AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY: THE PEOPLE MUST PREVAIL
Horace Campbell
In this essay, Horace Campbell looks at the importance of Africa
Liberation Day, its changing relevances as Africans are betrayed by the
architects of first independence and how, through struggle, we can reclaim
and fulfill its promise.
INTRODUCTION
On May 25, 2008, peace loving peoples all over the world will celebrate
African Liberation Day. This will be the fiftieth anniversary of the
setting aside of a day to commemorate those who sacrificed for the
liberation of the African peoples at home and abroad. In 1963, the
Organization of African Unity was established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Then,
the main emphasis was on the liberation of territories from colonial
rule. At the end of apartheid in 1994 new ideas of liberation were placed
on the agenda for Africa. Questions of health, food security,
environmental justice, decent education, the rights of women, the politics of
inclusion and cultural freedoms were placed as the core of the liberation
of Africa. African women at the grassroots are campaigning for a new
form of popular power where African peoples will have the voice to
intervene in the political process where they live and where they work. These
men and women at the grassroots seek to give meaning to political
participation and realize the dream of C.L.R. James who envisioned that
?every cook can govern.? This form of politics elevates the political
participation of the people beyond periodic voting. African youths at home
and abroad are looking forward to new institutions and new sites where
the ideas of peace, love and human dignity will prevail.
THE ORIGINS OF AFRICA DAY AND AFRICAN LIBERATION YESTERDAY
At the All African Peoples Conference, held in Ghana, in 1958 it was
agreed that one-day would be set aside as a national day of remembrance
for African freedom fighters. Ghana had achieved its independence in
1957 and one year later Kwame Nkrumah called a conference of African
workers, freedom fighters and champions for justice. Nkrumah who had been
inspired by Garveyism and the self mobilization and self organization of
the people took up the idea of African Liberation day and successfully
promoted the idea to the leaders who formed the Organization of African
Unity. The first celebration of Africa Day had begun in Harlem, USA by
the followers of Marcus Garvey who had called for African Unity from
as far back as 1919.
When Ghana achieved its independence in 1957 Nkrumah maintained that
the independence of Ghana would be ?incomplete without the independence
of all of Africa.? Together with the principal freedom fighters within
Ghana, Nkrumah established a Pan-African Secretariat within the Ghanaian
government and appointed George Padmore to run the secretariat. The
task of the secretariat was to act as the coordinating point for the
establishment of links with freedom fighters on the African continent and
for the secretariat to be a center for information to support those
fighting for freedom.
At that historical moment freedom was conceived of as freedom of the
peoples and freedom of the states from colonial rule. To carry forward
this task the Ghanaian government deployed the resources to support
freedom fighters, trade unionists and political activists for independence.
This was the spirit that inspired the calling of the All-African
Peoples? Conferences in 1958. It was at this meeting where Patrice Lumumba
was introduced to the wider Pan African struggles. In tandem with this
people-centered activity, Nkrumah also convened the conferences of
Independent African States to establish a diplomatic framework for the
political union of Africa.
Because most of the present governments in Africa are opposed to the
liberation of the peoples and the Union of the peoples of Africa the
detractors of African Union present the struggle for the United States of
Africa as a Gadaffi Initiative. Instead of Africa Day becoming a day to
honor and celebrate those who struggled for independence, the day has
been taken away from the people and the officials use this as another
opportunity to organize embassy parties and dinners to seek assistance
from the imperialists who are today called ?donors.? Nowhere is the idea
of Pan Africanism more devalued than where Pan Africanists seek to use
the name of Pan Africanism to establish NGO?s to seek assistance from
the very same forces that undermine African independence. Yoweri
Museveni has used the current Secretariat of the Pan African Movement in
Kampala as political football.
AFRICA DAY AND THE OAU IN PRACTICE
Fifty years after the start of the celebration of Africa Day in 1958
there are still colonial territories in Africa. The most well known is
the case of the Western Sahara. The military invasion and occupation of
Iraq by the USA demonstrated clearly the reality that the days of
colonial occupation are not yet over. In North Africa and in Palestine the
legacies and problems of military occupation reinforce and support the
dictatorial rule of the Egyptian ruling elite.
