Category Archives: African Diaspora

The issues that keep African-descendants apart based on geography, religion, complexion, gender and nation of citizenship, and how to overcome these issues to create unity.

Tear Down This Flag

As everyone is well aware by now, Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole in front of the State House in South Carolina on June 27 and took down the Confederate Flag that had waved defiantly since 1961, the centennial of the Confederacy and, coincidentally (right) the approximate time of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement (hence the defiance).

As she brought the flag down, she was immediately arrested, and the flag was re-hoisted within the hour.

Color Of Change (http://www.colorofchange.org) shortly thereafter circulated an online petition drive to have the charges against Sis. Bree dropped and to have the flag permanently removed from state government property.

We can think of few better tributes to the spirit that is celebrated in the first week of July than to repost the appeal from Color Of Change for Sis. Bree and also to repost the iconic speech by Ancestor Frederick Douglass, “What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?”

Here is the post from Color Of Change from June 27:

Early this morning, a multiracial group of Carolinians led by teachers and activists took down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds — within an hour the state had raised the hateful banner once again in time for an 11 A.M. white supremacist rally.

Bree, the Black woman who climbed the pole and cut down the flag, was arrested and taken into custody by Capitol Police. She should be promptly released from jail, any charges should be dropped, and the legislature should immediately vote to permanently remove the flag.

I demand all charges against Bree are immediately dropped and that South Carolina never raise the flag again.

According to a statement from the activists they took down the flag because:

“We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets.”

The Confederate flag was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. Any government that recognizes the flag is declaring that it cherishes a history of racial terror.

Taking down the flag is just one step but one that strikes a blow at the visible symbol of white supremacy. Make no mistake about it, however, racism isn’t just a flag or words it’s baked into our economy and inequities in our democracy and criminal justice system.

In Bree’s own words:

“It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”

South Carolina officials have sided with white supremacists in choosing to restore the flag before a planned rally. The legislature must immediately vote to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the capitol and all state buildings.

I stand with Bree!

Thanks and peace,

Rashad, Arisha, Hope, Brandi, Brittaney, Johnny and the entire ColorOfChange.org team

Color Of Change later released an Update: Bree Newsome was released from jail and the state is throwing the book at her. She and Jimmy Tyson, the white ally supporting her from the ground, were both charged with “defacing monuments on state capitol grounds” and face up to 3 years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine. This follows a growing trend of prosecutors from Oakland to Baltimore and across the country overcharging people who take non-violent direct action in defense of Black lives. Sign up here to stay updated on ways to help the fight to drop the charges: http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/DropTheFlagDropTheCharges/?source=mailingSignOn

The Stars & Bars vs. the Stars & Stripes

There has also been much discussion regarding the importance of the Confederate Flag as a symbol of culture or of hatred in South Carolina in the first place. Some argue that the flag itself is only a reflection of heritage and history, overlooking the fact that it’s the flag of what would today be regarded as a gang of traitors that plotted to overthrow the United States government and, incidentally, lost the resulting war. Apparently, flag apologists never asked whether or not any group that declared war against a sitting government was ever allowed to fly its flag in that country afterward.

Besides this point, there is the fact that the Confederate flag is not a simple symbol of “southern culture” but is, in fact, a symbol of the enslavement of Afrikan people, a point that backers of the flag would apparently prefer be kept under wraps. This fact is clearly spelled out in the Couth Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession, which we share below. Its numerous references to their defense of the “states’ rights” to own slaves should be obvious:

South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession
Convention of South Carolina
December 20, 1860

DECLARATION OF THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES WHICH INDUCE AND JUSTIFY THE SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA FROM THE FEDERAL UNION.

The People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D. 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.

In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, “that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”

They further solemnly declared that whenever any “form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.” Deeming the Government of Great Britain to have become destructive of these ends, they declared that the Colonies “are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; adopted for itself a Constitution, and appointed officers for the administration of government in all its departments — Legislative, Executive and Judicial. For purposes of defense, they united their arms and their counsels; and, in 1778, they entered into a League known as the Articles of Confederation, whereby they agreed to entrust the administration of their external relations to a common agent, known as the Congress of the United States, expressly declaring in the first article, “that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not, by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”

Under this Confederation the War of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3d September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the Independence of the Colonies in the following terms:

“Article 1.– His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.”

Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country as a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended, for the adoption of the states, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.

The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed, the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.

If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were — separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.

By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But, to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On 23d May, 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her people, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government, with defined objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties, to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert, that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused for years past to fulfil their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its 4th Article, provides as follows:

“No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio river.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the general government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the state government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which this Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the Common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the subversion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons, who, by the Supreme Law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety.

On the 4th March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced, that the South shall be excluded from the common Territory; that the Judicial Tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The Guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error, with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the people of South Carolina, by our delegates, in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

We rest our case. For now.

More on this and other tidbits of American history can be found at the website http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/south-carolina-declaration-of-causes-of-secession/.

Human Rights Organizations Speak Out on the Charleston Massacre

By now, the news media have run out of excuses to insist that the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was anything other than a hate crime. Politicians from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to several US Congress Members have called for the Confederate Flag that still waves in front of the South Carolina State House, considered a key inspiration for the murderous rampage of Dylann Storm Roof, to be taken down. Church leaders and prominent members of the Afrikan American community have spoken words of sympathy and healing for the families of the victims and for the communities of South Carolina and, frankly, across the South, as they struggle to come to grips with a yawning racial divide that they have ignored for far too long.

A number of Human Rights Organizations across the United States have made statements concerning the massacre of nine Afrikan people as they prayed in a Charleston, South Carolina church on Wednesday, June 17. A few of these statements were sent to us, and we share them with you below.

A related post includes statements from several Pan-Afrikan organizations, and we will offer some of our thoughts in a separate post as well.

Heather Gray of the Justice Initiative wrote the following article for Counterpunch Magazine:

The Violent Roots of Southern Racism
The Massacre in Charleston: “What Then Must We Do?”
By Heather Gray
Counterpunch

On Wednesday, June 17th, 2015 three black men and six black women were killed by a white youth in Charleston, South Carolina’s renowned Emanuel AME Church. Below are their names:

Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old

Suzy Jackson, 87 years old

Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old

Rev. De’Payne Middleton-Doctor, 49 years old

Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old

Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old

Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, 74 years old

Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old

Myra Thompson, 59 years old

Regarding the loss of these remarkable community leaders at the Emanuel AME Church, I am reminded of the “Sweet Honey in the Rock” song named appropriately “Biko”. This was after the brutal 1977 killing of South Africa’s Steve Biko by the South African apartheid regime. Biko was the one of the major founders of the “Black Consciousness Movement” in South Africa. He was famous for his saying “black is beautiful!” Indeed. Sweet Honey sang “You can break one human body, I see ten thousand Bikos”.

Seeing ten thousand “Bikos”? Yes, I would say that we are already witnessing thousands of people expressing outrage at this painful killing in Charleston. So the fact is that there might be a killing of our leaders, but thousands or millions of people will honor them and continue their work for justice in whatever way they can.

This heartbreaking massacre did not occur in isolation. It has been identified as a hate crime. I frankly think it should be identified as domestic terrorism. And, unfortunately, this incident in Charleston was not unique. It is part of a long and painful white supremacist culture in America. The roots run deep. It keeps raising its ugly head.

But then, we can look for our enemy and often realize it is us. Those of us born and bred in the United States. In fact, when President George W. Bush said he was going after terrorists following 9/11 I thought “Good, that means he’ll need to go after the Klan and many right wing Christian groups in America.” It was, of course, wishful thinking on my part.

Here’s what Raw Story/Alternet had to say in its June 18, 2015 article by Alex Henderson:

When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups (Henderson)

The problem, therefore, rests with those of us who are white and of European ancestry. We are the ones who created this culture and maintain it today. Most of us refuse to admit or acknowledge our racist past and the immorality of it much less to understand and teach its history of exploitation so that we can move beyond it. We keep our heads in the sand most of the time and it clouds our minds and distorts our vision. Generally, we also let other whites get away with too much when we should be stopping them in their tracks. Then many of us teach our youth that because they are white they are somehow special compared to others in the world. It’s a false and distorted pride and resides in a vacuous empty shell of lies.

I would venture to say that many whites, particularly in the South, are still of the opinion that there are different species of our modern humans. This is called racial essentialism, as in, there is different biological intellectual capacity or other characteristics such as industry and character between people of color and so-called whites.

As Professor William Richman in 2006 has stated regarding his article on genetics: “This article answers that basic question (of racial essentialism) by resorting to the rapidly expanding field of molecular population genetics…There simply are no genetically-based pan-“racial” differences in character, intelligence, or any other set of traits crucial to individual or societal success or position; racial essentialism is intellectually bankrupt (Richman).

I invite you to read Richman’s excellent and detailed article about recent genetics studies regarding the dispersal of humans from Africa – Genetic Residues Of Ancient Migrations: An End To Biological Essentialism And The Reification Of Race.

Our different colors are another issue often used to differentiate humans, yet we are all “homo sapiens” with different colors. The colors have to do with our closeness or not to the equator (please go to the footnote below for more detail on skin color.) Race differentiation? There is no such thing. It’s a myth. We are all of the same species with a variety of different colors (Robert Wald Sussman).

The thing is, even if there were differences why would there be this oppression in the first place? Why this long lasting inhumane exploitive behavior by Americans? All this rationale has been in place for centuries to justify slavery, then Jim Crow and now the current legacy of it all. The fact remains that, as was stated, these justifications are fallacies and cultural constructs by the western propagandists and the elite in the U.S. as a way to control the masses for their own intent, and that intent being greed.

All of the above have been tools used by the Southern elite, in particular, from the slavery era. They used the age-old divide and rule strategy of working class whites against the black community in order to achieve their goals. Greed is compelling!

And, unfortunately, the Southern elite, ever since slavery, has instilled this deadly model that we have yet to bury in the dustbin of human history. I venture to say that more than likely the young Dylann Roof, who killed the nine AME pastors and members, was brought up in this distorted and white supremacist culture and/or he managed to find it easily through the media and internet.

It is also important to note also that the white working class in the South is the most marginalized in the region. They are not liked by the middle and upper class whites and have been trained keep their distance from blacks creating a conflict there as well. They are generally exceptionally poor and not engaged politically or civically except in the church, which is often exceptionally fundamentalist in the South. Please be mindful also that the late philosopher Leo Strauss, the godfather of the many on the right, said the people need to be controlled and religion, any religion, he said, is the best way to do this. Many organizers on the right have followed Strauss’ insidious “control” directive, although there has been a long history of using religion as a control tool in the South.

Furthermore, the South has never had the diverse economic system with labor rights that has, in the past, been the model in many parts of the country. But the South never really had a chance with this model compared to other areas. The southern elite simply never let businesses into the region if the business had labor union availability. (Read James Cobb’s “The Selling of the South” regarding actions of the southern elite and businesses coming into the South.) And now U.S. businesses have moved to other countries for cheaper labor and offering no benefits at all, if they can get away with it. Given this, the rural South is all the more desolate as opportunities are all the more bleak. This, of course, is all a part of the neoliberal business plan, being to seek cheap labor, again for greed.

In the rural South, this lack of a diverse economy, including lack of opportunities in the predominant agricultural system that is becoming more industrialized, along with concentrated elite wealth, has led to increased conflict, unsolved murders and drugs.

Finally, the South is, of course, unique in so many capacities regarding white supremacy largely thanks to our slave past and on-going oppressive culture. South Carolina particularly stands out because of its unique slave history and, of course, African resistance to it. Here are some facts from the excellent International African American Museum:

Slavery in South Carolina was different from anywhere else in America:

Over 40% of all enslaved Africans to the U.S. came in through Charleston
Population ratios could be as high as 9 enslaved persons to 1 white resident in the Lowcountry
Enslaved persons comprised nearly 50% of Charleston’s population before the Civil War

Today, nearly 80% of African Americans could potentially trace an ancestor who was brought through Charleston.

South Carolina was the only state founded exclusively as a slave colony.

Founded exclusively as a slave colony, South Carolina quickly grew to have the highest ratio of enslaved persons to free whites of any mainland colony, or later, state.

In the years preceding the Civil War, enslaved people comprised about half of Charleston‘s inhabitants. Population ratios in the Lowcountry were even more extreme, where some areas had 9 slaves to every 1 white resident.

In order to maintain control over the enslaved population, slave laws and methods of punishment were harsher in South Carolina than elsewhere in the country.

It’s important also to know that the primary slave work in South Carolina was in rice production. South Carolina slave owners opted for highly skilled rice growers from West Africa where rice had been grown for at least 3,000 years.

The South Carolina planters were, at first, completely ignorant of rice cultivation, and their early experiments with this specialized type of tropical agriculture were mostly failures. They soon recognized the advantage of importing slaves from the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa, and they generally showed far greater interest in the geographical origins of African slaves than did planters in other North American colonies (Yale).

Furthermore, South Carolina was home – and understandably so – to the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. Namely, the Stono Rebellion in 1739. This was almost a century before Denmark Vessey (who was associated with the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston) planned a slave rebellion on June17, 1822. Please note that the killings at the AME Church in Charleston took place on June 17, 2015 – a coincidence? Probably not.

And as Leo Tolstoy stated “What Then Must We Do?”

We need, I think, a new paradigm to recover from this sickness that serves only to destroy the other and ourselves as well. The responsibility of making this change rests with whites in partnership with the black community. The response from blacks and white groups joining with black groups the past year, however, around the killings of blacks by white police officers, is impressive; there are groups around the country beginning to address seriously the issue of white supremacy. The Quakers are, as always, noteworthy for their excellent work on this, as has been the case here in Atlanta. The “Black Lives Matter!” movement is taking on a life of its own throughout the country. I am sure these efforts will continue and/or we need to make sure that’s the case!

But most of us need to be more comprehensive in our efforts regarding education about the beginnings of and extent of white supremacist thoughts and action in our culture and ways to counter this, which includes finally learning about Africa and its profound history.

Two rather symbolic, yet important efforts, are, for one, to take the confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina as is now being demanded by many South Carolinians. As a friend of mine said, “Having the confederate flag there is a disgrace”. I agree. The other symbolic gesture is that the U.S. Congress has yet to apologize for slavery and Jim Crow.

…just months after President Barack Obama took office, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. The Senate acknowledged “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery” and apologized “to African Americans, on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery.”

The House of Representatives had passed a similar measure the previous year. But Congress could not resolve the two apologies because of differing views on how the resolution would be used in any discussion of reparations. The Senate version was insistent that an apology would not endorse any future claims. The House could not agree. Significantly, the office of the president of the United States has never issued an apology.

In other words, the United States has never given an unconditional apology for slavery. For a nation that can’t even agree on an apology, the recent conversation around reparations could be seen as little more than an exercise in oratory ().

These directives are but a start to rid ourselves of this white supremacist sickness in America. There are many other recommendations as well, of course. The time is now!

Heather Gray is a writer and radio producer in Atlanta, Georgia and has also lived in Canada, Australia, Singapore, briefly in the Philippines and has traveled in southern Africa. She served as the director of the Non-Violent Program for Coretta Scott King in the mid-1980’s in Atlanta; and for 24 years worked with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund focusing on Black farmer issues and cooperative economic development. She holds degrees in anthropology and sociology. She can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net.
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Footnote: As humans left Africa and then further away from the equator our skin color changed and became more varied over time. Our black or white skin or variations of color have largely to do with our adaptation to heat – the closer we are to the equator the darker our skin as the “melanin is an effective absorber of light; the (darker) pigment is able to dissipate over 99.9% of absorbed UV (ultraviolet) radiation” (Wikipedia) and in this way we can better survive in an exceptionally warm climate; consequently the further away from the equator, the lighter our skin because we need to absorb more heat and vitamin D (Smithsonian) in order to survive (see the world map of skin color below). There is also a third factor that effects our skin color and it has to do with diet combined with UV rays:

….coastal peoples who eat diets rich in seafood enjoy this alternate source of vitamin D. That means that some Arctic peoples, such as native peoples of Alaska and Canada, can afford to remain dark-skinned even in low UV areas. In the summer they get high levels of UV rays reflected from the surface of snow and ice, and their dark skin protects them from this reflected light ().

Our different skin colors mean an environmental adaptation, with the exception of diet plus environment for Arctic peoples. That’s it!

