Africa. It also has one of the world's largest oil reserves.
The Nigerian people do not control the oil wealth of their country. Big oil conglomerates such as Chevron-Texaco and Shell make tremendous profits exporting millions of barrels of oil from Nigeria to other parts of the world while the Nigerian masses remain extremely poor. The average annual per capita income of Nigeria is only $290.
The Nigerian Labor Congress just organized a powerful general strike against the skyrocketing price of gasoline, which lasted several days before the government offered a compromise.
U.S. and Liberian relations
Liberia's population is less than 4 million people. According to UNICEF August 2002 statistics, the poverty rate is 85 percent and the extreme poverty rate is 55 percent. Per capita income is less than $100 per person.
News accounts say a sector of the Liberian masses look to foreign intervention, including U.S. troops, to help bring an end to the bloodshed and bring economic relief to their country. Some of this hope may be rooted in what some perceive as long-time close relations between Liberia and the U.S.
The U.S. history books and the big business press claim that Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed slaves who migrated from the U.S. But that theory is disputed. There is evidence to show that the American Colonization Society, a group of whites including slaveowners, bought land in Liberia in 1817 for next to nothing.
One of the most prominent of these slave owners was Francis Scott Key, credited with writing the words of the Star Spangled Banner, the U.S. national anthem. Another slaveowning member of the ACS was William Thornton, an amateur architect who designed the U.S. Capitol. It was mainly slaves who built that historic building and others in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.
Former slaves were encouraged to emigrate to Liberia by the ACS, not to escape the horrors of slavery but to keep them from fighting for the right to jobs, education and political representation that whites on the whole had won. In other words, the ACS, seeing that the days of their slavocracy were numbered, mapped out this strategy in order to undermine the potential that former slaves might win democratic rights, including receiving 40 acres and a mule from the federal government.
In the 1920s the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. got a 99-year lease for 1 million acres of Liberian land at 6 cents per acre per year. Its Liberian rubber plantation became the company's main source of profit while Liberia sunk deeper into poverty.
Untapped oil reserves in Gulf of Guinea
Bush and the Pentagon claim that the only motive for sending U.S. troops into Liberia would be to help bring about "stability and democracy" for the war-weary Liberian people. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth lies in the U.S. wanting to control the most important world resource--oil.
Liberia could be a jumping-off place for U.S. troops to control the nearby Gulf of Guinea. Vast untapped oil reserves were recently discovered there. Whatever imperialist power controls this strategically oil-rich region will be in the position to dramatically increase its oil markets. For the U.S., this could mean a 25-percent increase in oil imports from Africa.
Nigeria and the former Portuguese col ony of Sao Tome and Principe are located on the Gulf of Guinea. So is Ivory Coast, which is in the midst of a civil war instigated by its former French oppressors.
Kayode Fayemi, the leader of the Center for Democracy and Development based in Lagos, Nigeria, stated, "The focus on oil in the Gulf of Guinea would probably ensure that the United States looks the other way when it comes to human rights, account ability and transparency. In Nigeria, the example of that would be how does the United States respond to campaigns from local communities for equitable and local management of resources." (NY Times, July 6)
The U.S. government certainly did not offer any support over a year ago for the justifiable takeovers of oil facilities in the Niger Delta organized by defiant Nigerian women, who demanded that the oil conglomerates fund jobs and educational opportunities for their sons. A Nigerian paper, This Day, reported that the U.S. may be deploying troops to the Niger Delta to "protect" oil facilities there.
Bush's quest for endless war cannot be separated from what is going on in Liberia, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Bush is accusing Taylor of instigating war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone, but it is Bush who is the biggest war criminal of all.
Bush envisions himself as a modern-day emperor, similar to the rulers of the vicious Roman empire, and the majority of the world as an appendage of U.S. corporations.
Reprinted from the July 17, issue of Workers World newspaper
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via email: ww@wwpublish.com.)
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Bush Speech in Africa
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2003
by Bantu Kelani
My reaction to this speech is shocked and awed!
Imagine a President who could speak these words and his actions and his policy does not contradict these words.
This speech contradicts Bush stance against AA and many other things. He did not invite any members of the Black Caucus on this trip with him. The speech was obviously written by someone with a whole different mindset from Bush.
Not only was and is Amerikkka a prison for Black men and women but now Prisons have been built inside the Prison that house more men and women than any nation on the earth.
I'm certain Bush did not listen to the likes of Malcolm but the writer of this speech sure did!
Kelani-
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THE PRESIDENT'S REMARKS FOR YOUR REFERENCE
President Bush Speaks at Goree Island in Senegal
Remarks by the President on Goree Island
Goree Island, Senegal
11:47 A.M. (Local)
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. President and Madam First Lady, distinguished guests and residents of Goree Island, citizens of Senegal, I'm honored to begin my visit to Africa in your beautiful country.
For hundreds of years on this island peoples of different continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect and friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human liberty.
At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.
Below the decks, the middle passage was a hot, narrow, sunless nightmare; weeks and months of confinement and abuse and confusion on a strange and lonely sea. Some refused to eat, preferring death to any future their captors might prepare for them. Some who were sick were thrown over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the closest thing to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance and bravery are recorded. Countless others, we will never know.
Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere. They entered societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their unpaid labor. There was a time in my country's history when one in every seven human beings was the property of another. In law, they were regarded only as articles of commerce, having no right to travel, or to marry, or to own possessions. Because families were often separated, many denied even the comfort of suffering together.
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.
In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question, then why not me?
In the year of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of slavery's cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the slave-holding piety of the time to a higher standard of humanity. "God tells us," wrote Equiano, "that the oppressor and the oppressed are both in His hands. And if these are not the poor, the broken-hearted, the blind, the captive, the bruised which our Savior speaks of, who are they?"
