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) Félix Houphouët-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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