Statement from the Southern Poverty Law Center

Among several statements on their website, Morris Dees and Richard Cohen wrote the following commentary to the Opinion Page of the New York Times for the Southern Policy Law Center:

White Supremacists Without Borders
By MORRIS DEES and J. RICHARD COHEN Southern Poverty Law Center
JUNE 22, 2015
The Opinion Pages – New York Times

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – A VARIETY of clues to the motives of Dylan Storm Roof, the suspect in last week’s mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., have emerged. First, we saw the patches he wore on his jacket in a Facebook photo: the flags of regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia that brutally enforced white minority rule. Then, a further cache of photos of Mr. Roof – seen in several bearing a Confederate flag – was discovered on a website, Last Rhodesian, registered in his name, together with a manifesto, a hodgepodge of white supremacist ideas. The author (most likely Mr. Roof) calls on whites to take “drastic action” to regain dominance in America and Europe. These themes, popular among white supremacists in the United States, are also signs of the growing globalization of white nationalism. When we think of the Islamist terrorism of groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, we recognize their international dimension. When it comes to far-right domestic terrorism, we don’t. Americans tend to view attacks like the mass murder in Charleston as isolated hate crimes, the work of a deranged racist or group of zealots lashing out in anger, unconnected to a broader movement. This view we can no longer afford to indulge. When, according to survivors, Mr. Roof told the victims at the prayer meeting that black people were “taking over the country,” he was expressing sentiments that unite white nationalists from the United States and Canada to Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Unlike those of the civil rights era, whose main goal was to maintain Jim Crow in the American South, today’s white supremacists don’t see borders; they see a white tribe under attack by people of color across the globe. The end of white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, they believe, foreshadowed an apocalyptic future for all white people: a “white genocide” that must be stopped before it’s too late. To support this view, they cite the murders of white farmers in South Africa since the end of apartheid. In recent years, extremists have distilled the notion of white genocide to “the mantra,” parts of which show up on billboards throughout the South, as well as in Internet chat rooms. It proclaims “Diversity = White Genocide” and “Diversity Means Chasing Down the Last White Person,” blaming multiculturalism for undermining the “white race.” The white nationalist American Freedom Party has made the mantra’s author, a segregationist from South Carolina named Robert Whitaker, its vice-presidential candidate in 2016. White supremacists across the country, some displaying the apartheid South African flag, have participated in “White Man Marches” to raise awareness of the so-called white genocide. A neo-Confederate group, the League of the South, also uses the white genocide argument to call for laws against interracial marriage. White nationalist leaders are traveling abroad to strengthen their international networks. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have documented more than 30 instances in the past two years. In 2013, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, a group that publishes pseudo-academic articles purporting to show the inferiority of black people, addressed groups of white nationalists in Britain and France on their common cause. “The fight in Europe is exactly the same as ours,” he said. The movement is bound to produce more violence, not necessarily from organized groups but from lone wolves like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed more than 70 people in his country in 2011 because he wanted “to save Europe from Islam.” Mr. Breivik had ties to American white nationalists as a registered user of Stormfront, a web forum founded by a former Ku Klux Klan leader that has more than 300,000 members (about two-thirds are American). Europe has also seen the rise of a powerful, far-right political movement that rejects multiculturalism. The anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece are prime examples. In Germany, there has been a series of murders by neo-Nazis. Britain, too, is experiencing an upswing of nationalist, anti-immigrant politics. This month, S.P.L.C. staffers will join activists from the United States and Europe at a conference in Budapest about this transnational white supremacism that is emerging as the world grows more connected by technology. The message of white genocide is spreading. White nationalists look beyond borders for confirmation that their race is under attack, and they share their ideas in the echo chamber of racist websites. The days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over. We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realize that white supremacists are doing the same.

Morris Dees is the founder, and J. Richard Cohen the president, of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Pan-Afrikan Organizations Speak Out on Charleston Massacre

We include here statements from several Pan-Afrikan organizations as they express their sympathy for the victims, their analysis of what happened and their conviction that the slogan “Black Lives Matter” must translate to the commitment to defend the Pan-Afrikan Community, wherever we are found around the world, against oppression and violence.

These are clearly not all the statements that have been offered from our many and varied organizations and they do not represent the entirety of thought in the Pan-Afrikan activist community; they are but a sample. We will share commentaries and analyses from human rights organizations in the general community in a separate article, and we will offer some of our own thoughts in a separate article as well.

Statement from the Clement Payne Movement, Barbados, The Caribbean

PRESS RELEASE

CARIBBEAN GOVERNMENTS MUST INTERVENE AND DEFEND OUR AFRICAN-AMERICAN BROTHERS

The critical importance of the United Nations International Decade For People of African Descent becomes more and more apparent with each passing day!

A case in point is the massacre which occurred [June 17] at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States of America, in which nine African- American women, men and children were brutally shot to death by a White male.

This latest genocidal outrage comes at a time when right-thinking people all over the world are expressing shock and horror at the phenomenon of White American police officers callously killing literally hundreds of unarmed Black-American men and women, and the U S Criminal Justice system routinely declaring that the killers are not even required to stand trial for their wrong-doing.

Indeed, the U S Justice System recently sent such a loud and clear message that Black-American lives do NOT matter, that it is not surprising that an ordinary White civilian racist would get it into his head to enter the sanctuary of an historic African -American church and assassinate Black men, women and children who were in a posture of prayer!

But the inherent message of the UN International Decade For People Of African Descent – which began on 1^st January 2015 – is that the African- American people of the United States of America are our Black Barbadian and Caribbean kith and kin!

The nine Black American men, women and children who were so brutally murdered [June 17] are our “brothers and sisters”. And they are our brothers and sisters because their African ancestors were brought to the Americas in the same slave ships that brought our African ancestors, and were subjected to the same architectonic socialisation experiences of chattel slavery and colonialism in “Plantation America” that our ancestors were subjected to on the plantations of the Caribbean.

The only truly significant difference between ourselves and our African-American brothers and sisters is that we are Blacks in a Black majority society, while they are Blacks in a White majority society.

This fundamental difference is responsible for the fact that we possess pre-dominantly Black governments, legislators, nation states, police forces, judicial officers, diplomatic representatives, and the list goes on, while they remain a relatively powerless and under-represented minority in the White majority institutions of the USA. Furthermore, it has now become absolutely clear that the traditional White American establishment that orchestrated the anti-Black slavery and slave trade of the 18^th and 19^th centuries has no intention of ever permitting the Black US-based descendants of their former slaves to ever be truly and fully free!

The very existence of the UN International Decade For People of African Descent impels us as Black people to come to this profound understanding of the predicament of our African-American brothers and sisters, and to the responsibilities that we must undertake as a result of that horrific predicament.

And the clearest such responsibility is that we Black Barbadian and Caribbean people who are racial majorities in our national societies, and who possess predominantly Black nation-states, national governments, and diplomatic seats at the United Nations and other high councils of international decision-making, are duty-bound to speak up for and to defend the rights of our African-American brothers and sisters! We simply can no longer allow our interest in our brothers’ plight to be restricted because they are supposedly citizens of a different nation! No! We who are joined together by deeply rooted ties of ancestry, kinship and affinity, must not permit artificial national barriers to keep us apart!

The time has therefore come when the Prime Ministers, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and the various Ambassadors and consular officers of our Caribbean nations must accept that they have a duty to speak up for and defend our African-American brothers and sisters.

Just as the American State Department, Secretary of State, President and Vice-President believe that they possess a right to intervene in and pass judgement on our national domestic affairs, our Caribbean high officials of state must assert an even greater right to intervene in and pass judgement on the existential predicament of our African-American brothers and sisters within the national arena of the USA.

And it is therefore high time that our premier officials of state intervene with US President Barack Obama and call upon him to do his duty to the African-American people of the USA!

The sad reality is that President Obama has spectacularly FAILED— during his Presidency— to address the issue of the deeply entrenched anti-Black racism that exists in the bowels of American society and in the very DNA of the institutions of the USA.

Even with this most recent racist massacre, President Obama shamelessly side-stepped his duty to represent the African-American cause and sought to characterize the massacre as being related to the ease of access to guns in the USA, rather than to pinpoint the fact that it was underpinned by the trenchant anti-Black racism that exists in U S society .

Way back in the 1960’s, the late Lyndon B Johnson, a white American president, distinguished himself on the race issue by establishing the Kerner Commission to enquire into the endemic racist conditions that were at the heart of the race-based civil disorders of the mid-1960’s and to propose possible solutions. What has President Obama done on the issue of anti-Black racism since becoming President? The tragic answer is:– nothing of consequence!

Truly, the time has come for us to move forward on this issue! The advent of the UN Decade For People of African Descent says to us that the time has come for us as Black people to express solidarity with each other right across the Black Diaspora! The time has come for us to collectively declare an attitude of zero tolerance towards all elements of anti-Black racism and racial discrimination!

The time has also come for us to address the U S Government about this issue of the racial oppression of our African-American brothers and sisters, and to use our political leaders and diplomats to take this issue before the United Nations organization and other international human rights bodies!

Quite frankly, in this UN International Decade For People of African Descent, the time has come for us to undertake powerful trans-national campaigns of activism to finally and permanently destroy the centuries- old demon of institutionalized anti-Black racism!

On behalf of the Clement Payne Movement of Barbados, I hereby call upon the political leaders and Governments of the Caribbean to accept and embrace this new understanding of their duty to our African-American brothers and sisters, and to act upon it with a sense of urgency!

May our recently martyred brothers and sisters rest in peace.

DAVID COMISSIONG
President, Clement Payne Movement

Statement from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Association for the Study of African American Life and History
The Howard Center, 2225 Georgia Avenue, NW, Suite 331 Washington, DC 20059
www.asalh.org

June 18, 2015

A Statement Concerning the Massacre at the Emanuel AME Church

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) speaks out against the violence in Charleston, South Carolina, that took the lives of nine African Americans in the Emanuel AME Church. We extend our condolences to the families who lost their loved ones, the members of the Emanuel AME Church, and the entire Charleston community. May your faith sustain you through this storm.

As all Americans now know, this African Methodist Episcopal Church has been a rock in our community since the early days of this republic when the members of the congregation, enslaved and free, could not be citizens of either the state or this nation. The church itself was implicated in the Denmark Vessey plot to throw off the chains of slavery, and it has been a site for our struggle for racial justice and equality across the centuries. The congregation represents how slavery itself could not and cannot extinguish the human thirst for freedom and true citizenship.

This massacre strikes at the heart of our democracy. According to the witness Sylvia Johnson, a member of the church, the shooter told his victims, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country – and you have to go.” As an expression of white nationalism, this slaughter of American citizens – for being citizens – is thus even more than a hate crime. The accused, Dylann Roof, assaulted our common democratic institutions and engaged in domestic terrorism. His purpose could have been none other than to foment greater racial strife, if not race war. We cannot let it stand.

We call on our elected officials at every level of government to denounce white supremacy as an ideology and to root out this form of terrorism. Our nation offers itself to the world as a beacon of racial progress, the hope of a true multi-racial society and we must uphold by this self-appointed mission. Moreover, the state of South Carolina–where the citizens can elect Nikki Haley, a South Asian woman, and Tim Scott, an African American man, as their Governor and United States Senator, respectively– cannot allow white nationalism to undermine our efforts to build and maintain a common democracy.

Daryl Michael Scott
President
Click here to view this statement on our website

Statement from Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal

Charleston

A young white man, barely at the age of his majority, walks into Charleston’s most storied Black church and, before he leaves, a new history is written.

Attending the Wednesday night Bible study, he sits for nearly an hour, but his mind isn’t on the life of Jesus nor his disciples. It’s on murder, mass murder. When the door shuts behind him, nine Black souls, elders mostly, had been slain, Bibles in hand.

The man, or boy more than man really, hadn’t come to learn about religion, for he had a belief, white supremacy, or the profound hatred of Black people.

White supremacy is the mother’s milk of Charleston, of South Carolina, of the South, of America. For surely as slavery funded and built America, the underlying principle was the devaluation, exploitation, and oppression of Black life. It’s the only thing that makes the church massacre in Charleston even remotely intelligible.

Nine Black people were sacrificed to the blind idol of white supremacy for the same reason that thousands of Black men and women were lynched on American elms and pines: as sacrifices to an idea, to perpetuate a system of economic injustice.

Dylan Roof, the 21 year old accused of this massacre, had no friends to speak of, no place to stay other than an associate’s couch, no job, and a tenuous relationship with his parents. Isolated, alienated, alone in the world, his sole remaining possession was his whiteness, the only thing that gave his existence meaning. That was the energy that fueled the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.

It now sits like an incubus in the American soul, seething hatred and fear, waiting for more Black lives to consume.

Statement from The Newark Anti-Violence Coalition on the Mother Emanuel AME 9 Massacre: Calls Pinckney Killing an “Assassination”

The Newark Anti-Violence Coalition (NAVC)
(908) 605-NAVC
navc@googlegroups.com
Facebook.com/newarkantiviolencecoalition
Facebook.com/newarkanti-violencecoalition group

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE!

The Newark Anti-Violence Coalition speaks out on the Massacre of the Mother Emanuel AME 9 in Charleston, South Carolina, but unlike most condemnations of the heinous act, the NAVC asserts that the incident be also be treated as an ‘assassination’ of Rev. Clementa Pinckney for his leadership on police brutality!*

“Why are we not demanding that this act be treated as assassination of Rev. Pinckney,” asked media advocate Zayid Muhammad.

Rev. Dr. Clementa Pinckney

“Pinckney was not only that church’s beloved pastor, he was also a state legislator who got out in front of the highly contentious issue of police brutality, when he unified area elected [officials] to insist that all police officers wear body cameras as a basic, but critical, reform, in light of the videotaped police killing of [Walter] Scott in South Carolina.

“That reform, to his credit, passed, in spite of that area’s deep, dark baggage of racial oppression and terrorism.

“That reform was bound to have engendered some very real enemies, seen and unseen, as a consequence.

“We have to ask: ‘Was this man’s killing in particular a message to Black leadership, saying, do not dare get serious about pushing for serious police reform?

“We just wonder, if Rev. Pinckney were white, would this tragedy be dismissed simply as a crazed ‘lone gunman’ gone off on a rampage?”

The NAVC then insisted there be a full and complete federal investigation of the case along those lines.

They then related Pinckney’s police reform efforts to [Newark, NJ] Mayor Ras Baraka’s local police reform efforts. Mayor Baraka created the first civilian review board in the country to have subpoena power over the Newark police. He did this just several weeks ago by executive order.

“We cannot understand why Black electeds in cities allover the country have not applauded this move and have not followed his lead and done so in their own cities.”

The statement also challenged Black elected officials to emulate Pinckney’s leadership and Newark Mayor Baraka’s leadership on the issue of police brutality.

The NAVC also demanded that federal security anti-terrorism efforts be expanded to provide greater protections to elected officials pushing for police reform. The full text of the statement is annexed…

*Newark will be the site for a national march against police brutality on July 25th…

Statement from the UNIA-ACL

The Tragedy of White Hatred and Injustice in South Carolina
By Shaka Barak, Minister of Education 06-21-15

For over 100 years the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA & ACL) has been trying to protect our race from the crimes against them, by whites and other alien races, not only in South Carolina, but all over the world. We wrote in our governing constitution and bylaws a provision that states our desire to establish commissionaires and agencies in the principle cities and countries of the world for the representation and protection of all Africans and people of African descent, irrespective of nationality. What has happened in South Carolina was bound to happen, and unfortunately will continue to happen more frequently and on a larger scale if we don’t unite. It happened in the United States to African men after World War I, when they returned to America from shedding their blood for so-called democracy. This was a time when African GI’s returning from the battle fields in France, wounded and battle torn, were lynched in their uniforms. Africans loved America so much that they not only lined up to fight for America, but the masses immediately raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by purchasing war bonds. This love was because of the promises of freedom, justice and equality President Woodrow Wilson alluded to when he said it was a “war for Democracy.”

During that WWI period from 1914-1918, and after, three United States Presidents were members of the Ku Klux Klan, including Wilson, Coolidge and Harrison. From the founding of the UNIA & ACL, by the Honorable Marcus Garvey to the President General the Honorable Senghor Jawara Baye, knowing how white supremacy destroys the minds of white people, they have tried to prepare our race so that we wouldn’t have to face these atrocities, but be so united and strong no white or any alien race would dare lay their hands on a Black man or woman anywhere in the world.

Since the Honorable Marcus Garvey has passed June 10, 1940 what has our race done? We have abandoned Universal African Nationalism and allowed the alien races who have attacked us since we became vulnerable 400 years ago, to now lead us. These whites and their surrogates have not sought to lead us on the course laid out for us in our constitution, and the course taught by the foremost Black Nationalist the Honorable Marcus Garvey and all his successors, but away from Garveyism. The others have led us away from Garveyism and nationalism on a course they would direct called integration because they could control that course. We have been on a course that would not lead to; racial pride and love; not to self-reliance; and not to self-determination and not to self-government. Without the proper preparation in South Carolina and other parts of the world, we were not ready to protect ourselves. Scattered throughout the world as a disunited race, in this weak state, we have been, could be and will be easily massacres by the enemy from without and the enemy’s surrogates from within. The divide and rule tactic is being used against us on every continent on earth.

We must understand the lesson of Marcus Garvey, and you can only get that truth in the UNIA & ACL. We had more respect as a race in 1920, by that generation of alien races than at any other time in America. Under the UNIA & ACL we were seen as more serious, bolder, and aggressive and determined when it came to pursuing our human rights. We had more measurable success as a race, when we built and supported our own Universal Grocery Stores, and Universal Restaurants. When the UNIA & ACL members launched the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, it gave the then estimated 400 million Africans and people of African Descent pride, in that an accomplishment, but it also made other races either jealous or fearful as they saw the BSL as a competitor in the maritime industry.