Down through the years, African Americans have upheld the ideals of America by exposing laws and habits contradicting those ideals. The rights of African Americans were not the gift of those in authority. Those rights were granted by the Author of Life, and regained by the persistence and courage of African Americans, themselves.
Among those Americans was Phyllis Wheatley, who was dragged from her home here in West Africa in 1761, at the age of seven. In my country, she became a poet, and the first noted black author in our nation's history. Phyllis Wheatley said, "In every human breast, God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance."
That deliverance was demanded by escaped slaves named Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, and ministers of the Gospel named Leon Sullivan and Martin Luther King, Jr. At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time. Yet, in every time, there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.
We can fairly judge the past by the standards of President John Adams, who called slavery "an evil of callosal magnitude." We can discern eternal standards in the deeds of William Wilberforce and John Quincy Adams, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they left behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused Americans to examine our hearts, to correct our Constitution, and to teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of every race. By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.
My nation's journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the bitter experience of other times. But however long the journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.
In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is not the possession of one race. We know with equal certainty that freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in the natural rights of man, this conviction that justice should reach wherever the sun passes leads America into the world.
With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there is suffering, and liberty where there is tyranny. And these commitments bring me and other distinguished leaders of my government across the Atlantic to Africa.
African peoples are now writing your own story of liberty. Africans have overcome the arrogance of colonial powers, overturned the cruelties of apartheid, and made it clear that dictatorship is not the future of any nation on this continent. In the process, Africa has produced heroes of liberation -- leaders like Mandela, Senghor, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Selassie and Sadat. And many visionary African leaders, such as my friend, have grasped the power of economic and political freedom to lift whole nations and put forth bold plans for Africa's development.
Because Africans and Americans share a belief in the values of liberty and dignity, we must share in the labor of advancing those values. In a time of growing commerce across the globe, we will ensure that the nations of Africa are full partners in the trade and prosperity of the world. Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand together for peace. Against the merciless terrorists who threaten every nation, we will wage an unrelenting campaign of justice. Confronted with desperate hunger, we will answer with human compassion and the tools of human technology. In the face of spreading disease, we will join with you in turning the tide against AIDS in Africa.
We know that these challenges can be overcome, because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries. Yet, eventually, the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced -- what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island Prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us.
May God bless you all. (Applause.)
END 11:55 A.M. (Local)
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SA will do everything to assist Zimbabwe
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2003
By Christelle Terreblanche, www.iol.co.za
The presidency has refused to be drawn into the latest round of speculation about a political exit plan for the Zimbabwean head of state, Robert Mugabe.
Rapport newspaper reported on Sunday that President Thabo Mbeki gave American President George Bush assurances during his visit to South Africa last week that Mugabe would be out of office by December.
The report was based on an article in the Zimbabwean newspaper, the Independent, and supported by "diplomatic sources" and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
"All we can say is that Zimbabweans are searching for solutions and that we will do whatever we can to assist", said presidential spokesperson Bheki Khumalo. More on iol.co.za
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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2003
Report by YellowTimes.org
Background: Democratic Republic of Congo
BACKGROUND REPORT (NFTF.org) -- Updated July 14, 2003 -- The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the current incarnation of a nation that has been known to history by various names although most of us will have known it as Belgian Congo or Zaire. It is still known in some circles as Congo-Kinshasa to distinguish it from its neighbor, Republic of Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville. Much of its western border is comprised of the Congo River which it shares with Republic of Congo in an undefined way; no specific agreements have been reached on the division of the river, its islands, or its resources.
This nation of approximately 55 million is in Central Africa surrounded by Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. There are over 200 ethnic groups in DRC but about 45% of its population consists of three groups who are Bantu, and a fourth that is Hamitic. Author Joseph Conrad referred to this area as the "Heart of Darkness" and it is this area that is known to many as "darkest Africa."
DRC is a nation endowed with vast potential wealth (gold, diamonds, rubber, copper, cobalt, oil, timber, and coltan along with a wide variety of agricultural produce) but its economy has declined significantly since the mid-1980's due a variety of unsuccessful government measures, the residue of colonial rule, and the financial imperialism of new masters. It has been estimated that DRC may comprise the most mineral-rich chunk of land on the globe but its recent history has been one of internal conflict. Much of this arose as the nation absorbed large numbers of refugees from the fighting in Rwanda and Burundi in 1994. But the conflicts in the whole region of central Africa really date back as far as the fifteenth century and are today, as they always have been, conflicts of imperialism.
Many of the countries in this area achieved independence from colonial masters in the 1950's and 1960's and quickly degenerated into fighting within and without their borders, much of it spurred by the "financial colonialists" who stepped into the gap left by the old monarchies. The history of these nations since the fifteenth century has been one of European colonialism, resistance, independence, followed by neocolonialism, and prolonged resistance yet again. The primary beneficiary of the new order in this region was the United States who allegedly maneuvered the assassination of Congo's first president, Patrice Lamumba, in 1960. The country's history has been troubled ever since.
President Joseph Mobutu ruled for over 30 years after coming to power in a CIA-aided coup. He is said to have turned over and again to policies and practices that would favor United States government and business interests over the needs and interests of his people. But rebel groups arose to challenge Mobutu's rule and in 1997, power was seized by Laurent Kabila, a former Marxist who led the Alliance of Democratic Forces. During most of Mobutu's rule the country had been known as Zaire but in May 1997 Kabila formally changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo.
On assumption of power, Kabila inherited a country already involved in massive tribal infighting, partly arising because of the influx of refugees in 1994. His rule was quickly challenged by a Rwanda and Uganda backed rebellion in August 1998. Finally, troops from Zimbabwe, Chad, Angola, Namibia, and Sudan intervened to support Kabila's government. Even though a cease-fire was reached in July 1999 between DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Namibia, Rwanda and the Congolese rebels, sporadic fighting continued unabated. Kabila was assassinated January 16, 2001, again with alleged CIA intervention, and rule of the country fell to his son, Joseph.