At the time of Kwame Nkrumah, Nasser and the peoples of Egypt
represented one base of support for freedom fighters. Today, the leaders of
Egypt seek to establish a dynasty and hinder the full support for those
fighting against occupation whether in Palestine or in Iraq. Peace
activists in North Africa like peace activists in the other parts of Africa
oppose occupation and genocidal violence. It is this reversal for the
peoples that ensure that the politics of retrogression thrives. With the
absence of committed leadership, militarists seize the discourse of
liberation to establish movements for emancipation and liberation to foment
genocidal politics. Genocidal politics thrives when the politics of
exploitation, exclusivism, racism, militarism, religious dogmatism,
extremism, and patriarchy intersect in a nested loop to oppress the people.
Sudan is one society where the recursive processes of genocidal
thinking, genocidal institution, genocidal politics and genoicidal economic
relations are reproduced to perpetuate war and the wanton destruction of
human lives.
There is a new peace movement across the globe and the celebration of
Africa Day is one component of the struggles against genocide and
genocidal thinking. This peace movement in Africa must link up with the
global movement for peace so that liberation in Africa will be associated
with emancipation, peace, social justice and the well being of the
people.
THE OAU LIBERATION COMMITTEE
It was very significant that it was in those states that supported
African liberation with moral, material and political support that this day
was observed at the national level as a public holiday. After
imperialism killed Patrice Lumumba and orchestrated a military coup d ?etat
against Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and the Tanzanian people stood
out in the ways in which the idea of African Liberation was respected
and the society made tremendous sacrifices for the liberation of
Africa. Julius Nyerere established a tradition of self-sacrifice that was
followed by those committed to ending all forms of exploitation. The
Tanzanian society could not have supported liberation and hosted the OAU
Liberation Committee to spearhead liberation without the mobilization and
politicization of the ordinary people.
One can compare the sacrifices of the Tanzanian peoples with the
present Xenophobia in states such as South Africa and Angola where former
freedom fighters have used the history of the liberation struggles to hold
on to political power, to enrich themselves and diminish the meaning
of independence and liberation The attacks on African migrants in South
Africa and the violence unleashed against poor workers in 2008
represented one example of how the former leaders of the African liberation
process have become obstacles to the further emancipation of Africa.
Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF leadership in Zimbabwe represents the extreme
example of freedom fighters who started out on the side of the people
but used state power to enrich a small clique while shouting about
imperialism. Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Meles Zenawi of
Ethiopia and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea represent leaders who once used the
language of liberation while setting up militaristic states to oppress
the people of Africa.
WILL THE PEOPLE PREVAIL?
The momentum and energy of the poor ensured that the OAU through the
liberation committee supported the process of decolonization in Africa
despite the fact that the generals constituted the majority at the
summit. The formation of the OAU in 1963 had been a compromise among member
states that could not agree on how to respond to the clear external
manipulation of the Congo after those representing the interests of Western
mining capital murdered Patrice Lumumba in 1961.It was in this Congo
where the traditions of militarism, corruption and genocide had taken
deep roots.
Those who yesterday opposed African liberation and supported dictators
such as Siad Barre (Somalia), Arap Moi (Kenya) F幨ix Houphou褮-Boigny y
(Ivory Coast) and Hastings Banda (Malawi) now write books on failed
states in Africa. This language of corruption and notions of Africa
representing a breeding ground for ?terrorism? is one component of
psychological war against Africa. The objective of the propaganda is for the
young to forget the imperial crimes in Africa. In this way the dream of
the young is to escape Africa to Europe.
The imperialists who orchestrated and planned the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba have reframed their role in the destabilization of Africa
and now write books celebrating their role in the destruction of African
sovereignty. Larry Devlin who was the Chief of Station of the Central
Intelligence Agency in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) has written a book
(Chief of Station) to cover up the crimes of US imperialism in Africa.
Mobutu represented the biggest obstacle to African liberation and unity
and for thirty five years Mobutism supported genocidal politics and
genocidal leaders in Central Africa from Rwanda to Burundi and Uganda
under Idi Amin. The clause of non-interference in the internal affairs of
states was the expedient to protect the confraternity of dictators.
Despite these setbacks, the people prevailed and are now placing the
question of the union of the peoples of Africa as the urgent task of
contemporary liberation.
The formation of the African Union in 2001 was a conscious effort to
transcend the traditions of violence and militarism. Defeat through
victory Just as how at the end of slavery in the British territories 1834
the slave masters were compensated, so in the period at the end of
apartheid the West intensified the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation,
liberalization and de regulation so that the architects of apartheid and
their black allies could enrich themselves.