One-hundred years later the same organization that launched those ships and gave our race the restaurants and grocery stores is still alive and pleading with our race to join us at the UNIA & ACL 58^th International Convention. This is the place where we can come together and build the right economic, educational, and political structures to address all the problems of the 1.2 billion members of our race at home and abroad. We did not solve all the problems in the 1920’s because we cannot undo 400 years of slavery and colonialism in less than 175 years of emancipation, especially with powerful white forces fighting us with the deadly tools of their civilization every step of the way. We have not given up but are on the same course to get our people to replace the feeling of hope with the feeling of confidence. We need the confidence that makes us believe, to a man, that whatever other races and nations have done we can do. We need confidence that we can build and maintain a racial hierarchy, and a 1.2 billion member and growing racial empire.

Today’s leaders on the other hand have confidence in the white man, his just-us system, his military, his Supreme-mist Court, and his economic system. They find it hard to imagine a nationalistic program ran and controlled by and for Africans. So without the proper vision we see what has happened in South Carolina also happening in Libya, after Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated. It happened in Egypt, when President Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak Mabarrack was disposed. It happened to Africans in Syria, when Bashar al-Assad leadership was undermined. Africans are lured to sleep thinking it’s safe in the world without their shield of Universal African Nationalism to protect them in case things go south, which often happens. Let us remember, forget Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma, when all seemed well until that faithful evening when whites dropped bombs on innocent African in the Greenwood District.

Atrocities against our race instigated by whites are happening in Nigeria, in Angola, in South Africa, in Brazil, in Austria, in India, and in the Dominican Republic. Why are they happening in the far corners of the earth? It is because we lack unity. The UNIA & ACL can build its divisions all around the world, but to make that happen, and to show how it all that make sense we must come together at the 58^th International Convention, and meet face to face. We must see those delegates not only from South Carolina, but see those who represent the members of our scattered race all over the world. We realize that the problems facing the Africans in Brazil cannot be solved by the Africans in Brazil alone. If the Africans in Brazil, Mexico, India, Japan, China, France, Spain, Germany and other countries, don’t unite, then they will be destroyed by being isolated and picked off one by one.

European countries, and states in the US are being led by their bankers into bankruptcy, and they will use the African as a scapegoat that will lead to whites rioting and massacring the Africans among them. The basis for a race war is when most whites are led to believe that, if there are jobs, they need to take those jobs even if it means murdering Africans and scaring them out of certain cities, and urban areas. It has been done before, because up until President Barack Obama, America has had nothing but racist white presidents that inherited a racist system of government. They have been men, backed up by white women, who nursed their babies with the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and manifest destiny”. What they did to enslave each other, the indigenous populations worldwide, and the African is a long forgotten part of their history. They pursued the acquisition of wealth, land and power by any means necessary with the belief those future generations would either forget or forgive the acts of genocide and extermination. The white man especially hopes the victims of his barbarism forget or forgive.

Let’s take a close look at South Carolina, and how easily the white race has murdered other weak and unprepared nations in the past and the present. There were over 20 different native tribes in South Carolina before the white man came there from Spain in 1521. These so called Indians were not only the first there but in the majority until they were murdered or forced off that land. South Carolina has always been the leader of the racist southern states. It led southern states to question the Union, build southern nationalism, support slavery, seek a southern literature, seek southern religious nationalism, seek a southern nation through succession, and pushed for expansion through the ideology of “Manifest Destiny”.

In 1817 an independent African Association was organized in Charleston, South Carolina because Africans were tired of white preachers conducting their religious affairs. In 1817 the Immanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was formed by Moorish Brown with 1000 organizers. Seventeen years prior in 1800 Denmark Vessey an AME member, who was freed in 1800, the same year the 24 year old Gabriel Prosser organized a rebellion, the same year Toussaint l. Overture organized the Haitian revolution, and 4 years after in 1804 the Underground Railroad was formed. So Vessey saw 6000 Africans leave white churches and go to the AME. Vessey also saw the founding of the American Colonization Society with the intent of taking free Africans to Liberia. Vessey seemingly had his mind made up to reject that offer and fight for freedom against the injustices in his own way. For just one example of these injustices, whites first had 469 Africans who wanted to pray, arrested in 1817 under false charge of disorderly conduct. Then they invoked the 1800 law prohibiting the assembling of enslaved Africans without a white person present. Breaking this law led to 140 free Africans being arrested, and the Bishops and ministers had to either go to jail for one month or leave the state and others were given the choices of 10 lashes with a whip or pay a $10 fine each. White legislators rejected any appeals made by Africans to conduct their own independent worship services. Enslaved Africans in South Carolina could not gather in groups of more than seven and sometimes even funerals were under suspicion.

The United States also embraced nationalism, especially when John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was Vice President. The founding fathers were nationalist. A Noah Webster of the famous Webster’s Dictionary was a nationalist who published nationalist educational material such as the American Reader, American Grammar, American spelling book and the American dictionary of the English Language. Likewise, at Harvard College in 1818 Edward T. Channing delivered an address entitled “Literary Independence.” America he said, “must establish a domestic literature upon what is peculiarly our own, our scenery, our institutions, our modes of life, our history and the antiquities of our country. “By 1810 to 1820 Blacks had surpassed whites in South Carolina. South Carolina was the spokesman for the slave holding states. A well-known nationalist and defender of slavery was Thomas Cooper, President of South Carolina College.

The deeper the south, the stronger were the UNIA & ACL Divisions. We had divisions in Anderson, Beaufort, Charleston, Chehan, Church Parish, Coosaw, Island, Georgetown, Green Pond, Labaco, Lake View, Midland Park, Mount Holly, Pineopiolis, Rock Hill, St. Andrew, Strawberry, Union Heights, and Yemassee. Had we maintained our divisions in South Carolina, there would have been no way [Roof] could have gotten into a prayer meeting where our elders and children were. We would have scanned him, frisked him, disarmed him, and then fed his behind to some alligators in a swamp, and told the police where to look for any of his remains.

In conclusion, the UNIA & ACL under President General Senghor Baye sends condolences and sympathy to those who lost loved ones in the mass murder by the white man Dylann Roof, of Columbia South Carolina. The names of those Africans he murdered include Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Daniel L. Simmons, Susie Jackson, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. We will be extending an invitation for the family members, the church members and citizens of Charleston, South Carolina to send a delegate to attend the UNIA & ACL 58^th International Convention. Inquiries can be made to Shaka Barak, UNIA & ACL Minister of Education, email: shakabarak1@yahoo.com, or those designated by the President General Senghor Baye.

MOVE’s Phil Africa Passes to the Ancestors

Phil Africa, a member of the original MOVE Nine who have been imprisoned since 1978 after a highly controversial police assault in West Philadelphia, has died under suspicious circumstances in a Pennsylvania prison hospital.

In the early 1970s, a man once named Vincent Leophart was known for walking the dogs of neighbors in the Powelton Village area of West Philadelphia. After finding a permanent home for himself, in 1972 he developed a philosophy he called The Guideline, which would become the basis of the principles of the MOVE Organization. He took the name John Africa, and those who would join MOVE would take the name Africa as a surname, thus establishing themselves as a “family”. MOVE was often characterized, rather simplistically, as a “back-to-nature” and “Black liberation” organization, but their membership, while largely Black, also included White and Latino members, and their ideology went beyond just a commitment to natural living, including support of truth-and-justice issues and a consistent stance in opposition to the increasing use of drugs such as Ritalin on school children, issues about which they have regularly warned the public during rallies and teach-ins for decades.

Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s was extremely turbulent, as were many urban centers in the United States, as Frank Rizzo, first as Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner and later as its mayor, mirrored the “law-and-order” philosophy of the Nixon Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover in the pursuit and destruction of Black Liberation and Civil Rights organizations from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, among others. Rizzo made it his business to eradicate first the Philadelphia Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, and then MOVE in the 1970s. A series of harassment arrests, complete with gratuitous assaults by Philadelphia police against MOVE members that resulted in the death of Life Africa, an infant member of MOVE, increased tensions between MOVE and the police. In 1977, a neighborhood dispute between MOVE and other residents of the Powelton Village community drew the attention of several community mediators who finally saw MOVE reach an agreement with their neighbors, but also of the Philadelphia police, which had already earned the nickname of “Rizzo’s Thugs” with many city residents who had come to recognize the brutality, racism and corruption of the police force. Rizzo’s police blockaded the house where the MOVE family lived for a year, attempting to “starve them out”, before deciding to launch an assault on August 8, 1978.

The assault on the MOVE compound employed fire hoses in an attempt to drown the MOVE people who were hiding in the basement or force them out to the main floor of the building, where they would be met by hundreds, if not thousands, of rounds of ammunition fired into the house. Indications are that one of those rounds hit Philadelphia police officer James Ramp in the back as he was storming the house, killing him. Because of Rizzo’s unbridled hatred of MOVE and the fact that MOVE had successfully resisted the Philadelphia police blockade for a year, the MOVE people, who had been hiding in the basement and possessed several non-operational firearms, were to be blamed for Ramp’s death. When the MOVE people were finally extracted from the house, four Philadelphia police officers viciously beat Delbert Africa in a scene that was captured in a rather famous (or rather, infamous) photo (right).

Eleven MOVE people were arrested and taken to trial. Prior to trial, however, they were offered a “deal”: renounce MOVE and go free; remain loyal to MOVE and be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Two of the eleven took the “deal” and charges against them were dropped. The other nine — Merle, Debbie, Janine, Janet, Delbert, Phil, Mike, Chuck and Edward Africa — who refused to renounce MOVE, were taken to trial and convicted on a variety of charges connected to the assault on the house and the death of police officer James Ramp. They each were sentenced to terms of 30 to 100 years in prison, and prosecutors as well as police and politicians have steadfastly insisted that they will impose the full 100 year sentence on all of them, meaning that they will all die in prison. These people would be known as the MOVE Nine.

The four police officers who viciously beat Delbert Africa, on videotape and in photographs, were also tried, but the judge ordered a “directed verdict” at the last moment and acquitted all four of them of any charges in connection with the beating. This behavior is seen today in the recent grand jury decisions to not charge police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, as well as hundreds of other cases of unpunished police brutality over the last several decades.

Among the better-known advocates of MOVE is current Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Minister of Information for the Philadelphia Black Panther Party who, as a journalist during the Powelton Village siege and assault, had broadcast interviews with MOVE members over the radio and helped to counteract the dehumanizing propaganda that had been spread about them. Mumia was targeted by the Philadelphia police and was arrested on December 9, 1981 for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. He was convicted in a trial replete with withheld evidence, witness intimidation and many other forms of prosecutorial, police and judicial misconduct, and was sentenced to death, which has since been commuted by a federal judge to life without the possibility of parole after years of appeals, rallies and court challenges. Mumia’s daughter, affectionately known as “Goldii”, recently died as she and the MOVE Family have been fighting for Mumia’s exoneration and release from prison.

On March 13, 1998, the first of the MOVE Nine died in prison, Sis. Merle Africa. A statement that day from the MOVE Organization said the following:

Today our sister and family member Merle Austin Africa died under very suspicious circumstances. After a short bout with a stomach virus from which she was almost fully recovered (family visited with Merle last Thursday) she fainted in the cell last night going to the bathroom. The prison authorities removed Debbie Sims Africa and stayed in the cell with Merle for 45 minutes and finally called an ambulance and took her to an outside hospital.

We were not allowed any information and only after Merle’s mother insisted was she told that Merle had died.

Information is sketchy but on Thursday the 5th Merle was looking good and feeling back to her old self and gave strong hugs to family who came to visit. Merle was a young woman in her mid-forties of good health and strong spirit.

One week after she is dead. We need to have answers!

Now, the second member of the MOVE Nine has died in prison, and under remarkably similar circumstances. The following statement was released by Mama Ramona Africa (pictured, right), who was the sole adult survivor of the May 13, 1985 Osage Avenue assault on MOVE that killed five children and six adults (including MOVE’s visionary founder, John Africa).

On Saturday, January 10th Phil Africa, revolutionary, John Africa’s First Minister of Defense, and beloved brother, husband and father, passed away under suspicious circumstances at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, PA. On Sunday, January 4th Phil Africa wasn’t feeling well and went to the prison infirmary. Though he wasn’t feeling well, other inmates saw Phil Africa walking, stretching and doing jumping jacks. Hearing that Phil was in the infirmary MOVE members drove up to visit him and were denied a visit by the prison. While they were visiting with Delbert Africa, Phil was secretly transported to Wilkes Barre General Hospital where he was held in total isolation, incommunicado for five days.

Prison officials at SCI-Dallas wouldn’t communicate about Phil’s condition. They told MOVE that Phil was at Wilkes Barre General hospital and the hospital denied he was there. The hospital and the prison behaved very suspiciously denying Phil the ability to call family members or his wife of 44 years, Janine Africa, stating that she was not a blood relative. The hospital and prison received hundreds of phone calls in support of Phil from around the world. When they finally submitted to pressure and allowed Phil to call Janine on Thursday, January 8th he was heavily drugged, incoherent and couldn’t even hold the phone to talk to her.

On Friday, January 9th Phil was sent back to the prison infirmary and placed in hospice care upon arrival. On Saturday, January 10th Ramona and Carlos Africa were granted permission to visit Phil in the prison infirmary. When they reached him he was incoherent and couldn’t talk or move his head to look at them. An hour after they left Delbert called with the news that Phil passed away.

Inmates in the infirmary and others in the prison were shocked when they heard the news. They had witnessed his vigorous health for decades in the prisons, had just seen him stretching and doing jumping jacks six days earlier. This rapid decline all occurred while he was being held for six days in isolation, incommunicado from his MOVE family at Wilkes Barre General Hospital.

The fact that Phil was isolated for the six days before he passed, that he was in such better health before he was taken to the hospital, and that the hospital refused to release his medical information is beyond suspicious.

This is another example of how the system hates MOVE and will do anything to stop MOVE. You can look at the example of August 8th, 1978 when the MOVE 9 were illegally imprisoned, and May 13th, 1985 when the government dropped a bomb and intentionally murdered 11 MOVE members to see this point clearly. When Merle Africa died in prison on March 13th, 1998 the conditions were very similar. She had been one way in the prison, but within hours of being forced to go to an outside hospital she was dead.

Phil made a deep impression on people all around the world. He was constantly writing, often dozens of letters a day, encouraging solidarity and strength, and warmly advising hundreds of people. Phil worked hard to learn to paint and created countless paintings which he sent to supporters for free to draw attention to issues, get raffled off for the struggle, and bring people together. Phil took his commitment and work as a revolutionary very seriously, but was often smiling, laughing, and giving people hugs and encouragement. He was a warm father figure to many in the prison where he taught inmates how to box, to think, and how to get stronger. Despite having two of his children murdered by the system and being separated by prison, Phil was a father figure to many. He was separated from his wife Janine for over 36 of the 44 years they were married, but he worked hard to stay connected with her even though they were so callously isolated by the system.

It’s this system’s intention for MOVE people to die in prison. The MOVE 9 never should have been imprisoned at all, and according to their sentence they should have been paroled over six years ago. The death of Merle and Phil Africa rests directly at the feet of this government! Phil will never be forgotten. He is dearly missed, but his strong example should inspire everyone to fight harder for the freedom of the MOVE 9 and all political prisoners!

LONG LIVE PHIL AFRICA!

LONG LIVE MERLE AFRICA!

FREE THE MOVE 9!

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA!

Memorial Service for Phil Africa

A memorial service is being planned for Phil Africa on Saturday, January 31 at the Kingsessing Recreation Center in Philadelphia. Here is the announcement from Mama Ramona Africa about the memorial service:

ONA MOVE, Everybody. First, let me thank each of you for your genuine and kind words to this family regarding the loss of our brother, Phil Africa. We wish we could thank you individually but the sheer number of the responses we have received makes that impossible. Know that we love you all and our family truly appreciates your response to our loss. We want to inform you that there will be a celebration of the revolutionary life our brother, Phil Africa, on Saturday, January 31, 2015 at the Kingsessing Recreation Center, located at 49th and Kingsessing Ave. from 1-4 pm. We’re inviting all of you that can attend. If you choose to, you can take the opportunity to verbally express how Phil touched you; what his revolutionary life means to you or whatever you would like to say about Phil Africa. If you are located far away or can not attend for whatever reason but would like to send us a brief comment about Phil, please do so and we will see that it’s read at the celebration. Again, thanks to each and every one of you for all of your kind words of support.

Ramona Africa for The MOVE Family

More information is available on the MOVE Organization’s Website, http://onamove.com, including the following statement:

Many people have asked where they could send cards to Ramona Africa and the entire MOVE Family. Please send a card to the MOVE Family at this difficult time at:

and Phil’s life partner/beloved wife Janine Africa at:

Janine Phillips Africa #6309
451 Fullerton Ave.
Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238

and all members of the MOVE Family still unjustly and illegally imprisoned by the anti-life, money-loving Philadelphia-Pennsylvania-U.S. authorities. Free the MOVE 9!

Janine Africa, as drawn by her husband Phil Africa.

Seeds of Suspicion: Feed the Future, Afrika and GMO Foods

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
— Morpheus, to Neo in The Matrix (1999)

THE RABBIT HOLE: Seeds of Suspicion

On September 26, 2014, the Africa Braintrust event was held at the John Wilson Convention Center in Washington, DC. The annual event, organized by United States Congress member Karen Bass (D-California), brings together a variety of speakers and panels to discuss issues of interest to Afrika and the Afrikan Diaspora. This year’s event centered around the August USA-Africa Summit, in which President Barack Obama met with 50 Afrikan heads of state to discuss USA-Afrika relations.