Joseph Kabila was successful in negotiating a withdrawal of the Rwandan forces from Congo in October 2002, and early in 2003 all combatant parties finally came to the table and agreed to cease the fighting. They agreed to set up a government of national unity as a caretaker until democratic elections can be held in 2005. These will be the first democratic votes cast in this country in over forty years.
Since the departure of the last of the foreign forces from DRC at the end of April 2003, there has been a steady increase in ethnic violence in areas where it is alleged Rwanda and Uganda deliberately incited longstanding ethnic hatred. The violence became so acute that the United Nations finally decided to intervene and has sanctioned a small international peacekeeping force under the direction of France. Local people and area governments appear united in their complaints that the force is too small, that its mandate is too limited and of too short a duration; much criticism has been leveled at the U.N. for its shortsightedness and many people point to this region as having the potential for any genocidal nightmare like that in Rwanda in 1994.
As of this writing, the peace agreement reached in April is generally holding and the government is beginning its drive toward restoring the infrastructure and social systems of DRC. The nation lost between 3.3 and 4.7 million people (apparently a difficult number to quantify in these remote conditions) as a result of the past five years of fighting. At this point, they are anxious to get back on their feet, without the shackles of colonialism.
More history:
The People and Their History
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Debt and its racist dimension in Africa
Posted: Saturday, July 5, 2003
by Ras Benjamine
In September 2003 the World Trade Organisation looks set to ratify yet more laws, and fishing rights in favour of the West. Sub-Saharan Africa, so rich in human and natural resources, remains the economically poorest region of the world. Half of our people live in poverty, and in many African countries economic conditions have been getting worse for the last 20 years or more.
We all know that a free market is not a fair market particularly when Africa is involved. America and Europe policy on trade and investment needs to be ratify by Africans. Africans leaders need to understand that the third world is sustaining the economy of the West! Around the world, tariff controls, subsidies and export taxes are overwhelming our farmers in Africa making international competition impossible. In Mali, small-scale cotton growers are undercut by American behemoths; in Kenya, flower farmers have been deadheaded by Dutch import charges; in Senegal (West Africa), it is cheaper for a farmer to buy rice from South-East Asia than Senegalese rich from 10km down the road. In countries like Senegal, we have onions farmers who are working twice as hard for half the reward because Dutch onions are cheaper and forced upon the local natives. Up to 80 per cent of the Senegalese nation lives off their produce and now our people are struggling now because the international community will rather dump cheap imports on us than see Africans trade themselves out of poverty and debt! Much of the debt accumulated by African countries was built up during the 1970s, a time of reckless lending by banks and international agencies, and was agreed to by undemocratic governments. In many cases, the population of the borrowing country realized little benefit from the loans as the money disappeared in failed infrastructure projects, corrupt schemes, or unwise investments. The debt has continued to grow since then as governments take out new loans to pay off old ones.
The general consensus amongst many African economists is that external debt of African countries is clearly odious, illegitimate and immoral. It is a tool that the West are not prepared to relinquish. It is a tool used as an instrument to perpetuate their control and domination of the economies of Africa and reduce international competition and gain world domination. Debt has a racist dimension because of its impact on the people of Africa. It is estimated that about 19,000 children per annum in most African countries die of preventable diseases. This is a direct consequence of the deterioration of the health systems for lack of public investments crowded out by debt service. This would never be tolerated in Europe or America, but the lives of people in Africa are clearly considered to be less important than those in the North.
Some Solutions:
-Raise mass consciousness that debt is a fraud
-Build a grassroots global movement against paying so called debt
-Develop an alternative to Structural Adjustment as a precondition for any mandate to run a government in Africa and the developing world
-Given that women produce 80% of Africa's food, head 60% of Africa's households and do similar work in the rest of the developing world, the Campaign will advance the aims of Global Women's Strike and fight for its realisation.
Africa and the rest of the former colonies don't owe western banks and governments anything. Why should the hardest working people in the world beg for debt 'relief' while the IMF and World Bank are organising the robbery of their every resource, forcing us to work even harder?
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What To The Slave Is The 4th Of July?
Posted: Friday, July 4, 2003
Frederick Douglass Independence Day Speech at Rochester, 1841
Frederick Douglas, a former slave himself, became a leader in the 19th Century Abolitionist Movement
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!...
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
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President Bush's Visit To Africa
Posted: Wednesday, July 2, 2003
and Colin Powell's Letter in New York Times 23-6-2003.
by Patricia-Gwen-Afwoni
Personal Assistant -Southern African Region
Africa Strategy notes with sadness and shame the degree of hypocrisy in which the current Right wing Republican Administration of George Bush has conducted its foreign policy on Africa. The forth coming African tour of Bush between 7-12 July 2003 is designed to threaten the peace and widen the gaps between moderate states and war mongers in Africa. We also note with utter contempt the letter that appeared in the New York Times of 23rd June 2003 by a second class citizen of America by the name of Colin Powell. It has shown how slavery has ruined the simple logic of a soldier who fought against the racial tide in America. "The biggest problem is not our black colour but the Stomachs that direct us to eat instead of the Brains". That sums up what the Ms. C.Rice and Colin Powell have done in the USA.
It is regrettable that most blacks who gain power in the so-called Western democracy turn a blind eye on their brothers on the African continent and demonise the same roots of Pan African spirit. Africa Strategy has documented all evidence of foul play by Colin Powell and Ms Condelesa Rice on Africa. The Letter written by Colin Powel shows the mind of a slave who is still chained to slavery even after its abolition almost 150 years ago.