Firstly, through IMF and the World Bank the basic rights to education,
housing, health care and decent wages have been eroded. This has meant
that the African poor have borne the brunt of the world capitalist
depression. When Alan Greenspan, (former head of the Federal Reserve in the
USA) noted that this capitalist depression has been the worst since
1920, he neglected to note that the poor and the exploited in Africa bore
the brunt of this capitalist depression. Food riots in Senegal, Ivory
Coast, South Africa, Egypt, Somalia and the Cameroons are the outward
signs of the stirrings of a new liberation movement where the peoples of
Africa are demanding food, clothing, shelter and access to proper
health care.
Secondly, African liberation now requires that the people control their
governments and that issues of financial planning and budgeting are
discussed in the villages, townships and cities of Africa. In Africa, the
politics of retrogression has become the norm, and the leadership has
taken ? to cultural proportions - the tendency to turn their backs on
the people as soon as they take office. Hence, though the African Union
has stipulated that no leader can come to power through military coup
leaders now resort to electoral theft as evidenced recently in Kenya and
Zimbabwe. There is now an urgent need to create new democratic
institutions to strengthen popular participation and representation.
Parliamentary democracy on its own is not enough; it must be supplemented with
and strengthened by other popular institutions and associations like the
local governments, cooperative movements, independent workers, women,
student and youth organizations, assemblies or organizations for the
environmental concerns and for minority rights, and so forth A new
leadership must ensure that this is the dominant political culture, with
enough flexibility to allow for changes when changes are needed to
strengthen and further consolidate that culture.
This new political culture will eventually shift power from the current
corrupt and unrepresentative political groupings, to local communities
whose chosen representatives will be accountable to the interests of
these local communities first not those of a small center that
monopolizes power in the national political groupings.
Thirdly, in the midst of the millions dying from the AIDS pandemic the
African governments are being coerced to cut delivery of health care.
The provision of health for the masses of the people represents one of
the fundamental goals of liberation in this era. All across the
continent the requirements for a healthy life are pressing when the poor are
seeking environments with clean air, clean water, and neighbourhoods
cleared of mosquito holding areas and homes that are not dilapidated.
LIBERATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REPAIR
Environmental repair and environmental justice form the fourth link in
the chain of liberation in this new century. All across the continent
the present leaders glorify the extraction of petroleum resources
without regard for the health and safety of the peoples. From the North of
Africa down to the Namibian coast petroleum companies are looting African
oil while destroying the environment. Nigeria represents an extreme
example of where environmental racism abounds and where a small clique is
enriched while the majority of the peoples are exploited.
As much as 76 per cent of all the natural gas from Petroleum production
in Nigeria is flared compared to 0.6 per cent in USA, 4.3 per cent in
the UK, 21.0 per cent in Libya. The flaring is one of the most severe
of the numerous hazards to which the peoples of the Delta and the Rivers
States are exposed. At temperatures of 1,300 to 1,400 degrees
centigrade, the multitude of flares in the Delta heat up everything, causing
noise pollution, and producing CO2, VOC, CO, NOx and particulates around
the clock. The emission of CO2 from gas flaring in Nigeria releases 35
million tons of CO2 a year and 12 million tons of methane, which means
that Nigerian oil fields contribute more in global warming than the
rest of the world together. (Claude Ake, 1996)
It is in Africa where the petroleum companies are engaged in crimes
against Africans and crimes against nature. Many of the gas flares are
situated very close to villages, sometimes within a hundred metres of
homes of ordinary citizens. Petroleum companies have been flaring at some
sites for 24 hours a day for more than 30 years. Despite this record,
the standard view of environmental management, is that the basic rights
of private property and of profit maximization, come before the health
and welfare of the peoples of Nigeria in general, and in particular, the
peoples who live in the Niger Delta.