In earlier posts, we reported on the keynote address by former US Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the first of three panels that were held at the session, and the keynote address by Dr. Rajiv “Raj” Shah, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Dr. Shah began his address by commenting about the continuing Ebola crisis, then discussed two signature USAID programs: Feed the Future and Power Africa. Last year, we attended a Congressional Policy Breakfast about Power Africa and the Electrify Africa Act, and we wrote about that session for this Web Site, including many of the concerns raised by community activists and concerned Afrikans about access to power in rural areas, questions of who primarily benefited from Power Africa and the potential environmental and human rights consequences.

Here, we will spend some time on USAID’s Feed the Future initiative. The stated aims are laudable: increasing the crop yields of rural farmers so the populace can eat instead of starving, so that children can play and go to school instead of wasting away through malnutrition, and so that countries can effectively feed their people instead of waging oppression and war over scarce resources. But the picture is far more complicated than that. The journey we will undertake here will delve into USAID’s checkered past in Latin America, examine the agency’s ties with major multinational biotech and agribusiness corporations, take a look at the concerns surrounding genetically modified (GM) food, scrutinize the issue of patents and food sovereignty (which is different from “food security”), and ask the question: Is this the Future we want for Afrika?

What Dr. Rajiv Shah of USAID Says About Feed the Future

First, here are the words of Dr. Rajiv Shah at the 2014 Africa Braintrust event as he touted USAID’s Feed the Future initiative:

“The first [of USAID’s current signature programs] is Feed the Future, and when President Obama took office, he really made this the top developmental priority. The slide you’re looking at is a picture of an Ethiopian farmer and daughter collecting the harvest. In Ethiopia today, through Feed the Future, we’re working with DuPont and a host of local farming cooperatives to increase the farm yields for 35,000 maize farmers and their families. Today, as a part of our Feed the Future partnership, the government has liberalized its seed sector, has refined the way it protects private capital investments, has offered licenses and engaged foreign investors, and has built upon the innovation labs that were set up across American colleges and universities. Now, we measure the results of these efforts through legitimate and widespread household surveys, and we now know that as a result of this program in Ethiopia, public and private, Ethiopia has driven down the rate of hunger, of poverty, of stunting, which is an expression of malnutrition in children that robs them of their future, and has increased the rate of reduction of poverty and malnutrition three times in just the last two and a half years. That’s an extraordinary achievement, and as a result 160,000 children today who would have been hungry are now laughing, learning, playing, going to school, and not because we’re handing out more American food, but because we’re helping their farmers, mostly women, improve the productivity from their own labor and their own ingenuity. That kind of story is playing out in Ethiopia, but also in 14 other countries in Sub Saharan Africa. It’s playing out across more than 200 companies that have committed more than $10 billion of private investments. It’s playing out in the African Union that has reaffirmed this year is the year of agriculture for Africa, and has put into place a set of leadership commitments and policy reforms, and it plays out at a global level in last week’s announcement of global hunger levels that have come down by more than 40 million individuals, almost all of whom are in Sub Saharan Africa over the last three or four years.

“Today, as a part of our Feed the Future partnership, the government has liberalized its seed sector, has refined the way it protects private capital investments, has offered licenses and engaged foreign investors, and has built upon the innovation labs that were set up across American colleges and universities.”
— Dr. Rajiv Shah, Administrator of USAID

“These are extraordinary successes and gains, and I just want to note and thank the United States Congress and its leaders, including Representative [Karen] Bass, for introducing, on a bipartisan basis in both the House and the Senate, Feed the Future legislation that will authorize this program into law and ensure that we can stick with it, using this model of development to continue to drive down hunger and poverty and drive up agricultural investment and growth for decades to come. So I would like to take this moment to ask for your support for Feed the Future, and that you support Representative Bass and that you support the bipartisan members of the House and Senate that are going to try to make this happen, we hope, in the Lame Duck Session this year, because I think it’s telling that our political leaders, at a time that, sometimes, is a little fractured and a little partisan, can come together to support this kind of an effort, executed to this level of excellence. So thank you for your leadership, Representative Bass. …”

We thank Rep. Bass for her continued commitment to bring information to her constituents and to concerned Afrikans and Afrikan Diasporans. Her Africa Braintrust event provides an opportunity for us to learn about the analysis and plans of a number of activists, scholars and government officials from the United States and Afrika. That being stated, it is necessary for us to now compare the words of Dr. Shah to what others around the world have said, what the corporate partners of USAID have said and done, the warnings of food activists and farmers’ advocates, and what the implications will be for Afrika as the next frontier (target?) of USAID’s Feed the Future initiative. We will reference and quote a number of articles, statements and Web Sites during our journey, and we include the locations of these articles, analyses and statements so you can look them up for yourself, and perhaps dig even deeper down the rabbit hole.

What Latin American Activists Say: USAID’s influence in Latin America & The Caribbean

An article dated July 21, 2012, titled ALBA Expels USAID from Member Countries (http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/alba-expels-usaid-from-member-countries/), translated by Rachael Boothroyd for the Web Site http://venezuelaanalysis.com, reported on the Resolution from the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) for the immediate withdrawal of USAID from member countries of the alliance. The Resolution goes as follows:

On behalf of the Chancellors of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Federal Republic of Brazil, on June 21st 2012.

Given the open interference of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the internal politics of the ALBA countries, under the excuse of “planning and administering economic and humanitarian assistance for the whole world outside of the United States,” financing non-governmental organizations and actions and projects designed to destabilise the legitimate governments which do not share their common interests.

Knowing the evidence brought to light by the declassified documents of the North American State Department in which the financing of organisations and political parties in opposition to ALBA countries is made evident, in a clear and shameless interference in the internal political processes of each nation.

Given that this intervention of a foreign country in the internal politics of a country is contrary to the internal legislation of each nation.

On the understanding that in the majority of ALBA countries, USAID, through its different organisations and disguises, acts in an illegal manner with impunity, without possessing a legal framework to support this action, and illegally financing the media, political leaders and non-governmental organisations, amongst others.

On the understanding that through these financing programmes they are supporting NGOs which promote all kind of fundamentalism in order to conspire and limit the legal authority of our states, and in many cases, widely loot our natural resources on territory which they claim to control at their own free will.

Conscious of the fact that our countries do not need any kind of external financing for the maintenance of our democracies, which are consolidated through the will of the Latin American and Caribbean people, in the same way that we do not need organisations in the charge of foreign powers which, in practice, usurp and weaken the presence of state organisms and prevent them from developing the role that corresponds to them in the economic and social arena of our populations.

We resolve to:

Request that the heads of state and the government of the states who are members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, immediately expel USAID and its delegates or representatives from their countries, due to the fact that we consider their presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the sovereignty and stability of our nations.

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, Federal Republic of Brazil, June 21st 2012.

Signed by: The government of the Pluri-national state of Bolivia, The government of the Republic of Cuba, The government of the Republic of Ecuador, The government of the Commonwealth of Dominica, The government of the Republic of Nicaragua, The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Why did ALBA make such a statement? Surely, USAID doesn’t use its status as a global “humanitarian” agency (Isn’t “International Development” their last name?) cannot be attempting to destabilize legitimate governments, can they? Well, perhaps we need more information and testimony, such as the following article from the Web Site http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ALBA-Strongly-Condemns-USAID-Plot-in-Cuba-20140808-0043.html, published August 8, 2014, titled The member states of the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our America (ALBA) demanded the United States cease its subversive actions against Cuba. Here is an excerpt:

The statement released this Thursday follows revelations about the recruitment and employment of young Latin American people since 2009 in a bid to convert contemporary Cubans into “agents of change” and promote political dissent on the island.

The U.S. based agency Associated Press revealed on Sunday that the U.S. agency for International Development (USAID) sent a group of young people from Costa Rica, Venezuela and Peru to Cuba under the guise of carrying out health and social projects, when in reality their main goal was to find and encourage anti-government activists.

In the text, ALBA expressed its “indignation”, describing the project as “immoral”.

“The ALBA condemns this new plan against Cuba, and demands and end to the subversive, illegal actions partly covered by the U.S. government, that violate the sovereignty and right of the Cuban people to self-determination.” added the communiqué.

“The countries of ALBA express their deep solidarity with the Cuban Republic and demand the United States respect the Cuban people’s will in continuing to improve its economic and social model, as well as the consolidation of its democracy, without any external interferences.”

An analysis of USAID’s objectives in Latin America was presented last month in an article on the Web Site http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/USAIDin-Latin-America-More-Than-Just-Aid-20141027-0055.html, USAID in Latin America: More Than Just Aid, published 27 October 2014, which said, in part:

After being expelled from numerous Latin American countries for dubious activity, the United States organization USAID has developed a reputation of an organization that while providing aid is also developing ways to undermine governments in a number of the continent’s countries.

According to their website, USAID’s mission is “furthering America’s interests, while improving lives in the developing world.” However in practice, they may well be furthering the United States interests, but not by improving lives in the developing world but by supporting the activities of groups that are opposed to democratically elected governments.

The most recent damning revelations are that the agency not only had attempted to create a twitter style social media network in Cuba to undermine the government, but on top of this an Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change in order to overthrow Castro’s government, which the United States has been trying to do for over 50 years now, with no success.

After it was revealed that USAID had been interfering in Cuba, the House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz said, “That is not what USAID should be doing … USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished.”

But USAID’s track record of engaging in subversive activities is a long one, and U.S. credibility as an “honest broker” was lost many years ago.

The USAID operations in Latin America, which are overseen by what is known as the “Office of Transition Initiatives” (OTI), is a way for the U.S. to promote its interests through soft power. The U.S. calls these projects aiding in “transition”, whereas in reality it is nothing but meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. They work with many different NGOs and private companies, all under the guise of providing aid to developing nations.

USAID have engaged in activities to undermine democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Haiti and interfered in Brazil, Ecuador and most likely other nations. …

But not only is USAID’s image tattered in many parts of Latin America, it is also held in suspicion among several activists in Ayiti (Haiti). A report critical of USAID, which was released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), was detailed in the April 3, 2013 article New Report on U.S. Aid to Haiti Finds “Troubling” Lack of Transparency, Effectiveness (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/new-report-on-us-aid-to-haiti-finds-troubling-lack-of-transparency-effectiveness). Among the article’s revelations:

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) identifies significant problems with the delivery of U.S. aid in Haiti and finds an overall lack of transparency on how the billions of dollars obligated for U.S. assistance to Haiti are being used. The report, “Breaking Open the Black Box: Increasing Aid Transparency and Accountability in Haiti,” by CEPR Research Associate Jake Johnston and Senior Associate for International Policy Alexander Main, examines the effectiveness of U.S. assistance to Haiti, how it is being administered, to what extent it is adhering to the “USAID Forward” reform agenda and what steps can be taken to ensure its more effective and transparent delivery.

“Billions in U.S. aid money are going to Haiti with little transparency to ensure that it is being used effectively,” paper co-author Jake Johnston said. “The situation for many people in post-quake Haiti is especially daunting, but for USAID it has been business as usual. No care has been taken to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are being best utilized in Haiti.”

The report notes that the few audits and evaluations of USAID’s programs in Haiti since the earthquake present a “troubling picture of the manner in which U.S. relief and reconstruction efforts have been conducted so far.” Contractors have hired far fewer Haitians than promised, Haitian businesses were largely excluded, goals were not met, there was inadequate supervision of grantees, and USAID had not conducted internal financial reviews of contractors.

The paper shows that of the $1.15 billion in contracts and grants awarded since the 2010 earthquake, over half went to the top 10 recipients of global USAID awards, with the largest recipient being the for-profit company Chemonics International Inc., the single largest recipient of USAID funds worldwide aside from the World Bank and U.N. Meanwhile, just 0.7 percent of USAID awards have gone directly to Haitian businesses or organizations. …

The paper notes that despite USAID’s “Forward” reform agenda, the agency has blocked disclosure of additional information, including through Freedom of Information Act requests. …

“Without transparency, not only is it impossible for U.S. taxpayers to know what is being done with their money, but the Haitian government and the Haitian people have little opportunity to ensure that U.S.-funded projects actually assist Haiti in rebuilding and dealing with ongoing urgent humanitarian needs,” paper co-author Alex Main said.

So, there is evidence that USAID has acted, in the recent past, to undermine governments in Latin America, and that many of those governments have expelled USAID employees as a result. There are also reports of a lack of transparency as to how funds are spent in countries, such as Ayiti (Haiti), where USAID has purportedly acted in a humanitarian capacity. What has that to do with Feed the Future, and why should we assume that USAID will act in a similar fashion in Afrika?

What Food Activists Say: USAID’s Support of GMOs

Another troubling aspect of USAID’s practices over the years has been the agency’s consistent support of corporations that are engaged in the promotion of genetically modified (GM, or GMO for “genetically modified organism”) food, which goes back over a decade. An October 2002 report by Greenpeace (http://greenpeace.co/uk) titled USAID and GM Food Aid, states, among other things:

In August 2002, Andrew Natsios of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) accused environmental groups of endangering the lives of millions of people in southern Africa by encouraging local governments to reject genetically modified (GM) food aid. Mr. Natsios said, “They can play these games with Europeans, who have full stomachs, but it is revolting and despicable to see them do so when the lives of Africans are at stake.” He added, “The Bush administration is not going to sit there and let these groups kill millions of poor people in southern Africa through their ideological campaign.”

In fact, the cynical manipulators of the famine in Africa are the US government, USAID and the GM industry. They are using the current situation to force the introduction of GM crops on countries desperate for food aid. There are numerous sources of non-GM aid available around the world, including the USA. Using these sources is the best way to both feed people and maintain their dignity, yet the US has made a clear policy decision to only supply GM contaminated aid from US suppliers. Aid agencies, the EU and UK Government all believe that best practice in emergency aid is to provide support to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in the form of cash, so that it can buy grain from the quickest and most cost effective sources. The only organisation that thinks otherwise is USAID. US policy thus impedes aid from generating maximum benefit.

It is clear that the current program of aid donation is the latest twist in a crude 10-year marketing campaign, led by USAID and designed to facilitate the introduction of US-developed GM crops into Africa. …

The simple fact is that USAID has chosen to supply GM maize as food aid, even though there are numerous grain companies in the USA from whom they could supply certified non-GM grain. …

During negotiations on the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, part of a UN sponsored international agreement to control the movement of GM crops around the world, African countries made it clear that they did not want to become a test site or dumping ground for unwanted GM food. Yet this now seems to be the case. Indeed, in comments largely ignored at the time, the UK Chief Scientist Professor David King said that the Bush Administration’s efforts to force GM foods into Africa in the form of food aid is “a massive human experiment. Professor King questioned the morality of the Administration’s desire to introduce GM into African countries, where people are facing starvation in the coming months. …

USAID has become increasingly frustrated over countries not taking GM contaminated aid – a US official was quoted as saying, “beggars can’t be choosers.” USAID clearly states, however, that among other things its role is to “integrate GM into local food systems” and “spread agricultural technology through regions of Africa.” US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Johannesburg, “In the face of famine, several governments in southern Africa have prevented critical US food assistance from being distributed to the hungry by rejecting GM corn which has been eaten safely around the world since 1995.” …

There is much more to this article, including an analysis of how the US’s specific means of delivering aid makes this result not only possible, but likely, as well as USAID’s connections with global agribusiness and biotech corporations and its efforts to further the opening of markets (“trade liberalization”) and the enforcement of patents, hardly an aid imperative. The whole article can be found at the Web Site www.greenpeace.co.uk.

There is more still to this part of the story, which we will cover in more detail when our journey takes us to India. But now, we wish to share with you the words of an executive of Monsanto, one of the largest biotech and agribusiness corporations in the world and a major corporate partner of USAID. Monsanto is quite proud of its role in pushing GMO food on the world, primarily through its proprietary hybridized seeds. These seeds have been marketed to farmers in the United States, India and other parts of the world. While Monsanto claims these “magic seeds” have brought nothing but benefit to farmers around the world, many of the farmers themselves have quite a different tale to tell. But first, the words of this Monsanto executive, which makes it clear that USAID has been an enthusiastic backer of GMO food and biotechnology for quite some time, and that they enjoy a rather cozy relationship with USAID.

What Monsanto Says: The Promise of GMO Foods

Following are excerpts from a statement of Mr. Gerald Steiner, Executive Vice President, Sustainability and Corporate Affairs, Monsanto Company, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, July 20, 2010, which was posted on Monsanto’s Web Site, http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/feed-the-future-initiative.aspx:

Thank you for inviting me to testify today on a vital new initiative, Feed the Future (www.feedthefuture.gov), which provides a framework for addressing one of our planet’s great needs, and great opportunities – the use of more productive and sustainable agricultural development to reduce hunger and poverty.

Our company has made a three-pronged commitment to improve sustainable agriculture: We will do our part to help farmers double yields in our core crops of corn, cotton and soybeans between 2000 and 2030, while producing each bushel or bale with one-third fewer resources in aggregate (such as land, water and energy). And, just as importantly, in so doing we will help farmers to earn more and improve the lives of their families and rural communities.

… Our cornerstone strategy is to actively engage and seek collaboration from a wide range of partners in the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society.

… USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah, when introducing Feed the Future to the Chicago Council Symposium on Agriculture and Security in May, asked for private-sector input. “Tell us what countries and donors can do to reduce constraints on business operations,” he said. “And please explore with us whether our tools to encourage investment . . . would help you make the commitment to invest greater resources in these specific value chains and countries.” …

… At Monsanto, we develop improved seed through advanced breeding as well as biotechnology.

… Cutting-edge science and technology is built into the seed itself, which can be planted by an African farmer using a hoe, or an American farmer using sophisticated machinery. …

… These require systems approaches that begin with improved seeds, access to fertilizer and extension training, and end with functioning markets. What we need in order to effectively contribute – as noted in the Feed the Future Guide and implied in Dr. Shah’s question – are enabling business environments.

That includes policies that provide predictability, such as reliable, science-based regulatory systems, as well as laws that protect the fruits of our research and development and the ability to fairly compete in the marketplace. …

I am encouraged by Feed the Future’s endorsement of business- enabling policies, and by its support for public-private partnerships. … Monsanto is engaged in a variety of public- private partnerships in markets around the world. …

… we are equally focused on public- private partnerships that help farmers access and use agricultural technology to produce more abundant crops, while using fewer resources. One of these is Project Sunshine, a partnership with the government of the Indian state of Gujarat and local NGOs, which has helped thousands of subsistence farmers to increase corn yields and break the cycle of poverty. …

Farmers who planted hybrids doubled, or even tripled their corn yield – and, as a result, doubled or tripled their income. Those who accepted free seed and inputs in 2008 were able to purchase them at minimal cost the following year. By 2010, Project Sunshine generated additional farm income of $27 million, improving living standards and increasing spending power so that families can afford to educate their children. …

Again, these are Mr. Steiner’s own words. Monsanto is clearly quite proud of its work in the development and promotion of GMO foods and its relationship with USAID. Mr. Steiner’s mention of Project Sunshine is also important, for it is the subject of a case in the Gujarat State of India that we will examine in a few minutes.

What Food Activists Say: Monsanto’s Plans for Control of India’s Food and Farmer Suicides

Mr. Steiner’s statement above extols the benefits of GMO seeds for the farmers of India, but as we have already stated, numerous voices are saying something entirely different. We will quote parts of some of the articles below and will simply refer to others, with their Web addresses included so you can read the articles in their entirety.

A Daily Mail article by Andrew Malone (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html) helped tell the world about The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops with this opening statement:

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.

Sourcewatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto_in_India) released a report, Monsanto in India, which goes into more detail about the crisis of farmer suicides. Here is part of that article:

Farmers in India are finding that the “biotechnology revolution” is having a devastating effect on their crop lands and personal debt levels. “In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved” says Vandana Shiva, leader of the movement to oust Monsanto from India in her 2004 article The Suicide Economy Of Corporate Globalisation. “As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness. As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. …”

UPDATE: “Since 1997, 182,936 Indian farmers have taken their lives and the numbers continue to rise. According to a recent study by the National Crime Records Bureau, 46 Indian farmers kill themselves every day – that is roughly one suicide every 30 minutes – an alarming statistic in a country where agriculture is the economic mainstay“.

Yet even this number may be underestimated. According to P. Sainath, rural affairs editor of The Hindu, “the states where these [figures] are gathered leave out thousands from the definition of ‘farmer’ and, thus, massage the numbers downward. For instance, women farmers are not normally accepted as farmers (by custom, land is almost never in their names). They do the bulk of work in agriculture – but are just ‘farmers’ wives’.” This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides. They will be recorded as suicide deaths – but not as ‘farmers’ suicides’. Likewise, many other groups, too, have been excluded from that list.”

This has been called a genocide. Says the Deccan Herald, “Bt cotton requiring more water than hybrid cotton, was knowingly promoted so as to allow the seed industry to make profits. What happens to the farmers as a result was nobody’s concern. And never was. … Strange, the country has already jumped into the second phase of green revolution without first drawing a balance sheet of the first phase of the technology era. Such an approach will only worsen the crisis, and force more farmers to commit suicide or abandon their farms. As a result, India is sure to witness the worst environmental displacement the world has known and this will be in the field of agriculture.”

Others have also written extensively on Monsanto’s GMO seeds and their implication in the wave of farmer suicides in India. An article on Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/killer-seeds-the-devastating-impacts-of-monsanto-s-genetically-modified-seeds-in-india/28629) titled KILLER SEEDS: The Devastating Impacts of Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Seeds in India by Iqbal Ahmed, January 12, 2012, states:

Monsanto’s operation in India illustrates monopolization and manipulation of the market economy, tradition, technology, and misgovernance. The world’s largest producer of genetically engineered seeds has been selling genetically modified (GM) in India for the last decade to benefit the Indian farmers – or so the company claims.

Prominent physicist, food and farmers’ activist and 1993 Right Livelihood Award winner Dr. Vandana Shiva (founder of Navdanya http://www.navdanya.org/) has authored more than 20 books and 500 papers in leading scientific and technical journals. One of them, available on http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsanto-destroys-farming/5329947, is The Seeds Of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming (Global Research, March 13, 2014 and Asian Age and Global Research, April 5, 2013), which goes into detail to allege that

Monsanto’s talk of ‘technology’ tries to hide its real objectives of control over seed where genetic engineering is a means to control seed.

Tony Cartalucci, a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”, wrote an article for Global Research on March 14, 2014 (http://www.globalresearch.ca/gmo-agribusiness-in-india-grassroots-action-against-monsanto-cargill-sygenta/5373420) titled GMO Agribusiness in India: Grassroots Action against Monsanto, Cargill, Sygenta, Grassroots Activism Builds Wall Against Western Imperialism.

Also from Global Research, Colin Todhunter wrote an article on June 20, 2014 titled Criminalising Dissent in India against GMOs and Monsanto (http://www.globalresearch.ca/criminalising-dissent-in-india-against-gmos-and-monsanto/5387779).

There have been some victories, however small, for farmers and food activists in Indian courts and government agencies. The Project Sunshine seeds that Monsanto executive Steiner was touting in his statement above, for example, were withdrawn from the project in 2012, as the following article from DNA India, Sun no longer shines on GM maize seeds (http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-sun-no-longer-shines-on-gm-maize-seeds-1681371, April 27, 2012) explains:

Gujarat government on Thursday withdrew propriety seeds of multinational company (MNC) Monsanto from ongoing Project Sunshine of the government. Non Government Organisations (NGOs) and anti-GM lobby hailed the move.

“We cannot let our food security be compromised by giving unusual leverages to MNCs,” said Prabhakar Kelkar, national president – Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS). Talking at a press meet in the city on Thursday, he said that the move is the first step towards ensuring food security in the country.

Popularly known after its brand name ‘Prabal’, Monsanto seeds are double-crossed hybrid of maize that was being distributed to tribal farmers of Gujarat under Project Sunshine. …

Speaking on the issue, agriculture minister Dilip Sanghani said that government was purchasing Monsanto seeds to be given to ‘Project Sunshine’ farmers, but it has now stopped doing so. …

Earlier, use of Prabal seeds by government in Project Sunshine invited criticism from BKS, scientists and NGOs. … It is also alleged that authorities selected the seeds despite adverse opinion of agriculture scientists.

Another article apparently sought to clarify the issue, however, by stating that the Gujarat government did not “ban” the seeds; it only ceased distributing them. The article Gujarat says ‘no’ to ban on distribution of Monsanto hybrid maize seed (http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/gujarat-says-no-to-ban-on-distribution-of-monsanto-hybrid-maize-seed/article3386089.ece) is excerpted below:

Despite opposition from various quarters, including the agricultural experts and the farmers’ organisations, the Gujarat government has refused to impose a total ban on distribution of the Monsanto hybrid maize seed named “Prabal” to the farmers in the State, particularly the tribal agriculturists. …

“The State government does not distribute seeds, it only certifies for distribution, and therefore there is no question of stopping the distribution,” the official said. He said the State government had not taken any decision to “ban” the distribution of Monsanto seeds, but it had only decided to allow distribution of other varieties of seeds also along with Prabal if farmers chose it.

The State government had been distributing Prabal, the hybrid maize seeds developed by the American multi-national company Monsanto, to the tribal farmers since 2008. The agricultural scientists and experts, however, maintain that Prabal, which required more water and fertilizers than other varieties and needed deep soil, was not suitable for the usually dry and rain-fed areas like Gujarat, and particularly for the poor tribal farmers. …

Then, in July 2013, an appeals court and India’s Intellectual Property Appellate Board rejected two patent applications from Monsanto for varieties of their GMO seed, as reported in the July 15, 2013 Nation of Change article Monsanto’s Patent Appeal Rejected by Indian Government, Saving Farmers, Food and Lives by Christina Sarich (http://www.nationofchange.org/monsanto-s-patent-appeal-rejected-indian-government-saving-farmers-food-and-lives-1373891665):

Part of the reason Monsanto was not able to pass their patents is because the 1970 Patent Act excluded patents in agriculture and medicine. The act had to be amended when India signed the World Trade Agreement (including sections covering Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights). Strong sections of the Act, like ‘what are not inventions’ in clause 3 and the especially 3d, ‘excludes as inventions the mere discovery of any new property or new use for a known substance,’ were key in Monsanto’s refusal. It was this same clause that kept the Novartis pharmaceutical company from patenting a known cancer-curing drug. They tried to challenge this in the Supreme Court of India, but lost. Many are saying that what the Novartis case is to our global Right to Health, the new refusal of Monsanto’s patents are the same Right to Seed and Right to Livelihood for farmers.

There are supposedly 27,000 farmers who have committed acts similar to a farmer in Bhiwandi taluka, India, who consumed pesticide after his crops failed miserably due to draught and increased debts to companies like Monsanto. Farmers have been petitioning the Indian government to help lift them out of poverty. While not every farmer blames Monsanto directly, the majority of these farmer suicides happen in the cotton belt, where Monsanto controls 95% of the cotton seed supply with Bt cotton. The costs of the seeds jumped more than 8,000% with the introduction of Bt cotton. …

Monsanto’s attempts to patent further seeds and bankrupt entire generations of farmers and their families that have successfully farmed for centuries have been halted – at least in India – for now.

What Monsanto Says II: No Connection Between GMO and Indian Farmer Suicides

Monsanto, of course, denies any connection between their GMO seeds and the farmer suicides in India. On the Monsanto Web Site (http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/india-farmer-suicides.aspx), a number of statements designed to give the corporation’s side of this and other controversies can be found. In the piece titled Is Bt or GMO Cotton the Reason for Indian Farmer Suicides, Monsanto makes the following contentions (among others):

Farming in rural India brings with it a set of systemic and social issues that can lead to hopelessness among farmers and an unacceptably frequent occurrence of farmer suicides. Significant research has documented the problem is complex and disproved the claim that GMO crops are the leading cause. …

The international community has conducted several studies to identify the reasons for the unacceptably frequent occurrence of farmer suicides in India over the last three decades. For example:

A 2008 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute found indebtedness among Indian farmers can be linked to numerous causes, including a lack of reliable credit, changes in government policies, cropping patterns, plant and insect resistance to pesticides, and even shifts in the crops planted on the farm.

The Council for Social Development’s (CSD) June 2012 study, Socio-Economic Impact assessment of Bt Cotton in India, identified the key reasons leading to farmer suicides as lack of irrigation facilities, unavailability of timely credit and fluctuating cotton prices over the years. …

Despite claims by those who oppose GMO crops, research also demonstrates there is no link between Indian farmer suicides and the planting of GMO cotton.

Farmer suicides in India have been a problem for nearly three decades – starting well before the first GM crop (biotech or Bt cotton) was introduced in 2002. …

One contention that is not answered is that the problems with irrigation and resistance to pests might have been triggered by the need for larger volumes of water for Monsanto’s GMO crops in areas where irrigation was not available as well as increasing resistance of pests when they adapted to the GMO varieties and the new pesticides that were required to ensure their cultivation. Also not mentioned was the “shifts in the crops planted” from cycling through different crops, as farmers have done for centuries before the advent of industrial farming, to “monocropping” to conform with the demands of factory (industrial) farming, as is promoted and practiced in many corporate agricultural environments.

“Terminator” Seeds and “Terminator” Courts: Threatening the Right to Save Seeds?

There has also been discussion about the several-thousand-year-old practice of seed saving, and the degree to which this age-old agricultural tradition is being threatened by the patenting of seeds by corporations like Monsanto. Allegations of the development of a “Terminator” seed that produces sterile or non-viable offspring (to require farmers to buy seed every year instead of recycling the seeds from a previous planting) have been categorically denied by Monsanto (despite their acquisition in 2006 of a company that was conducting experiments in this very same technology), but Monsanto jealously guards its seed by patenting it, and then threatening farmers who try to save their seed (instead of buying it again from Monsanto) with lawsuits. An article on the Web Site http://thirdworldtraveler.com, Terminator Seeds Threaten an End to Farming by Hope Shand and Pat Mooney (rafiusa@rafi.org, www.rafi.ca), Earth Island Journal, Fall, 1998, noted that

In March 1998, Delta & Pine Land Co. and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced they had received a US patent on a new genetic technology designed to prevent unauthorized seed-saving by farmers.

The patented technology enables a seed company to genetically alter seed so that the plants that grow from it are sterile; farmers cannot use their seeds. The patent is broad applying to plants and seeds of all species including both transgenic (genetically engineered) and conventionally-bred seeds. The developers of the new technology say that their technique to prevent seed-saving is still in the product development stage, and is now being tested on cotton and tobacco. They hope to have a product on the market sometime after the year 2000.

Monsanto was implicated in this as well, based on its attempt to buy Delta & Pine Land in 1998 (which failed) and its ultimate success in acquiring that company around 2006. Monsanto, however, has denied that it has any intentions to develop and market “Terminator” seed technology. Again, from the Monsanto Web Site (http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx), Myth: Monsanto Sells Terminator Seeds:

Fact: Monsanto has never commercialized a biotech trait that resulted in sterile – or “Terminator” – seeds. Sharing the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops. We stand firmly by this commitment, with no plans or research that would violate this commitment.

Perhaps this is true, and perhaps Monsanto has stood by the commitment it says it made to “smallholder farmers” in 1999 to not pursue “Terminator” technology in its seeds. Monsanto does, however, publicly defend its practice of prosecuting farmers who attempt to save their seeds, again from their Web Site, http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx, Why Does Monsanto Sue Farmers Who Save Seeds?

When farmers purchase a patented seed variety, they sign an agreement that they will not save and replant seeds produced from the seed they buy from us. More than 275,000 farmers a year buy seed under these agreements in the United States. Other seed companies sell their seed under similar provisions. They understand the basic simplicity of the agreement, which is that a business must be paid for its product. The vast majority of farmers understand and appreciate our research and are willing to pay for our inventions and the value they provide. They don’t think it’s fair that some farmers don’t pay.

A very small percentage of farmers do not honor this agreement. Monsanto does become aware, through our own actions or through third-parties, of individuals who are suspected of violating our patents and agreements. …

Whether the farmer settles right away, or the case settles during or through trial, the proceeds are donated to youth leadership initiatives including scholarship programs.

Also, from the Monsanto Web Site, http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/pages/seed-saving-and-legal-activities.aspx, Seed Saving and Legal Activities:

In agriculture plants and seeds with enhanced traits or genetics may be patent protected. This is true in the U.S. for plant varieties as well as biotech innovations. Monsanto is one of many seed companies that patent their innovations. Growers who purchase our patented seeds sign a Monsanto Technology/Stewardship Agreement — an agreement that specifically addresses the obligations of both the grower and Monsanto and governs the use of the harvested crop. The agreement specifically states that the grower will not save or sell the seeds from their harvest for further planting, breeding or cultivation.

The United States Supreme Court seems to agree with Monsanto in this regard. On the Web Site of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, GEN News Highlights, May 13, 2013 (http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/breaking-news-unanimous-supreme-court-upholds-monsanto-seed-rights/81248358/) appears the story Unanimous Supreme Court Upholds Monsanto Seed Rights. It reports on a case between Monsanto and an Indiana farmer over the saving of soybean seed.

The U.S. Supreme Court today unanimously sided with Monsanto’s right to enforce its patents for genetically modified soybean seed beyond their initial sale, over objections from a 75-year-old Indiana farmer who used multiple generations of the seed.

So, we have established USAID’s links with Monsanto and other biotech agribusiness corporations. We have seen how this alliance has been used to promote the use of GMO seeds in India. We have seen how farmers in India have in many instances suffered because of the imposition of GMO seeds. We have also read the words of Monsanto’s executives as they explained their denial of any connection between their GMO seed and farmer suicides, as well as their stated willingness to take legal action against farmers, even poor farmers, who rely upon time-honored practices such as saving seeds. We have also taken a look at USAID’s record in Latin America and Ayiti, one which has inspired distrust in many corners of South America and the Caribbean. And we have read the words of both Dr. Shah of USAID and of Mr. Steiner of Monsanto regarding the plans for Feed the Future, especially in Afrika. So, what are the implications of all this? Should Pan-Afrikanists, Afrikan Internationalists, Black Nationalists, progressives of all races and nationalities and people who just plain like to engage in such revolutionary acts as the eating of food be concerned, and why?