The spirit of Abraham Lincoln will roll in the grave when they hear that President Bush has visited a pseudo democracy in Uganda and spent over six hours dining and dancing with the military dictatorship that has refused people to associate and assemble freely. The same right wing group that will hover over our great continent in next few days will go down in history for praising President Museveni for crimes against humanity in the Great Lakes Region. It is not surprising that the low calibre intellectualism and ignorance on world politics of Colin Powell has added agony and anguish on the people of Africa who yearn for freedom.
The so-called second citizen of the USA hegemony has denounced President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who has given democracy of pluralism a chance and hails the efforts of Ugandan President Museven in "restoring peace". Is there peace in Uganda really? Colin Powell must be day dreaming with Saddam Hussein's face counting the fate of the innocent Americans in Iraq. In Africa we call this ghost bursting. Africa Strategy is completely baffled with the statements that have allowed Museveni to operate with impunity in the region.
There are two characteristics of the USA administration that have come out in the clear. The lust for oil in the world. And the second one is the power of militarism and adventurism for glory. The government of the USA likes Museveni because of the discovery of oil fields around Lake Albert near the Uganda DRC border. They will make money. The second factor which the World should know is that the USA wants to use Museveni to attack Sudan in the north to protect the rich oil fields and pipeline that runs from Southern Sudan to the Red Sea. Logistics are written on the wall. To be able to control these activities the USA Administration has to use stooges like Museveni for Military adventurism which has caused genocide and death in the region.
Africa Strategy notes that Baroness Lynda Chalker as a roving spinster of empty slogans has been brought in to pay No 11 on the wing. In her quest for power in the region she has now sponsored and paid former mercenaries in the region to topple the government of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. These evidence is slowly emerging as the minutes of many meetings are being studied by our sources in Kampala and South Africa.
We note with great concern the way millions and millions of US Dollars are being channelled through Uganda to train and pay mercenary armies to overthrow the government of President Mugabe. We are also worried about the Millions of USD that has been pumped into the hands of opposition in Zimbabwe for ECONOMIC SABOTAGE. One of the paragraphs in the Minutes obtained from the meetings OF the Lynda Chalker- Museveni crusade indicate that there is a desire to overthrow the government of President Mugabe by using mercenaries in the region. This comes as a result of all countries around the region have refused to destabilise Zimbabwe
Africa Strategy further notes that the company that was registered in Canada Toronto to drill oil in Uganda under the name of Heritage Oil is closely connected to Africa Matters which in the last three months has held a series of meetings with opposition leaders of Zimbabwe in the region to map out strategies of toppling President Mugabe. Lynda Chalker and Colin Powell met in Washington DC between 14th-21st of June 2003 to facilitate regime change in Zimbabwe. This was the time when Museveni was in the USA to be rewarded for the slaughter of many people in Congo and Uganda. Africa Matters has poured millions of USA Dollars to train enemies of countries like Zimbabwe and Kenya where the British and Americans are not happy about the leadership. All these activities are a great worry for peace and tranquillity in the region.
Africa Strategy wishes to use this opportunity to warn all those who are bent on paying the government of Uganda to commit violence in the region like Baroness Lynda Chalker and the black surrogate Colin Powell that all the peaceful people of the region are documenting all your encounters. We have now obtained clear evidence from sources about all your financial transactions which point at USA and Britain as the main countries fuelling violence in Zimbabwe and other countries in the region.
Africa Strategy is disturbed that the so-called world order that has wrecked Iraq and left the country in tatters is turning to Africa to fuel a crisis in the Great Lakes Region. W e now know and the world knows that Colin Powell "forged" and "doctored" intelligence reports to justify the invasion of Iraq. We are aware of the impending fabrication and malice that Colin Powell and Bush want to link the people of Zimbabwe and the Great Lakes Region so as to justify regime change. There are serious diplomatic encounters behind closed door that intend to list a country like Kenya as a terrorist state. We condemn such moves that will create divisions and cripple the economy of Kenya that relies on Tourism as the main source of Foreign exchange. This is the most deplorable act of political vandalism that President Bush and his black messenger of doom Colin Powell want to create on African soil.
We call upon the people of Africa to raise up in great numbers in the cities of Kampala and other African cities where the "doomed cult leaders" are visiting to denounce such militarism . This can be done by peacefully protesting to their Visit to Africa. We support those in Uganda who have arranged for such protests. We want the 6 hour meeting with the blood thirst President of Uganda to be in total quagmire.
Those African countries that are sending their Presidents to Uganda to meet the Texas cult leaders should be questioned in terms of African morality and values. The proxies of imperialism on the continent who have helped to ooze blood from the African veins under the pretext of NEPAD, and globalisation should be exposed. Africa needs peace not political scramble that we witness coming up in guise of a black Bismarck of Africa called Museveni. Let the current onslaught on neo-colonialism in African be our vanguard of the future African Union.
The Africa we want and yearn for is the Africa that leads by example. The case of President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. He removed land from I% whites and gave it back to his 99% of his black people. All those leaders in Africa should shun parrots like President of Uganda who sings the song and praises of the USA and Britain under a ONE party State model of democracy. These leaders who pick Millions of Dollars from Bush and Colin Powell at the expense of the people of Congo in Ituri region Then he is used as a conduit of dirty toxins that ferment wars in the region. Such leaders on the continent should be put on red card status by the rest of Africa.
Africa Strategy will alert the continent of all those agents of doom who have sinned beyond repair in the Middle East and they want to create another set of everlasting killing fields in Africa.
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Powell ignorant of Zimbabwean situation
Posted: Wednesday, July 2, 2003
By Willmore Kanyongo, US www.herald.co.zw
It is clear the US Secretary of State - Colin Powell - is totally ignorant of the Zimbabwean situation.