Concerns for environmental justice are kept subservient to concerns for
economic efficiency and capital accumulation. Successive governments
in Nigeria have been willing accomplices to this degradation, the oil
companies are protected while the health and welfare of Nigerian society
suffers irreparable. The cuts in the social wage of the population make
it impossible for local communities to support health clinics and
there is an absence of drugs in most rural hospitals. The oil revenue is
recycled to prop up the political class. Since 1958, Royal Dutch Shell
has extracted billions from the lands of the Niger Delta. It is in this
situation where a movement has developed called Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
Should African freedom fighters be supporting the armed struggles in
the Niger Delta when we are presented with the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta? Acts of militarism even in the face of the
keenest oppression can only be supported in the present era when all other
forms of popular political mobilization have been exhausted. This is
the concrete lesson from the wars in Sierra Leone and ?the revolutionary
forces of Foday Sanko.? We have also learnt the limits of armed
revolutionary struggles from the wars of liberation in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo. From the military campaign of Kabila, the intervention
by Wamba dia Wamba, the senseless wars between Angola, Rwanda, Uganda,
Zimbabwe and Namibia along with prolonged fighting in Eastern Congo
there are clear lessons for liberation.
These acts of militarism and war force revolutionaries to grasp the
meanings of liberation and liberation movements today.
The legacies of the defeat in the Congo The Congo stands at the heart
of Africa and peace in the Congo will have a tremendous impact on social
reconstruction and transformation in Africa. Regional cooperation
between truly democratic states will change the African Union and there
will be a quantum change in the politics of Africa when the ideas and
principles of African wildfire spread to all parts of the continent. In
order to forestall the full operation of the Peace and Security Council of
the African Union, the United States has established the US Africa
command to remilitarize Africa at the moment when the driving force behind
African liberation is the peace and social justice movements. It is
this peace and justice movement that inspired the continent wide
opposition to the Africa command so much so that the US government has to
resort to covert agreements to shore up the allies who are secretly
colluding with western militarism.
Potentially were countries such as Angola, the DR Congo and the Sudan
democratic states, they could collectively put together a major program
of self-development, funded entirely by them for the whole Eastern and
Southern Africa region. The West understands this and it is for this
reason that the European Union and the USA are not supporters of peace
and demilitarisation in Africa. In the face of the crisis of US
capitalism the Chinese have emerged as a major force in the political economy of
Africa. This new engagement has been significantly different from the
period when the political leaders of China had supported the
decolonization of Africa and provided support for Tanzania to build the Tazara
railroad.
>From liberation to emancipation As we come to the end of the first
decade of a new century this moment provides one other opportunity to
reflect on the tasks of liberation in the last fifty years and to assess
how far the tasks and goals of liberation were realized. The crisis of
the nature of human existence is manifest in all spheres of social
relations; in the relations between humans (men and women), in the
relationship between humans and the environment and in the forms of economic
organization. It is now clearer that African liberation is not possible
within the capitalist mode of production. When Walter Rodney wrote the
book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he had stated unequivocally that
capitalism stands in the path of further human transformation. Now this
is even clearer with the nested loop of environmental crimes, food
crisis, economic terrorism, pandemics and the absence of representative
democratic forms.
African women are leading the call for a new definition of liberation
beyond one where African males occupy the positions of power of European
and send their children to schools to be educated in European
languages and in the ideas of patriarchy, domination over nature and private
property. Since the period of the anti-apartheid struggles there has been
a deepening of the understanding of liberation to encompass issues
that are common on both sides of the Atlantic such as regional economic
integration, democratisation, the end to genocide, reparations, the
emancipation of women, the end to sexism and heterosexism, the humanization
of the male and the humanization of the planet. The African Liberation
Struggle of Tomorrow How can Africans be validated as human beings and
lay the foundations for a new sense of personhood? This question has
been sharpened by the major turning point in human transformations with
the revolutionary technological changes that carried potential for
healing as well as the potential for destruction. Books on Apartheid
medicine have pointed to the ways in which Africans are being used as guinea
pigs. The questions of the worth of the value of African life, of human
life will be contested in the 21st century.
Millions are dying from preventable diseases and the health
infrastructure has deteriorated while health workers leave Africa in droves. Where
Information technology and robotics are changing the nature of work,
education and leisure and the traditional understanding economics, the
advances in gene splitting technologies are changing the very ways in
which plants and animals are produced. The information revolution is
bringing telecommunications technology to most communities across the
continent and the peoples are now able to keep in constant contact with
their village communities. African youths are using this technology to
bring knowledge and information to others in order to break the control
over information. Imperialism seeks to tap into the cognitive skills of
the peoples while the governments look to Europe for models of education.