Implications for Afrika

Paula Crossfield wrote a piece on http://civileats.com/2009/08/06/will-obama-let-the-usaid-genetically-modified-trojan-horse-ride-again/ (August 6, 2009) titled Food Security in Africa: Will Obama let USAID’s Genetically Modified Trojan Horse Ride Again?, which began with an August 5, 2009 visit to Kenya by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Representatives Donald M. Payne (D-NJ) and Nita M. Lowey (D-NY):

While the group was there on a broad platform to discuss economic development in Africa, including food security issues, the delegation took the opportunity yesterday afternoon to visit the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) lab, which is best known for unsuccessfully trying to produce a genetically modified, virus-resistant sweet potato under a US-led program. The trip to KARI highlights the poor vision the United States currently holds on furthering food security in Africa.

Historically, the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in the US and other countries has primarily profited patent-holding companies, while creating farmer dependence on the chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced by a few US corporations, used to the detriment of human health, soil quality and the environment. The failed sweet potato project at the KARI lab was a product of a public-private partnership between Monsanto, KARI and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal organization responsible for most US non-military foreign aid. USAID is not shy about their desire to promote biotechnology, and have been working towards furthering a GMO agenda abroad since 1991, when it launched the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project (ABSP). According to this in-depth research article by the organization GRAIN, the ABSP sought to “identify suitable crops in various countries and use them as Trojan Horses to provide a solid platform for the introduction of other GM crops.”

In Kenya, that crop was the sweet potato — the focus of the USAID-funded Kenya Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program, which sought for fourteen years at KARI, at a cost of $6 million, to create and bring it to market before the partnering groups abandoned the project. …

The point … is to show how a tangled consortium (these are just some of the groups), funded by taxpayer dollars via USAID, seeks to further the aims of biotech abroad, especially in Africa, where Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia were singled out and have been the testing grounds for this strategy.

The obvious beneficiaries of such international development are the handful of corporations which own the patents and the technology, and which produce the herbicides and pesticides required by the use of such seeds. … Africans … have a right to be worried — they can look to India to see what a future relying solely on biotech seeds could look like, where a depleted water table, poisoned waterways and farmer suicides have been the result of the first Green Revolution. …

After painting the picture of a corporate-influenced, GMO-friendly food aid regime being promoted by USAID, Ms. Crossfield goes on to suggest a better alternative based on a major report that was researched, compiled and released in 2009 by a team made up of hundreds of scientists and policymakers and which strongly recommended a locally-based, more sustainable means of fighting world hunger and improving food security (physical and economic access to food, whether self-determined or imposed upon a community) while maintaining a nation’s food sovereignty (the right of a community to control their own access to food and the standards their food must meet – more on that later):

But instead of tired solutions that are not working, we need a paradigm shift, says Dr. Hans Herren, who has worked in Nairobi for 27 years and was co-chair of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report. The IAASTD report [pdf] was sponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and represented four years of work by 400 scientists. …

Biotechnology is a reductionist pipe dream which is overly dependent on waning resources. By contrast, the IAASTD looked at agro-ecological solutions that focused on agricultural resilience. Agriculture according to the IAASTD requires multifaceted, local solutions. While biotechnology has been promising drought tolerance and higher yields for years without delivering, there are real answers available now — like drought tolerant varieties, suited to certain areas, which are naturally bred; science that focuses on building the quality of the soil and the capacity for that soil to hold more water; or push and pull solutions that deal with pests naturally by attracting beneficial insects or planting compatible species that act as decoys for those pests.

… In light of what we now know about USAID, and the fact that there are biotech friendly advisers like Technology and Science Advisor to [then-Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton Nina Fedoroff and Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rajiv Shah in the administration, it is not hard to assume how those monies might be used. But President Obama should significantly change our policy if he wants to truly help the continent he says he cares so much about.

Obama administration: Study the IAASTD. If there is any hope for a better food system in Africa and the U.S., we must first accept that what is being practiced now is not sustainable, and begin to start the process of making it so. – See more at: http://civileats.com/2009/08/06/will-obama-let-the-usaid-genetically-modified-trojan-horse-ride-again/#sthash.ZWCaX21q.dpuf

Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, ETH Zurich, Institute of Integrative Biology, Zurich, Switzerland, wrote The IAASTD report and some of its fallout – a personal note (http://www.inesglobal.com/_News/iaastd.html), to describe her experience as part of the group that had put together the IAASTD report:

The paradigm of industrial agriculture was maximizing profits from land by focusing on one factor only: productivity – the increase of yields literally at any costs. With the help of chemicals and cheap oil, cheap food was brought to many in the industrialized world and has brought unimaginable profits to the chemical and oil companies. This came at the expense of the health of humans and the environment, the costs of which were never factored into the economic equation in any meaningful way. The price was paid by all, including those who never profited from cheap food in the first place which for most humans constitutes fundamental injustice in itself. With today’s world population split deeply into a very affluent part in the industrialized world where many people eat themselves to death and an impoverished part where many people starve to death and live under the most appalling conditions ever, a shift in the obviously dysfunctional agricultural and food production paradigm has become paramount for global peace and justice. Exactly what went wrong and how we can improve on it was to be learned from the biggest ever review of global agricultural food production and the underlying causes for continued and growing hunger and starvation: the International Assessment of Knowledge, Science and Technology, or IAASTD for short.

The IAASTD was a multi-stakeholder process consisting of governmental and non-governmental organizations, the private sector, producers, consumers, the science community and multiple international agencies involved in the agricultural and rural development sectors. The expected outputs were critical, in-depth global and sub-global assessments of local and institutional knowledge and experiences. The participants had to create plausible scenarios for the future based on the past events and existing trends in population growth, climate change to mention just a few. ‘What if’ questions had to be developed and answered to the best of the current existing knowledge that would allow the implications of different technological options to be explored and understood. The aim was to inform processes of future planning and thinking as to what may happen as the world continues to develop over the next 30-50 years. The process lasted 3 years and involved over 400 experts and over 100 countries. The intergovernmental process ensured ownership by governments, while the Integrated Bureau allowed the full range of stakeholders to meet as a single body for constructive exchanges and consensus building. More information on the details of the process can be found on the IAASTD website (http://inesglobal.com/_News/iaastd.html). Now, from the above said, it was clear right from the start that this process would be hard, very hard – tough truths would have to be faced and it was to be expected that those who profited and continue to profit from the existing situation would have to swallow some bitter pills. Well, as it turned out too bitter for some.

Thus, those with vested interests were able to exert influence over even the IAASTD report, though not enough to significantly blunt the report’s conclusions.

A few paragraphs above, we mentioned two terms that are often confused with each other: food security and food sovereignty. “Food security” is often used by officials like Dr. Shah of USAID when describing a “foreign-aid” process in which the US or its corporate partners deliver food aid to a starving populace, akin to “giving a man a fish” on a massive scale. Seeds that are “owned” by major agribusinesses are given, or sold, to poor farmers, who then plant the seeds, sometimes without question, based on the promises of greater crop yields and a resultant easier life. But these farmers do not decide what seeds to plant; the corporations make that decision, often in their laboratories, a decision that becomes clear when the farmers try to “save” their seeds and find themselves prosecuted for it in local or international courts. What these officials will not talk about is “food soverignty”, in which the people in the community take ownership in decifing what seed will be planted, how it will be done, and whether they will save their seed or not. Farmers’ rights afvocates and food activists will usually speak of “food sovereignty”, which is much more self-determinative, akin to a community “learning to fish”.

Here is how a couple of Web sites define the terms and explain the difference between food security and food sovereignty. The first is from http://globalfoodpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/food-security-vs-food-sovereignty/.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Food sovereignty is a broader concept. According to the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, food sovereignty encompasses “The right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies. Food sovereignty means the primacy of people’s and community’s rights to food and food production, over trade concerns.” Food sovereignty is thus embedded in larger questions of social justice and the rights of farmers and indigenous communities to control their own futures and make their own decisions.

From http://www.coffeekids.org/food-sovereignty-vs-food-security-is-there-a-difference/:

Food security and food sovereignty, although often used interchangeably, are considerably different concepts. Food security, a much more widely understood notion, refers to communities with access to food. NGOs that work with food security projects often work with a community to meet its food needs, denoting that it currently lacks the quantity and quality of food necessary to sustain community members. Food security does not necessarily stipulate what types of food are provided or whether or not that food is local or brought in from other regions, and it does not always require the direct involvement of the community to attain and administer that food (e.g., disaster-relief situations in which food arrives from outside sources). Food sovereignty, on the other hand, is slightly more specific and elicits certain guidelines that food security does not explicitly mention. Food sovereignty puts ownership of food systems into the hands of the communities themselves. It involves a sustainable, long-term process in which a community can establish its own food systems and produce its own local products without being subject to fluctuating international markets or dependent on external sources for the acquisition of seeds. Food sovereignty takes into account the cultural and social, political, geographical and environmental context of the community in order to develop an appropriate plan of action to address the community’s particular problems and needs.

So, what is at stake here is Afrika’s right to food sovereignty; whether it will be sacrificed so that corporations and superpowers can make the claim of having “saved the world” in the name of food security while fattening the pockets of the corporate CEO’s and shareholders. What’s at stake is the ability of the farmers of Afrika to make decisions as to whether their food will be organic, conventional or GMO; whether they will control their own farming practices or whether they will be controlled by either foreign organizations like USAID or multinational corporations like Monsanto; whether traditional farming and agricultural practices that have sustained communities for centuries or millennia will be lost forever as corporations and their governmental allies work to bring into play yet another massive land grab based on the ruination of farmers through the economic pressures brought on by introduction of GMO food, that simple looking little “magic seed” which is really a Seed of Suspicion that might just raise the curtain on another disappearing act for the rights of the world’s peoples to feed themselves on their terms. This battle has already played out in India, to disastrous effect for many poor farmers there. Latin America and the Caribbean have perhaps avoided that crisis but have suffered in other ways as their governments have been undermined and their leaders toppled. Afrika suffered under a Scramble once before, at the time of the enslavement of millions of her Sons and Daughters in the Americas, Europe and Arabia. Open your eyes and see the latest Scramble, this one for Afrika’s land and resources, one that has, in fact, already been going on for centuries through the extractive industries (gold, diamonds, coltan and other minerals) and more recently through the acquisition of farmers’ lands for the use by foreign and corporate interests for food export or for the growing of biofuels. The latest theater is the Scramble for Control of Afrika’s Food, one that appears to be hiding behind initiatives like Feed the Future.

There is much more to look at here. We won’t be able to do it in this article, which is already much longer than a “usual” blog piece. We hope we have been able to keep your attention. We hope we have been able to share some valuable information. As stated above, the links to the articles should give you the opportunity to dig even deeper if you so choose. One final link we’d like to share is to an article by Colkin Todhunter, GMO Agribusiness and the Destructive Nature of Global Capitalism (http://www.globalresearch.ca/gmo-agribusiness-and-the-destructive-nature-of-global-capitalism/5323232), which carries the discussion into a scathing critique of the entire capitalist system. Perhaps that is a rabbit hole to be explored at a later time.

Fifty Years Later: Of Marches, Motivators, Monuments … and Motormouths

I wasn’t at the 50th Anniversary of the historic March on Washington. Mind you, I wasn’t opposed to the March, nor do I consider marches as a waste of time as many critics do. I had attended the Redeem The Dream March in 2000, as well as the Million Man and Million Family Marches in Washington, DC, the Million Woman March in Philadelphia, PA and the first Million Youth Marches in Harlem, NY and Atlanta, Georgia. Thus, while I don’t consider marches to be The Answer To Black People’s Problems, I am not a “Marchiphobe” either. Marches can inspire people to take more concrete action in the cause of social justice, and as such they have a certain, if limited, value. And there have been so many marches. But the March on Washington, the 1963 March that was organized by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin (above) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the March where America heard the “I Have A Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is considered by many to be the Granddaddy of them all. Thus, we could expect that the 50th Anniversary of that March would be regarded as a near-sacred event by those who participated in and remember the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties.

The actual date of the March was commemorated on Wednesday, August 28, with speeches by any number of prominent persons, most notably President Barack Obama and Veteran Civil Rights Activist John Lewis. And while the statements made on that day certainly were important and will be quoted often in the days and weeks to come, I want to concentrate this edition of my commentary on the March held the previous Saturday, August 24, in the absence of some of the high-level political operatives and high-powered celebrities, or what some may want to refer to as the People’s Version of the 50th Anniversary of the March On Washington (though some prominent people were there as well).

I understand the critiques of Marches as “picnics”, as Ancestor Malcolm X had stated in 1963, a sentiment echoed by critics of the 50th Anniversary March. I also understand the compulsion many of us feel to participate in these Marches, as they often do help to motivate those activists among us who lose our focus and our motivation. Marches such as these also help re-establish the need in the public eye for continued activism, as demonstrated by the expression of discontent by such a mass of people as only a March, or a riot, seems able to express. As Rev. Al Sharpton (right), President of the National Action Network (NAN) and one of the organizers of the 2013 March along with Martin Luther King III (left), son of the iconic Civil Rights Leader, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), stated the day after the 50th Anniversary March, “Marches don’t solve problems. They expose them.”

An Unrealized Dream

Amid all the speeches delivered at the 50th Anniversary March, the most important themes revolved around the as-yet unrealized Dream of Dr. King and a Call to Action to all of us to help ensure that what remains of the Dream does not die. In the words of Rev. Sharpton, “Fifty years ago, Dr. King said America gave Blacks a check that bounced. Well, we redeposited the check. But guess what? It bounced again.”

Part of the issue here, though, is the fact that now there are an increasing number of groups trying to cash that check. While Black people were primarily being lynched, terrorized and excluded from society by courts, police and vigilantes alike, and while our leaders were being assassinated, the beneficiaries of the collective suffering of Black people grew to include women’s groups, the Latino Immigrant community and the gay community. True, the rights that were being fought for were meant to be equal rights for all, but as businesses owned by the White wives of politicians and businessmen were counted in the statistics of “minority enterprise”, opponents of affirmative action targeted the mild progress of Blacks as a signal that We Have Overcome. As the Latino population has overtaken the Black population, in part due to Black Latinos being classified as “Hispanic” in many cases, Americans of Afrikan descent began to see the gains of the Civil Rights Movement slipping away. And as gay citizens expressed their struggle for Marriage Equality as an issue analogous to the Civil Rights and Black Power Struggle, some in the Afrikan-American Community, and indeed in the Pan-Afrikanist Community, became frustrated at these other causes essentially “leapfrogging” the Black struggle by riding our coattails. For some of us, this has led to resentment and a deepening distrust of the “system” that has oppressed us for hundreds of years, yet expects us to assimilate into as the price for our “freedom”.

The Death of Trayvon Martin and the Criminalization of Young Black Males

Over the weeks that have passed since the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, who had killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, the call had been to make the case, and the enactment of Trayvon’s Law against profiling of African-American youth, a major focus of the March. The fact is that, since the March on Washington in 1963, there seems to have been little let-up in the targeting and murder of young, unarmed Black men by mostly-White authority figures who hide behind badges (in Zimmerman’s case, a Neighborhood Watch “badge”) and who make a case that they, despite being armed, feared for their lives. Amadou Diallo, Elinor Bumpers, Sean Bell, Adolph Grimes, Ronald Madison, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and many others constitute a trail of human destruction that can no longer be passed off as “isolated incidents” despite the protests of apologists for out-of-control vigilantes and police. The September issue of Ebony Magazine examines the Trayvon Martin case in the context of the increased criminalization of young Black males from a variety of commentators.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, reflected on “Stand Your Ground” laws that, at least indirectly, helped secure Zimmerman’s acquittal, and the parallels with her husband’s murder by White racists on June 12, 1963. “Stand firm in the ground we have already made and be sure that nothing is taken away from us because there are efforts to turn back the clock of freedom. And I ask you today, will you allow that to happen? … Stand Your Ground in terms of fighting for justice and equality.”

Martin Luther King III was able to move past the tired generalities of We-Still-Have-Work-To-Do and make a strong connection between his father’s unrealized Dream and the Martin tragedy. “The task is not done. The journey is not complete. … Sadly, the tears of Trayvon Martin’s mother and father remind us that far too frequently, the color of one’s skin remains a license to profile, to arrest, and to even murder without regard for the content of one’s character. … Regressive ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws must be repealed. Federal anti-profiling legislation must be enacted.”

Escaping the Preschool-To-Prison Pipeline

The March was not all about bemoaning the injustices we still face, however. There were calls to action made from the podium and during the talk shows that followed the next day. Rev. Sharpton placed much of the responsibility for helping young Black men escape the Preschool-to Prison Pipeline on the Elders who often criticize and condemn them : “If we told them who they could be and what they could do, they would pull up their pants an d get to work.”

After the March: The Talking Heads Have Their Day

The Relevant

Of course, the Sunday morning talk shows managed to extract considerable mileage from the March, with pundit after pundit giving their take on the 50th Anniversary, the March the previous day and the current state of Dr. King’s Dream. There were the usual platitudes about how We’ve Come A Long Way, But We’ve Got A Ways To Go. But there were some quite relevant and, dare I say it, important things that were said as well. Those who had participated in the previous day’s March, specifically NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Jealous (above left), veteran educator Dr. Marian Wright Edelman (above right), Congressman and 1963 marcher John Lewis (left, today and in 1963) and Rev. Sharpton, pointed out the continuing disparities in education, economics, joblessness, voting rights and equal protection under the law. Newark, New Jersey Mayor Corey Booker (right) pointed out the critical need for continued and escalated activism as part of a grand “Conspiracy of Love”. (I sometimes feel that Bro. Booker seems a little too “clean-cut”, but he does come up with some ideas that I like.) Taylor Branch (left), author in 1988 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Parting The Waters: America In The King Years 1954-1963 and one of the most vocal White proponents of the Marches in 1963 and 2013, lamented the current “partisan gridlock” in the halls of the Federal Government as being “driven by race and racial resentment” against President Barack Obama.