The article he wrote and which was published in The New York Times on June 24 has further shown him as a shameless liar, who has habitually sought to build his foreign policy on utter fabrication.
His country invaded Iraq on the pretext that there was evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which falsehood he presented to the United Nations.
He and his government - several months after the invasion - are yet to go back to the world body with evidence of piles of WMD from Iraq.
His administration has now changed the tone and has resorted to talking about Iraq's WMD programme.
Wait a minute - did the US invade Iraq on the basis of a WMD programme or piles and piles of WMDs?
The Americans certainly fooled the world and they intend to continue fooling it!
Again in his article in The New York Times, Powell asserts that "... the country's once thriving agricultural sector collapsed last year after President Robert Mugabe confiscated commercial farms..."
He goes on to charge that "... his cynical 'land reform' program has chiefly benefited idle party hacks and stalwarts".
First of all, Powell makes a false claim in asserting the collapse of agricultural activity in Zimbabwe and much as he travels, he remains ignorant of his own black history in the United States.
He wishes to conveniently ignore the historically skewed land ownership system in Zimbabwe which the British are responsible for and have not remedied.
He is also unaware that senior MDC leaders like Welshman Ncube have benefited from the land reform program.
It seems to me that a Zimbabwean A-level student could analyse these issues better than Powell showed in his flimsy article.
As he himself has chosen money and conservative political thinking over his black history, he imagines that Zimbabweans should also choose money over their national history as he pins his Zimbabwean foreign policy on blackmail in stating that "With the president (Mugabe) gone,... the United States would be quick to pledge generous assistance..."
Maybe Colin Powell is unaware that this is not the first time the United States has either promised money or actually given money. Muzorewa is a case in point. He was persuaded to dissociate himself from the process of liberation, of which President Mugabe was the vanguard.
In the case of Muzorewa, American money did not work and in the case of the monetary promises at Lancaster House, we are now wiser that they were a hoax meant to allow Rhodesians to consolidate their illegal land ownership rights.
The hallmark of US foreign policy is money and deception as the Iraq and Zimbabwean cases show.
In his article, Powell also states: "The United States - and the European Union - has... frozen their (Zimbabwean leaders) overseas assets." That is just mere propaganda!
What assets have you frozen and why haven't you made them public.
President Mugabe openly declared that if they were to find even kobiri chairo - if you know it Mr Secretary - you should donate it to charity or maybe to some of your brothers and sisters who litter American streets jobless, without shelter and food.
Oh, by the way, can't you solve this problem first before Mr George W. Bush sends you to a land you know nothing about?
The secretary of state also seems to question the mandate bestowed upon President Mugabe by the people of Zimbabwe when he insisted on "... constitutional changes to allow for a transition."
The entire world knows that there were no constitutional changes that were effected when the government which he now serves was selected and not elected into office by Republican Justices in the US Supreme Court.
I think he should be questioning the legitimacy of his master and remove the log in his own eye, before he questions that of our beloved President Mugabe.
How about the leader of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, who Mr Bush recently wined and dinned with at Camp David? When was he elected into power?
I was not aware that Americans can associate with non-elected heads of state, especially coup leaders like Musharraf.
Powell also proffered a favourite American line when they have to deal with a government they do not like.
He said: "We will persist in speaking out strongly in defence of human rights and the rule of law."
What happened in Uganda when an opposition leader was harassed and imprisoned after elections there?
Isn't Yoweri Museveni an American darling? What happened when a court in Malawi recently blocked the deportation of five suspected Al Queda members?
Is there no suspicion that your government is having these whisked to Quatanamo Bay?
By the way, what rule of law applies in Quatanamo Bay and what human rights?
American foreign policy has always been underpinned by double talk, double standards, deception and false promises of money if certain leaders are removed.
By the way, is American money still flowing into Zambia and what has happened to the American-funded trade unionist there?
Zimbabweans should be wary and not succumb to these American machinations.
http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?id=22497&pubdate=2003-07-02
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Preferring Our Violence Wholesale
Posted: Monday, June 30, 2003
Race and Destruction in Black and White
By TIM WISE
I don't know why these things amaze me, but for some reason they always do.
Before the ashes were even cool from the recent riots in Benton Harbor, Michigan, much of white America had decided that it knew what was behind all the mayhem; at least if the white folks who call into talk radio are at all representative.
It wasn't the reason stated by the residents who had engaged in the destruction, of course: namely, a history of police racism, brutality and misconduct, which they saw symbolized most recently by a high-speed police chase from a neighboring township ending in the death of a black motorcyclist.
Of course not. That explanation, though not necessarily justifying mass violence, would still constitute a reason; and having a reason would mean that the rioters were something other than merely insane; and insane is how much of white America prefers to see our black and brown brothers and sisters.
To whites who were calling talk radio in the days following the riots, the violent actions by certain members of the Benton Harbor black community were indicative of cultural depravity, even a biological predisposition to violence: arguments that are never made when whites on college campuses riot, as they have done some three dozen times in the past several years.
In truth, the idea that blacks are more prone to violence and destruction than those of us who are white is so utterly incomprehensible as to boggle the imagination. After all, the people who incessantly wonder why blacks occasionally riot and wreak havoc in their own communities never ask why whites are so quick to wreak havoc in the communities of others.
Indeed, the history of white violence done to non-whites, to say nothing of white violence done to each other--think 1066, think the Holocaust, think Stalin's purges--makes one wonder how anyone could believe persons of European descent were especially peaceful.
It wasn't black people who destroyed one Indian village after another throughout this continent and wiped nearly 100 million people off the face of the planet in the process.
Black folks didn't lynch themselves, or cut off their own ears for souvenirs after burning their own bodies, or hanging themselves from tree limbs.