Africa is the home of the richest biodiversity on the planet. While
some leaders are struggling for land, the biotech and pharmaceutical
companies are patenting African medicinal plants. The threat of the major
biotech companies to patent life forms along with the new rules of the
World Trade Organization relating to intellectual property rights contain
the seeds of undermining all of the gains that were made in the
context of the struggle for self determination. By presenting life as an
?invention? the biotechnical companies and the food corporations seek to
eliminate the African farmer altogether. It is against this background
that Africa is providing the lead in the World Trade Organization against
the patenting of life forms. In the book, the Liberal Virus: Permanent
War and the Americanization of the World, Samir Amin has warned of the
dangers to the pauperization of the majority of farmers in Africa if
African government follow the model of agriculture of Europe and the
United States.
AFRICAN LIBERATION AND THE CENTRALITY OF GRASSROOTS WOMEN
Whether it is in the area of food production, health care, care for the
sick or the education of the youth there is a disproportionate burden
that is carried by women of the grassroots. One of the most important
new development in the debates on revolution and transformation in the
21st century lies in the centrality of the place of the black women of
the producing classes in the struggle for social transformation. This
discussion which is going on in Africa and in the Americas emanates from
a long tradition of struggle by black women and the determination that
the black woman would never be again be marginalized in the African
revolution.
The ensuing debates on women?s rights, racism, class alliances,
environmental racism, gender and social reproduction hold the seeds of the
most profound understanding of the limits of the concentration on
productive forces that was the hallmark of radical politics for the generation
after 1917. The question of how the understanding of the oppression of
women is linked to the household as a site of politics brings home the
point that one cannot be politically progressive and support any form
of domination or intolerance. The women's movement successfully
challenged the labor theory of value and influenced our understanding of the
centrality of household production in the capitalist labor process. These
revolutionary women have deepened our understanding of the importance
of care and that the discipline of economics will remain one branch of
capitalist ideas unless it takes into consideration care and
reproductive capabilities of women.
Female labor power was never calculated in the economic models of
nineteenth century revolutionaries. Black women such as Sojourner Truth and
Harriet Tubman yesterday and women such as Angela Davis and Nawal El
Saadawi today placed the question of the liberation of women on the
political agenda. Throughout the twentieth century the women?s movement
internationally made great strides in placing the gender, care and
housework as fundamental questions of revolution. However, in the main, this
mainstream movement was dominated by conceptions of progress and reason
that emanated from Western Europe.
It was the radical black feminists who have reflected on how the growth
of emancipatory ideas has contributed towards the project of our
collective emancipation. By framing and ending the separation of the woman
question from the other sites of struggles and making gender
transformation the central question of the struggle, the progressive women inside
the left movement and in the radical formations have taken the
political lead in the fight for justice. Hence in Africa today, the combined
energies of the women from all parts of the Sudan are seeking to place
the issues of rape, sexual terrorism, violation and gender oppression at
the center of the debate on the future of the Sudan. Fundamentalism of
all forms represents one component of the counter revolutionary period
in which we live.
UBUNTU
There is need for a new orientation on liberation to conceptualize the
values of ubuntu as the basis for liberation. The concept incorporates
values of sharing, cooperation and spiritual health. Ubuntu,
emancipatory politics and reparations are the key concepts for liberation
tomorrow. The attainment of ubuntu is bound up with the political union of
Africa. The concrete understanding of the cultural unity of Africa and the
contributions of the African peoples towards human transformation are
being refined every day through day to day struggles. Cheik Anta Diop
who has studied the linguistic basis of African Unity emphasized the
importance of African languages in the push for continental unity. African
Liberation will be meaningless if it is not rooted in African
languages and in the genius of the African woman. The aspirations of Diop,
which were outlined in his book on the Economic and Cultural Basis for a
Federated State, form the core of the African Union of tomorrow. Diop was
clear that his idea on industrialization and regeneration of Africa
was not based simply on the development of the productive forces without
reference to the working people of Africa. Diop wrote clearly of the
requirement of effective representation of women at all levels of
governance.
The future of African liberation will be informed by a new mode of
politics where ordinary African men, women and children will be able to
revel in the idea of Africa for the Africans at home and abroad and tear
down the borders of oppression and control which were created in 1885.
The future of Pan Africanism and the AU must reinforce the traditional
respect for the elders and should raise up a new tradition, respect for
young people. This new tradition calls for Africa to lead the world in
the use of all means to support the emancipation of African women and
girls and to end all forms of oppression.
This is the essence of reparations, peace and justice!
*Horace Campbell is the author of the well known book, Rasta and
Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. His latest book, Reclaiming
Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation is
published by David Philip of Cape Town, South Africa.
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