African Liberation Day: the people must prevail Horace Campbell (2008-05-22)

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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