It wasn't black people who launched a war with Mexico in the name of Manifest Destiny, or conquered Hawaii, or laid siege to the Philippines at the turn of the last century, or planned, authorized, and carried out the terror bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing full well that the victims in each case would invariably be innocent civilians. It wasn't black people who created napalm, and then decided to drop it on Southeast Asians.
It wasn't black people who drew up the war plans to bomb Baghdad's electrical grid in the first Gulf War, thereby rendering water treatment facilities inoperable, even though it was acknowledged that doing so would result in widespread disease and death.
And with the exceptions of Colin Powell and Condi Rice--two black people who have long felt more at home in the presence of white elites than anyone who might actually look like them--it wasn't black folks who lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction so as to launch another war on that nation, killing several thousand civilians and destroying what economic infrastructure remained after a decade of sanctions.
For that matter, even violence in American cities has been the work of whites far more than blacks. Oh sure, we may not think of it as violence, but the effects of white elite actions vis-A -vis our cities has been every bit as destructive as anything thought up by the residents of Watts, Miami, Cincinnati or Detroit, to say nothing of smaller towns like Benton Harbor.
When white political and corporate elites launched "urban renewa" in the 1960's, the destruction wrought upon black peoples was immense. Hundreds of thousands of homes, representing one-fifth of all black housing in the U.S., were destroyed to make way for office buildings, shopping centers and parking lots. Afterward, only one-tenth of the property destroyed was replaced, so displaced families had to rely on crowded apartments, living with relatives, or run-down public housing projects. Interstates were built through the heart of black communities in city after city, impacting not only housing but economic vitality as well, and leaving a congested, loud, disorganized space in their wake.
It is doubtful that the combined amount of property destroyed by blacks in urban riots comes anywhere near the amount of property destroyed by urban renewal, for the benefit of whites.
When white-run banks redlined black communities, refusing to loan money to any businesses or individuals within the borders of those communities, no matter their individual credit worthiness, the effect was as destructive to neighborhood well-being as any riot.
When banks continue to refuse loans in such places, only to turn around and grant the very same loans through their subsidiaries known as sub-prime lenders, and in the process charge 3-5 times higher interest than would be allowed through the bank itself, the effect on black people is economic violence.
When two-thirds of black children in extreme poverty test positive for elevated levels of lead in their blood, thanks to exposure from lead paint in old, dilapidated buildings built by white folks, this is an act of violence.
In fact, white institutions have intentionally exposed black children to lead paint, as with recent revelations that Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute, with the approval of officials from Johns Hopkins University, essentially used black families as guinea pigs for a study on lead abatement in the 1990's. The study, condemned by a Maryland Appeals Court judge, placed poor families of color in housing with varying levels of lead, without telling them the dangers of such exposure. Researchers used incentives like T-shirts, food stamps and payments of $5 each to encourage families to move into contaminated housing, and then after periodic testing of lead levels in the children's blood, withheld information on the extent of their poisoning until it was too late to prevent serious health effects.
Indeed, if riots result in the burning of lead-infested buildings, or the places where such truly evil studies are concocted, we might more properly view such actions as the ultimate act of intra-racial charity, truth be told.
And it's not only in the inner-city where white violence destroys the lives of people of color. When the government in concert with white-owned businesses strip mines uranium on Native American soil, thereby helping to inflate the cancer rate among Navajo exposed to radiation by 1600 percent above the national average, the result is death and destruction as severe as any low-level retail violence by the oppressed themselves.
When white doctors routinely underdiagnose patients of color with serious illnesses; or fail to recommend the same medical interventions as they do for white patients, even when they present the same symptoms, have the same kind of insurance, and come from the same economic background, black lives are lost in numbers that dwarf those lost in riots.
When companies that pollute in white communities receive fines from the EPA that are 500 percent higher than the fines received for polluting in black communities, the result is violence of an especially pernicious form.
In fact, studies have estimated that because African Americans--particularly those of low-income--have less access to wealth and high quality health care, and are more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants, as many as 75,000 blacks die each year above the amount that would be expected to die if wealth, health care and pollutant exposure were equal to that of their white counterparts.
That most whites can't conceive of these things as violence is testimony not to the veracity of the charge, but rather our unwillingness to understand systemic racism and the harm it does to people every day.
So in the white imagination, burning down a building out of anger at police brutality is violence, while destroying a building to make way for a mall is progress, as is chopping down old-growth forest, dumping toxic waste in streams and rivers, or burying it in communities of color.
That's the difference between the violence of the powerful and that of the powerless. Those with power have the capacity to work out our existential crises on the bodies and property of others; those without have to make do torching their own stuff, because they know that the moment they turn their frustrations on those who have remained privileged and sheltered, the power of the state will be turned against them full-force.
And if that day ever came, most white folks wouldn't bat an eye, because we have nothing against violence. We love it, in fact; we glorify it; so long as it's being done by John Wayne, Rambo, Clint Eastwood, Tony Soprano, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush or his kid.
Body counts never bother us, and neither does destroying property, so long as the bodies and the properties are not ours.
Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, activist and father. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com
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Mugabe is Right, Whites Must Give Up the Land!
Posted: Thursday, June 26, 2003
by Koigi Wamwere, www.bbjonline.com/
Today, Europeans own almost all the land in the Americas, almost all the good land in Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, and most of the best land in many African countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. To acquire this land outside Europe, Europeans did not use law, justice or money.
They took it with the gun.
But the West does not want Africans to mention either this fact, or the fact that white people are wrong in wanting to own all the land and everything else in Africa.
And the West is the champion of free speech in the world!
When Africans in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere fought for their independence, it meant two things to them - land and freedom. But when Europe conceded independence to African countries it was self-rule without land and freedom.