The Not-So-Relevant

The above statements, in my opinion, all represented positive, respectful interpretations of the importance of the March (whether you or I agree with them all or not). A number of remarks, however, were simple (and simplistic) platitudes designed to mollify the masses into the type of sociopolitical submission that comes from having been convinced that we are all, in fact, “free”. Proud examples of Black people who had escaped poverty to become Rhodes Scholars apparently overlooked the fact that the Rhodes Scholarship was named after arch-racist Cecil Rhodes (after whom Rhodesia was named) and was founded to prepare young Western (primarily White) Men to control the rest of the planet during the British Empire’s expected Colonial Age in Afrika. An attempt by more than one commentator to draw “a direct line” from Dr. King back to Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers failed to mention the facts that the Founding Fathers were in large part slaveholders who had sanctioned the extermination of the Indigenous People of North America, and that even Lincoln had stated on numerous occasions that, while he was against slavery, he harbored no “illusions” about Blacks being equal to Whites or even any desire that such equality should exist. And right-wing so-called “conservatives” who continue to decry such Marches as an exhortation to the politics of entitlement and “hopelessness” seem to forget that the very “hopelessness” they decry was created through the draconian policies of criminalization and brutality that they imposed, and that the “entitlements” that they condemn are those claimed by their benefactors in the Big Business and political elites as they insist on greater and greater profits, coupled with tax breaks, while their activities impoverish more and more Americans and dispossess more and more people around the world.

Free or Just Loose?

We’ve been called to many Marches over the last 17 years, inspired by the example of the March on Washington in 1963. All of them have embraced as a central theme the cause of Freedom and the ways in which the Black Community sees that Freedom as remaining out of our reach. While such Marches do hold inspirational value for many, and as Rev. Sharpton said, they serve to constantly expose the injustices we still face, the practical results from most of these Marches have been inconsistent at best, and they will ultimately be seen as exercises in futility by an increasing number of our people in the absence of some near-revolutionary change for the better. Many Pan-Afrikanists would argue that this is because we think our “freedom” is our birthright, won through the struggles of our Ancestors and Elders, when in reality this “freedom” is under constant attack from our enemies and taken for granted by our alleged friends, as a result of which it is under perpetual threat. Witness the current effort to repeal provisions of the Voting Rights Act in several Southern states with a record of voter intimidation, and the enactment of “Stand Your Ground” laws in between 20 and 30 states. We fail to realize that In reality, as Political Prisoner and Veteran Member of the Black Panther Party Marshall “Eddie” Conway has stated, “You’re not free; you’re just loose.” We as Afrikan people will perhaps finally begin the process toward truly being “free” when we turn loose our sense of activism, as Mayor Booker urged us to do, and free ourselves from the bonds that others have placed on us, and we have placed on ourselves.

A Road to Pan-Afrikan Unity

By Bro. Cliff
Editor, KUUMBAReport Online
cliff@kuumbareport.com

I’ve been reading a lot of emails and other communication that, thankfully, have started to move away from personal arguments to what I believe is a principled discussion of the ideas we all have for organizing Afrikan people in the Afrikan Diaspora as well as in the Mother Continent. While I agree with many of us that immediate concerns such as jobs and wealth are important, they will be nothing but band-aids for a sucking chest wound unless we put together a real organizing model from top to bottom that will work to bring the Pan-Afrikan World to total freedom. I’d like to share with you one piece of that total model, as well as a few thoughts on how it could work as part of a much larger and more comprehensive plan, based on what I believe is (or at least should be) a familiar conceptual model for organizing the Afrikan Diaspora and Afrikans in the Continent.

I want to start by telling you about an organization known as the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC, http://srdcinternational.org). It is primarily based in the United States, but in realizing that the Afrikan-American population comprises only about 40 million of a total of 300-million-plus Afrikan Descendants around the world living outside the Mother Continent, this organization is dedicated to the organization and uplift of the entire Afrikan Diaspora, and to the need for the Afrikan Diaspora itself to control its own method of organization and uplift.

SRDC: One Major Plan for Organizing the Afrikan Diaspora

Since the African Union added Article 3[q] to its Constitutive Act in 2003, which invited the Afrikan Diaspora to participate “in the development of the African Continent and the building of the African Union”, the effort on the part of the Afrikan Diaspora to respond to that invitation has been pursued. In April 2006, a Pan-Afrikan Roundtable was held in Los Angeles, California, at which the AU’s definition of the Afrikan Diaspora as “people of African descent and heritage, living outside the Continent, regardless of their country of citizenship, who are willing to assist in the development of the African Continent and the building of the African Union” was accepted (though it was acknowledged at that time to be in need of review in the future) and the effort to organize the Afrikan Diaspora began in earnest.

The first objective of the Afrikan Diaspora, according to the African Union’s “roadmap” for our incorporation in the AU, is the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), a council of Representatives from civil society organizations, activists, the general public, the “people on the ground” as one might say. The AU’s requirement is that the Afrikan Diaspora develop “modalities for election of Representatives” to ECOSOCC (as stated in the Statutes of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council, available on the AU’s website). In other words, Representatives to ECOSOCC cannot be anointed, appointed or self-proclaimed. They must have been elected by their people, and the Afrikan Diaspora must develop a means to accomplish this and submit that method to the AU for their review and approval. Because the Afrikan Diaspora currently has only been designated to receive 20 seats out of the 150 total in ECOSOCC, that means that we have to make those 20 seats count by finding serious, quality Representatives while adhering to the standard that they must be elected positions. But how do we do that?

SRDC, in partnership with a number of other Pan-Afrikan organizations in the US, Canada, Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Canada and Europe, has developed a plan in which we begin by organizing our communities at the local level. In the US, that means state-by-state, while in other parts of the Afrikan Diaspora, this may mean organizing province-by-province (as in Canada), island-by-island (say, in the Caribbean) or country-by-country.

Each local organization determines a local Facilitator, a Community Council of Elders and two (2) Elected Representatives, that is, they are elected through a process in which the community in that local area is invited to a public forum where they learn about the effort, nominate and elect people from their own community to take the needs as well as the ideas of that community to the national, and even to the international level. The Council of Elders is needed to provide their guidance and wisdom, and to make sure that those who are nominated to be Representatives are indeed qualified, serious activists, thinkers and workers and not opportunists or manipulators as happens too often when our collective guard is down.

Once a reasonable number of local organizations are formed in a large country (like the US) or a sub-region, a National or Sub-Regional Summit is held to allow local organizations to share information, develop a more consistent organizing strategy and determine who the best Representatives from that sub-region, from among the local Representatives who were elected by their own communities, will be. Those national and sub-regional Representatives would then meet in a Full Diaspora Summit which would lead to a group of Representatives who take the Pan-Afrikan Agenda (the needs, issues and constructive ideas of all the communities in the Afrikan Diaspora) to the African Union in this case, but this model could also be used to develop Representative Councils outside the AU if need be.

SRDC is currently in the process of building this model and putting it into practice in the US, while affiliated organizations are doing similar work in Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. AU member nations are also pursuing a process whereby similar Representative assemblies are being developed in the Continent. SRDC’s method for organizing the Afrikan Diaspora has been submitted to the AU since 2007, and the AU’s official assessment of the proposed method is expected later this year. In the meantime, though, SRDC realizes that it cannot wait on the bureaucratic process to unfold before implementing this method. If necessary, adjustments to that method will be made, but in the meantime, the work to organize the Diaspora must move forward. In late July SRDC concluded its seventh National Summit, which included contingents from several US states, and affiliates from Canada, from the Caribbean and from other Pan-Afrikan organizations. SRDC’s work continues apace, and they invite you to come and work this model with them. Contact organizingsrdc@aol.com or srdcpub@gmail.com if you want to connect with an SRDC organization where you are, or if you want to create one if there isn’t one where you live.

A Part of The Bigger Picture

This portion of the discussion is based entirely on my personal opinions as a Pan-Afrikan activist, and does not necessarily represent the positions of the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus or the Pan African Descendants Union.

The work of creating a Representative-based method and strategy for organizing the Afrikan Diaspora is only a part of the whole picture we all must paint together. There are clearly other means and avenues we must pursue if Afrikan people are to fully realize the freedom, self-determination, justice and prosperity we all need and deserve. Businesspeople who have an Afrikan-centered worldview are needed to help us pursue economic development, but not Western European development in blackface; rather, it must be culturally and spiritually relevant to Afrikan people, and must be pursued in a way that will not oppress and exploit us or defile the environment of the Continent and planet which we all call home. We also need our Spiritual Community, which must include the Christian, Muslim and Hebrew elements but also ancient Afrikan spiritual traditions such as the Yoruba, the Akan, the Vodou, the Santeria and others, to find a way to come together in a true Spiritual Alliance. We need our Cultural Community to help keep us inspired creatively and to remind us of what and who we are working, building and fighting for. Our revolutionary and direct-action groups in the Diaspora and in the Continent that are all fighting for the people must find a way to work cooperatively if we are to reach our full potential for Pan-Afrikan Unity. We need Legal Warriors who are ready to defend us, our activists and our interests in domestic and international courts. Our scientists, doctors, agriculturalists, engineers, economists and teachers must work together more effectively so that we will have and develop the knowledge base we will need to chart our course of independence from the West as well as the East. We need our Elders, our Women and our Youth, as well as greater strength of will and strength of morality among our Men. We need a strong Pan-Afrikan Media to ensure that our people are properly informed about what is happening in the world around us. And we need a strong moral center to help guide it all from an ethical standpoint; I personally think the Ancient Afrikan moral system of Ma’at would be perfect there.

There are so many different areas in which the work needs to be done, but they must all find a way to work cooperatively toward the total goal of Afrikan Unity, Afrikan Self-Determination, Afrikan Prosperity, Afrikan Morality and Afrikan Justice. While some may see the missions of the different organizations as a series of roads that cross each other (and thus lead to a spirit of rivalry and competition, since everyone wants their “traffic light” to be green always), I prefer to see our various organizations as occupying spots on a large circle, the objective of a free, prosperous and just Afrika in the center of that circle and their missions as lines that extend from the circle to the center. The conceptual image is that of a bicycle wheel. A bicycle wheel is strong only when all the spokes are strong, the wheel is straight and even, and it can roll smoothly, allowing us to ride it to victory. But when spokes are cut, that wheel bends and is unable to roll smoothly. The result is what we have been getting: we crash on the side of the Road to History while everyone else passes us by.

There is currently a “Super-Coalition” that is pursuing such a vision of Pan-Afrikan Cooperation, based on the principle of “Unity Without Uniformity”. It is called the Pan Afrikan Descendants Union (PADU). And there certainly are, or will be, other honest efforts by principled activists to build cooperative coalitions among our organizations. If you want to find out more about PADU, feel free to contact me by email and I can tell you more about PADU and how to contact it officially.

The mindset we have too often insisted upon following until now, that of rivalry and competition, has been the equivalent of taking a set of wire cutters to that Wheel of Pan-Afrikan Unity. This is a large part of why our organizing efforts have failed so many times, and that mindset has frankly got to stop.

Why do we seem to gravitate toward the politics of competition and rivalry instead of the politics of teamwork, mutual respect and Ujima? Why have we apparently insisted upon following such a failed concept for so long? I chalk it up to a Western-influenced mindset that is based too much on a My-Way-Or-The-Highway philosophy that is based largely on individual and organizational ego. We have to move away from ego (Some people say “EGO” stands for “Edging God Out”) and toward coalition-building and the realization that none of us has all the answers. We also tend to hold on to personal beefs and arguments, based on something that someone did or said in the past, that quite frankly are small compared to what our true enemy has done and continues to do to us. We have to learn to atone for those misdeeds we have done to others and to forgive others for those things they have done to us that we didn’t appreciate.

We need to finally decide that truly coming together in a spirit of Pan-Afrikan Unity is something we really want to do. Every time we fail to answer that call is another way in which we disrespect our Ancestors and Elders, we leave our struggling Brothers and Sisters in deprivation and danger, and we betray our children and those unborn. Let’s start, today, to chart that course toward Pan-Afrikan Unity, Prosperity, Freedom, Truth, Justice and Righteousness.

Peace and Power,
Bro. Cliff
Editor, KUUMBAReport Online
https://kuumbareport.com
cliff@kuumbareport.com

Commentary: US Global Justice & Restitution

By Nb Ka Ra Christopher—A Concise Version Of An Extended Position Paper
October 1st, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE: This commentary, originally written in 2008, remains relevant today. Despite having entered a self-proclaimed “Post-Racial Society”, we still see all the ills that impacted upon people of Afrikan descent – poverty, crime, education, institutional racism, police brutality, disproportionate prosecution and punishment, political imprisonment, dispossession of Black Farmers and the increasing colonization of our Mother Continent by US-based multinational corporations. Add to this the fact that the racial climate has suffered in the United States because of a social and political backlash against the Obama Administration (despite its own acquiescence to the right-wing political agenda), and we see evidence that, in many ways, life for Afrikan descendants is worse than before, and the need for both external and internal reparation is greater than ever. Here, Baba Neb Ka Ra of Per Ankh Em Smai Tawi gives historical and spiritual perspective to the call for restitution and reparation from the world’s dominant superpower, one which became so largely by the unpaid labor of our Afrikan Ancestors.

*****

This commentary is being shared from a collective voice of Indigenous Afrakan ascended people at a time when many states, corporations and entities of the mainland United States of America are making verbal apologies for slavery and its long-lasting institutions that still impacted our social & economic life in 2008 and continue to do so today.

We greet you all with great peace, justice, love and harmony in the Name of Our Great Mother-Father Neter-Awe-All Nature: I Am That I Am The All In All:

This commentary is a synopsis of an extended treatise being addressed to the Honorable Judges and US Attorneys, executive, legislative and other judiciary agents, branches and representatives of the United States of America et. al. Its main purpose is to inform your relative institutions of our position as Indigenous Afrakan Survivors of the unjust and criminal captivity and enslavement of our Indigenous Afrakan Ancestors. This commentary serves as the ra-initiation of a pursuit for a legal complaint, on behalf of our Indigenous Afrakan Ancestors and we as their ascendants (descendants) to be filed charging the entity and institution known as the Sovereign Government and Nation of the United States of America and other nations to include yet not be limited to: Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Islamic Leaders of Mecca-Arabia, Israelite Leaders of Aretz-Israel, and other nations, institutions, organizations, families, and entities that have committed mass crimes, criminal activities, genocide, oppression and racism against Indigenous Afrakans, Ameridians and other indigenous peoples, families and nations of huemanity. These mass murders, crimes and acts of genocide have no statutes of limitations.

This commentary is being written on behalf of the indigenous Afrakan Ancestors and their ascendants (descendants) who have not yet been vindicated for the organized, conscious and planned inhuemane injustices and crimes committed against our ancestors during the Indigenous Afrakan Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Holocaust-Maangamizi, the conquest of the Americas, the colonization of the Americas and Caribbean, the development of the modern nations of the western hemisphere inclusive of the United States of America, the colonization and neocolonialization of Afraka, and the partitioning of Afraka into more than 50 countries at the Berlin Conference of 1884. This is the beginning of a process for justice to be administered, restored and atoned for the victims that have suffered from the criminal activities that were consciously and systematically incorporated and utilized to expand European imperialism, supremacy, globalization and dominance over non-Europeans, such as the Indigenous Afrakans and their ascendants (descendants) and other Indigenous Peoples. Just a mere gesture of apology is not going to vindicate and be enough atonement for the souls and spirits of our ancestors when we look at the existing conditions of our Indigenous Afrakan Peoples on our continental homeland, our social conditions as their ascendants (descendants) in the Diaspora, and the inhuemane life conditions of other Indigenous Peoples of the Earth. The “wicked king” of the biblical “Exodus Story” did not just give an apology for the “enslavement” of Israel, nor did Germany just give the Jews a verbal apology for their holocaust mass murder and enslavement against the Jews pre, during and post-World War II.

We need for justice, atonement, and amends to be made to rectify the injustices and abuses, and manifestation of restitution for the unjust and inhuemane crimes committed against our Indigenous Afrakan ancestors. This needs to begin with communications (educational symposia, summit, public policy meetings, counsel, mediation et. al.) with those in authority so that we can begin to initiate and establish a process for this matter to be brought to the table in a proactive and intervention-driven international forum through an established International Court of Justice of Indigenous Afrakan People, other Indigenous Peoples, and the United Nations.