And so most Africans continue to be landless while Europeans continue to own millions and millions of hectares of the best land in Africa.
In Kenya, 10 percent of the population, both black and white farmers, owns 73 percent of all arable land. In South Africa, 16 percent of the population, made up of whites, owns 87 percent of all arable land. And in Zimbabwe, 4,500 white farmers - or a mere .03 percent of a population of 13 million Africans - own 12 million hectares or 73 percent of all arable land.
The African majority in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya live under this situation not because they like it or because it is right, moral, fair or just, but only because they are powerless to change it.
There can be no greater proof of lack of independence for, say, Zimbabwe, than this situation where a mere .03 percent is allowed to own 73 percent of all arable land, totally control the nation's agriculture, and own half the country's economy.
Mugabe is a great freedom fighter who fought for the independence of his country but at the behest of the West turned his back on socialism and stayed too long in power. At last, Mugabe has realised that he too is a victim of neo-colonialism and has decided not just to say "no" to the West but to redistribute land in his own country.
Whatever Mugabe's past mistakes, we must agree that on this one question of finally redistributing African land to African people, he is 100 percent right. Mugabe's only fault is that he took too long to do it.
But now that he is finally doing it, all people who believe in fairness and justice must support him.
From what one hears from CNN, BBC and other Western news media, the West stands as one against Mugabe. They accuse him of violating the spirit of reconciliation, and perpetrating racism against white people in Zimbabwe.
Rather than prove anything against Mugabe, the West's accusations only prove how little it thinks of Africans' right to own anything or have meaningful independence.
Could one even imagine a situation in which 4,500 Zimbabwean Africans were allowed to own 12 million hectares of land in Britain, France or any other country in Europe?
The West also accuses Mugabe of violating the spirit of reconciliation between white colonisers and black colonised that was agreed upon at the time of independence. But did this reconciliation mean that colonisers would continue to own everything they had grabbed before independence, and that the Africans who had been robbed of everything would continue to own nothing?
Finally, the very West that is restoring all the money, properties and works of art that it stole from the Jewish people and paying reparations for all the slave labour Jewish people did during the Second World War, is asking that colonial white farmers be paid compensation by Africans.
The British government admits that at the time of independence it made a promise which it never kept, to provide the money necessary to buy out the white farmers. Now it claims that the reason for its failure to keep its own promise is Mugabe's mismanagement of Zimbabwean economy. But the real reason is the British desire that the Zimbabwean and African economies be controlled by British companies and British citizens. What then must Africans do? Starve to death until the British agree to keep their promises?
I am truly surprised at the clamour that I hear for British farmers to be compensated for any loss of land in Zimbabwe. Between Africans who have been working for starvation wages on white farms and white farmers who have made millions of pounds out of their colonial ownership of land in Zimbabwe, it is the white farmers who should compensate Africans.
Africans are entitled to recover their stolen lands from white farmers. And the West has a moral duty to pay not just compensation to white farmers who will lose land, but to pay reparations to Africans now for all the millions of people they killed and kidnapped from Africa during the slave trade. What is good for the Jewish goose is good for the African gander.
Rule of law must mean rule of just law. Sooner or later, colonial wrongs must be corrected all over Africa. And they will not be corrected by substituting white robbers with black robbers. Colonial injustice will be corrected by giving land and freedom not only to Africans in power and government, but to all the people to whom God gave land.
Whether leaders like Moi like it or not, today it is Zimbabwe, tomorrow it will be Kenya, the day after it will be South Africa, and after that it will be the entire continent. The river of freedom and justice is unstoppable.
If white and black people of Africa are to live peacefully in future, the West must stop imposing white people as saviours of black people using arguments that in effect paint white citizens of Africa as either more able technically or less corrupt morally.
Going by the opposition from the West, Mugabe may not survive this war against neo-colonialism. But he is right, and he is bearing the standard for all Africans. Should he fall, other Africans must take up the mantle and fight on to victory.
Wamwere, a Kenyan political activist and former presidential candidate, now lives in Norway. He wrote this essay in April 2000 and it first appeared in The East African newspaper.
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AFRICA: THE TRUTH!
Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2003
by George Alleyne, Newsday/TT
The Emancipation Support Committee and other like groups should urge on the University of the West Indies the need for it to conduct research into the history of Africa, its level of industrial growth, including manufacturing industries such as cotton manufacture, garment manufacture, food processing, its mining industries including the smelting of iron ore, and its trading before the colonisers came.
The young people in the Caribbean of African descent must be rescued from the bondage of mind conditioning, induced by the deliberate falsifying of African history by Europeans, who because of their superior military power, including the possession and use of gunpowder, were able to seize large parts of Africa and control the continent's raw materials and trade.
The Emancipation Support Committee should insist that African History should be taught, not simply at the level of Form Four or thereabouts in secondary school, but from the Forms One, as well as, initially, at the primary school level.
The Europeans - Portuguese, Spaniards, British, French, Dutch, Germans and what have you - would enslave large areas and millions of people of Africa. Having done this they sought to justify slavery with utterly absurd conclusions of racial superiority. C. A. Bayley would state in a review published in the Times Literary Supplement of August 8, 1997 "What Language Hath Joined", that a French anthropologist, Paul Topinard, had in the 1880s, categorised human noses "from the heroically straight European Aryan nose, through the weak and stunted East Indian nose, to the scarcely human 'Negro' snub nose".
Bayley went further and told the story of an English Census official in India, H. H. Risley, working with the Indian Civil Service, who had sent out census enumerators through every part of India, measuring Brahmin noses, Rajput skulls, along with the length of arms of tribal folk, to create what he [Risley]believed was a racialist ladder of human evolution.
James Anthony Froude, an exceptional 19th century British Imperialist, offered clearly laughable 'craniological' measurements as 'proof' that blacks were inferior to whites. "The history of this aberration - racism justified by the empirical objectivity of occidental science - is well known", Richard Waswo would state in his "The Founding Legend of Western Civilisation", published in 1997 [Page 229].
It is instructive that the African, who is dismissed by the European as unproductive in an effort to justify his continuing exploitation, produced substantial surpluses for trade, including maize, beans, sesame seeds and rice. So great were the exports of rice from Tanganyika to Zanzibar that the Rufigi river valley was referred to as Calcutta Mdogo or "Little Calcutta".[Helge Kjekshus: Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika 1850-1950 - Page 32].
The Mahenge tribe, further down the Rufiji, and members of the same tribe, this time along the Ulanga/Kilombero river, in 1900 produced surpluses, Kjekshus pointed out, amounting to almost 4,000,000 kilograms. Again, the same writer would stress that thousands of tons of foodstuffs, iron, salt, tobacco and grain were routed through the [indigenous] trading networks of East Africa.
Cotton weaving is estimated to have been around East Africa from between the 10th and the 14th centuries, brought by the Persians, and stone spindles, which were excavated at Kilwa, have been dated to the age between the 10th and 16th centuries, and demonstrated "great development in the manufacture of cloth, probably cotton". [N. Chittick. "Kilwa: A Preliminary Report"]. Cotton weaving had been of tremendous importance to the indigenous economies in many parts of East Africa. Indeed, in the 1850s, it was said to be the only important handicraft in Zanzibar, Kjekshus wrote in Page 10 of his book, from which I quoted earlier.
About the same time as the initial European contacts with West Africa, Africans, even by the standards of the late 1990s, were relatively advanced in agricultural productivity,
But it was much more than that. Jack P. Greene, in a feature article, "The Englishing of America", in the Times Literary Supplement of December 12, 1997 [Page 12], would cite John Thornton: "Africans had well developed mining and metal-working, sufficient trade and waterborne transport to sustain a class of professional merchants and to permit considerable agricultural specialisation, and a significant manufacturing sector that supplied tools and clothing needs...."
The producers and/or traders of West Africa, much as those in East Africa, had a tendency toward long distance, as well as specialised trade. A. G. Hopkins in his benchmark "An Economic History of West Africa" [Pages 58-59], quoted by the late Trinidad and Tobago Economist, Max B. Ifill, in his 1986 "The African Diaspora" [Page 71], would have a great deal to say on this: "....the pastoralists of the Sahara-savanna border traded livestock, dairy produce and salt with the cultivators of the savanna in return for millet and cloth. In turn the savanna region traded livestock, salt, dried fish, potato and cloth with the peoples of the forest, from whom they received....kola nuts, ivory, ironware and cloth. Finally, producers in the forest sold various foodstuffs and manufactures to coastal settlements in exchange for fish and sea salt."
In the early days of their trade with West Africa, Europeans were content to purchase cloth throughout the coastal areas for resale. John Thornton, in his book "Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400-1800", published in 1992, pointed out that Mauretania, Senegambia, Ivory Coast, Benin, Yorubaland and what have you exported cloth to other areas of Africa through European middlemen, and that Congo [formerly Zaire] has been described as "among the major textile-producing centres of the world".
European greed would surface. The Portuguese intervened, militarily, in West African trade along the Upper Guinea coast, as early as the 15th century, and as the late Guyanese Socialist, Walter Rodney, wrote in his classic, "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" [Page 121], the Portuguese interfered in the transfers of indigo dye from one African community to another. They commandeered the trade in salt throughout the coast of Angola, in cowries in the Congo, and that of high quality palm oil between northern and southern Angola.
The Portuguese forcibly interrupted the flourishing canoe trade in textiles between the Ivory Coast [then Cape Lahou] and Ghana [the Gold Coast], by constructing a fort at Axim. [Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa]. When the Dutch seized Axim in 1637, they found the coastal trade still thriving. They attempted, without success, to end the canoe trade, but were well enough armed to force the traders to carry Dutch goods, and for the people of the Ivory Coast to purchase a determined amount of Dutch goods. Rodney would state: "Partly by establishing a stranglehold on the distribution of cloth around the shores of Africa, and partly by swamping African products by importing in bulk, European traders succeeded in putting an end to the expansion of cloth manufacture."
I ask the reader to forgive me for quoting Walter Rodney once again, when he stressed that by the time Africa entered the age of colonisation [by the Europeans], West Africa had been 'persuaded' to shift to the export of raw cotton cloth and the import of manufactured cotton cloth. It has been established through radiocarbon readings [see J. H. H. Speke's "What led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile"] that East Africa had been producing iron since 500 B.C. The iron produced in Usangi, in Central Tanganyika, for example, was said to have been "as famed as Swedish steel", and there was a thriving trade. Kjekshus cites a German officer as stating that 150,000 market hoes were sold annually in a market town in East Africa.
But by early in the last century foreign imports, imposed on East African nations by their colonial masters, began to hobble the iron-smelting industry there, and several blacksmiths, with the drop in business, abandoned their craft to become porters etc. [G. Lechaptois in Aux Rives du Tanganyika].
Alvin Toffler, quoted in his book "The Third Wave", published in 1981 by Bantam, New York, the following: "The commercial policy applied by all the colonising countries was to open as much as possible the markets of their colonies to metropolitan products....even in the case of independent countries commercial treaties were concluded by agreements or by force."
Having subjugated large parts of Africa, crippled African industries by denying the colonies concerned the right to impose protective tariff barriers against cheaply produced European goods; enslaved the people because of superior fire power and the cynical application of a divide and rule policy, Europeans would parrot obscene phrases about so-called African inferiority.
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