When we look at the existing conditions of the Indigenous Peoples of the countries and nations that have experienced the invasion, conquest, domination, illegal occupation of their homes and homeland, the exploitation and terrorism, as well as those that were unjustly torn from their indigenous homelands, one can see plainly the inhuemane conditions which they are still facing everyday for their survival. Our Indigenous homeland of Afraka, our Diasporic colonies and countries, the habitations of the indigenous peoples of the world are all experiencing a heavy unjust imbalance in economic poverty, healthcare, education, resource development, political unrest, housing shortages, environmental catastrophes, endemic human made plagues and diseases that are killing our populations in a genocidal and exterminating proportion. When we look at Europe, America and many of the so-called developed and industrial nations, we see the opposite. We see them thriving in material gains, education, health, economics, stable political structure, strong military powers etc. Simultaneously, we see them invading and oppressing other nations and distributing their wealth to others like themselves while depriving others that are not of their same hue and race. They need to “dig the log out of their own eyes before they can dig the speck out of others’ eyes.”

We have to do something and all things necessary to bring about a change for the betterment of our ascendants (descendants), ourselves and to vindicate our ancestors who did not have the right to seek justice and equality. We Indigenous Afrakans have to ra-spect that the purpose of the great amount of lives lost in the Indigenous Afrakan Transatlantic Slave Trade Holocaust-Maangamizi and the loss of lives during their resistance to their capture and enslavement does not go in vain. We have to utilize this experience to assist huemanity. Our sacrifices throughout the Maangamizi serve a greater purpose of saving us and our continental indigenous Afrakan homelands and Earth from genocide et. al.

Many of us are taught by our parents and elders of just and sound mind, that we should always strive to do the right thing. Now it is time for us to do the right and just thing for the Earth, the birthplace and cradle of Huemanity – Afraka, our ancestors, ourselves and most of all our children. We have been told that we must: “know the truth-(Maat)-so that the truth- (Maat)-can set us free.”

Though we may not have legions and battalions of visible warriors and troops, armed with the latest arsenal of military technology and weapons of mass destruction, we do have the faith in our Neter-Awe-the All Nature Supreme Mother Father Being, the I Am That I Am, the All In All and our sacred continental homeland, Afraka, our ancestral Wisdom and Guidance, our Present Selves and Elders and the hope of our youth and yet unborn. Dr. John Henrik Clarke taught:

“Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.”

We share with huemanity words of wisdom by two of our departed sages, scholars and orators, Dr. John Henrik Clarke and Dr. Asa G. Hilliard, III:

“In the United States, which is a nation composed of immigrants, the Africans have a special and tragic uniqueness. We are the only immigrants who came to America [Caribbean] against our will. We are the only immigrants who came with an invitation. The nature of this invitation, the chains, the filthy ships, the guns, and the vile sailors, who had no respect for our humanity, will not be discussed here. But the invitation was special just the same. When we arrived in America [Caribbean] we had no housing problem, no employment problem. There were plenty of jobs waiting for us, with no pay for nearly 300 years. Our contribution to the economy of the United States, the Caribbean Islands, and the world in general laid the basis for global capitalism in the modern scientific and technical world.”—From Dr. Clarke’s Wisdom Teachings from Notes for an African World Revolution: Africans at the Crossroads (p171).

“Mental bondage is invisible violence. Formal physical slavery has ended in the United States. Mental slavery continues to this present day. This slavery affects the minds of all people and, in one way, it is worse than physical slavery alone. That is, the person who is in mental bondage will be “self-contained.” Not only will that person fail to challenge beliefs and patterns of thought which control him, he will defend and protect those beliefs and patterns of thought virtually with his last dying effort.”—Dr. Asa Hilliard’s wisdom teachings from African Contributions to World Civilization by Tony Browder

Our Indigenous Afrakan Ancestors were brought to these western shores against their free will and by force to resolve a labor shortage problem of European capitalist nations and businesses. The decision to enslave the Afrakans as a captive labor force was a conscious business decision made by these nations, entities, systems, and individuals. The economic, political, social, health, educational, psychological, and spiritual problems that we the Indigenous Afrakans and other Indigenous Peoples are now experiencing are directly and indirectly related to the decisions made by these nations, entities, systems and individuals when they believed they were solving their immediate problem for a cheap labor source. However, their temporary resolution to that problem of several centuries ago has affected and caused a plethora of problems and injustices that need to be amended and reconciled. The nations, entities, corporations, and institutions that have benefited and are still benefiting need to become a part of the solution and not continue to be part of the problem. We must remember that in mathematics a problem is not resolved until both sides of the equation are equaled and balanced. The scales of justice need to be balanced so that justice is properly administered by those who claim to be “just” & democratic nations of freedom.

A final point for this commentary recommends that we heed the words of an Ancient wise one, the sage Kheti of Afraka-Khamet Nwt em Smai Tawi (NE Afraka/UAR/Egypt) from the book: Selections from The Husia by Dr. Maulana Karenga:

I. “Be skilled in speech so that you will succeed. The tongue of a man is his sword and effective speech is stronger than all fighting. None can overcome the skillful. A wise person is a school for the nobles and those who are aware of his knowledge do not attack him. No evil takes place when he is near. Truth comes to him in its essential form, shaped in the sayings of the ancestors.”

II. “Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure in books. Open and read them and follow their wise counsel. For one who is taught becomes skilled. Do not be evil for kindness is good. Make the memory of you last through love of you. Multiply the people whom the city shelters, then god will be praised for your donations. And people will … give thanks for your goodness and pray for your health.”—(p.50-53)

In the Name of Our Awe- Mother –Father Neter-Awe-All Nature the Supreme Being of Creation and its administering powers and principalities, and in the Name of Our Most Holy and Sa-Ankhtified Noble and Glorified Ancestors and Ancestoresses, and in the Name of Our Living and Guiding Elders, and In the Name of Our Present Selves, Our Children and Our Yet Unborn, I greet all those who read these words with Maat Mer Hotep Hena Ankh Udja Seneb –Balanced Measure; Truth, Unity, Care & Merging; Peace and Highest Satisfaction; Together with Life Eternal, Strength & Stability, Health & Wellness.

Ra-spectfully in Maat as Truth, Djehuty as Wisdom and Seshait as the Practice of Truth and Wisdom,

I Am Neb Ka Ra Kherishetapheru, Sa Aset-Asar, The Widowers Son,
Aka slave name CARL FERNANDO CHRISTOPHER
Tepi Her Sesh Em Per Ankh Em Smai Tawi Khamet Nwt
Head and Chief Scribe of the House of Life of the United Twin Lands (Smai Tawi) Sovereign Nation State of the Khametu Indigenous Black People Kountry-Afraka-Khamet Nwt

“Free men and women name themselves and their offspring with pride. Enslaved men and women carry their slave masters and slave mistresses identification tag (“name”) in shame though they don’t know it!” —Ancestral Elder C. K. Jochannan, the father of Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan

Per Ankh Em Smai Tawi can be contacted on the Web at http://perankhu.net/.

Out of the Frying Pan … Into the Skillet?

We must not respond to the duplicity of “liberals” by aligning with the intolerance and exploitation of “conservatives”

NNPA columnist Raynard Jackson (Black Leaders have Sold Out, Atlanta Daily World, April 25, 2013) has put forth an old argument that uses the furor over immigration reform (with a nod to the gay marriage debate thrown in for good measure) to argue for people of Afrikan descent to take their support away from the “liberal” Democratic Party and its anointed Black leaders and throw it behind the “conservative” Republican Party. While I agree with Mr. Jackson that we should not mindlessly follow Democratic Party ideology and every media-sponsored, corporate-influenced “leader” hook-line-and-sinker, to then propose a solution of allegiance to the Republican Party is completely nonsensical and would amount to the cultural (and some would say actual) suicide of Afrikan people.

Mr. Jackson bemoans the lack of inclusion of the Afrikan Descendant (he says “Black”) community in the gay marriage and immigration debates, noting that the “liberal” organizations such as the NAACP, Urban League and Congressional Black Caucus expend so much energy supporting “homosexual marriage and amnesty for illegals” while we receive no support from the immigration and gay lobbies for our issues, citing the Trayvon Martin case as an example. Specifically with regard to immigration, he cites the unemployment rate among people of Afrikan descent and notes that “Blacks will be hurt the most by giving amnesty to these 11 million illegals and yet there has not been one town hall meeting with the Black community to discuss how this issue will negatively impact the Black community’s high unemployment rate.”

He specifically makes reference to polls that suggest that, contrary to the beliefs of many, the US population in general, and the Black population in particular, is opposed to both gay marriage and “amnesty for illegals”. He blames Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Marc Morial of the Urban League, MSNBC commentator Rev. Al Sharpton and Ohio Representative and Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Marcia Fudge in particular for attempting to hijack the interests of the Black community to curry favor with the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration.

Then he lets the other shoe drop as he hints at his solution: the Republican Party, which has fought against “the illegals” (and the homosexuals) for decades. Apparently, Mr. Jackson believes that the occasional conflicts between Latinos and Afrikan-Americans, and the moral opposition of many in our community to homosexuality indicates that we should all become Republicans. Perhaps we should go Tea-Partying with the right-wingers and join in on some occasional Stars-and-Bars romanticizing about the Good Ol’ Days of the Confederacy for good measure.

This entire join-the-GOP argument has been proposed a number of times before, by Black commentators working for White newspapers and a surprising number of Black papers as well. It’s a classic case of Black intellectuals proposing, over and over again, the same shockingly simplistic and counter-intuitive analysis in an effort to sound “forward-thinking”, or at least smarter than the rest of us. Because the Democratic “liberals” ignore us and take us for granted, we should turn to the Republican “conservatives”. In their apparent zeal to literally save us all from ourselves, our conservative Black intellectuals careen right past what should be obvious on a breakneck course into the arms of our historic oppressors, who want nothing more than to relegate us all back to a modern-day plantation.

First, let’s deal with this whole concept of “illegals”. The largely-Mexican immigrants who are so often derided by flag-waving Americans are the descendants of the people of Old Mexico, which, by the way, included not just present-day Mexico, but also Texas, New Mexico (ever wonder where that name came from?), Arizona, California, and even parts of Nevada and, I believe, Colorado. These territories were all systematically seized (some would say stolen) from Mexico by the US through the instigation of hostilities (“Remember the Alamo!”) and then the annexation of land as part of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, all in service to the US doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Thus, the frequent refrain from many Mexican and Central and South American immigrants today: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”

(If we want to blame someone for our high unemployment numbers, maybe we shouldn’t take in the politics of misdirection by attacking another group of exploited and oppressed people in some silly fight over the crumbs left over by the “One Percent”. Perhaps a more suitable target would be those officials who railroaded our once-public institutions such as schools, libraries, recreation centers and adult education centers into either privatization or outright economic oblivion so their buddies could profit from building more prisons. Perhaps we should look at those politicians who have presided over what may be the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the United States. Perhaps we should point the finger at the opponents of a living wage, trade unions, comprehensive jobs programs or even enforcement of current anti-discrimination laws. Who might those people be?)

Next, let’s look at who our Black conservative would-be saviors would have us join forces with. The Republicans? Are you kidding me? Because the Democrats take us for granted and ignore us, we should leave them and run to those who beat us every day? Racial profiling, political imprisonment, the death penalty, the de-funding of schools, opposition to affirmative action, opposition to a living wage, upward redistribution of wealth, the increased criminalization of our youth, privatization of prisons, deregulation of the same banksters who plunged the US into a mini-Depression, support of the worst corporate polluters on the planet as they pursue dirtier and dirtier methods of resource extraction, the Monsanto-ization of our food supply, voter intimidation, the support of corporate murderers and thieves who pillage Afrika and South America on the regular while they overthrow and sometimes assassinate heads of state, the doctrine of perpetual war to maintain the US’s status as the biggest bully on the block – while both political parties are guilty of most of these sins, the Republicans commit these crimes “in spades” (Pardon the politically-incorrect pun). They are still light years ahead of the Democrats in their baldface attempts to impose a global military-police state upon everyone else, especially our ancestral home, Afrika. The simplistic and insulting tactics of ideological deception, acrimony and fear employed by so many conservatives, especially Black conservatives, should turn the stomach of any self-respecting Afrikan.

Finally, in this mad dash from the so-called “liberal left” to the so-called “conservative” right, who are our corporate-influenced intellectual pundits ignoring? First of all, I don’t expect them to talk about the Greens, who are seen as more “liberal” than the “liberals” for whom they have such disdain. The Greens are more passionate about gay rights and a path to citizenship for the “illegals” than the Democrats are, so it’s no surprise to me that they are not mentioned as an option. Plus, the Greens tend to be fiercely pro-environment and anti-war, again not in line with the so-called “conservative” agenda. And the Libertarians, from my personal experience, appear to be basically Republicans “in disguise” (much like Ancestor Malcolm X said about Dixiecrats and Democrats back in the ‘60s).

But there are others in the political arena whom the conservative Black intellectuals refuse to discuss. I know many of us suffer allergic reactions to Socialist arguments, but how many of us really understand what Socialism is? I’d bet very few, if any of us. Why? Because we are conditioned from early childhood to fear Socialism as a synonym for Communism (which we also don’t understand for the most part). Thus, Americans supported the war crime the US committed on September 11, 1973 when it overthrew and assassinated Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, because the US wanted Chile’s copper and other resources and Allende was standing in the way. This atrocity, which plunged Chile into a 17-plus-year reign of terror and gave rise to one of the most despicable dictators in world history (Augusto Pinochet) was justified, however, because Allende was a Socialist. Similar arguments were made for the multiple attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, much as they were used to justify the assassination of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s and the support of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa (Yes, we celebrate Nelson Mandela now, but America vilified him while he was imprisoned for 27 years). The lies that led to the genocide of the Vietnam War were easily swallowed by loyal Americans because of the fear of Communism that we were all brought up with. Thus, any organization that promotes an ideology based on Socialism in any form, such as the All-Afrikan People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) or the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), must be condemned and dismissed without so much as a second thought, and certainly without any real analysis or discussion that would give us the chance to see that these, after all, are human beings too. (And I am not a member of either organization, not that it should matter here.)

But, if we are so afraid of the “hard-left” Socialism and Communism, that doesn’t mean that we must rush to embrace the harder-right Capitalism that the Republican Party would have us endure. First of all, there are hybrids of these systems that have been used successfully in countries in Latin America, Central America and Europe (and, in fact, to a very limited and inadequate degree here in the United States). Better yet, we can develop our own system based upon the best of ancient Afrikan communitarian culture. The problem with these options, though, is that in order to adopt and practice these ways of living, we actually would have to study and learn something. And we don’t have time for all that, do we? After all, the playoff game is on TV, or we must keep up with the Khardashians, and we all have to go update our status on Facebook. And anyway, after we do our study, we would then have to do some real work. We would have to organize our people ourselves instead of waiting for the Great White Father to do it for us. We would have to hold public Town Hall Meetings based on our Afrikan culture and identity, where members of our community would actually come together at the grassroots level and develop our own set of “national” priorities, first at the local or state level, then at the national level, and finally at the global Diaspora level, to craft a comprehensive Pan-Afrikan Agenda that might answer the centuries of abuse, mis-education, exploitation and oppression that Afrikan people have been forced to endure, once and for all. And even though there is already an organization that has done much of the initial heavy lifting to get exactly this type of process started (the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus, http://www.srdcinternational,org), we still don’t have time to get involved in such silly pursuits because we have to get busy showing everyone just how patriotic we are to a nation that built itself on the enslavement of our ancestors, clearly a much more worthy expenditure of our time and energy, no?

I remember a time when Rev. Jesse Jackson actually made me proud of him. He, conservative economist Ron Woodson and the late lawyer Johnnie Cochran were guests on Meet the Press just before the Million Man March. The late Tim Russert, the then-host, asked the three men: “Is the Million Man March about separatism or about inclusion?” First, Mr. Cochran, the skilled lawyer who should have seen the flim-flam coming, answered hopefully. “I think it’s about inclusion, Tim,” he said, and he went on to explain about the principle of Black men coming together to not only embrace each other but also to apologize and atone for their misdeeds and to resolve to be better men and better citizens. Mr. Woodson replied in classic conservative-Black-intellectual style: “Tim, I’m sorry to say it’s about separatism,” he sighed, and spoke about the Black-only, male-only theme of the March in a voice tinged with regret. Rev. Jackson was the only one who saw through the trap. “I cannot answer that question, Tim, because you have presented a false dichotomy,” he replied assertively. Rev. Jackson had seen that the question was designed to manipulate us into choosing between “A” and “B”, when the alphabet actually gives us 26 letters (in some countries more) for us to choose from, and the truth was that the Million Man March was about neither of those things.

I see that our conservative Black intellectuals are still using that same tactic today. What that tells me is this: They aren’t really interested in freeing us from Democratic Party or “liberal” control; what they want is to place us under “conservative” Republican control. Which, frankly, isn’t all that different.

Yes, it’s time for us to look somewhere other than at the media-supported, government-approved leaders for Afrikan people. Yes, we are often sold out by many of them (but not all: witness Cynthia McKinney) because we don’t realize who they really work for (and it usually ain’t us). But trading a “Black leader” who parrots the Democratic Party line for one who parrots the Republican Party line amounts to nothing more than jumping out of the frying pan into the skillet. Come on, Black People. Our ancestors created the first great civilization, our moral code of Ma’at carried the seeds of the Ten Commandments before there were Ten Commandments, and our resilience as a people has kept us here on this planet despite perhaps the most persistent global genocide ever committed over at least the last half-millennium. Stop resorting to the easy, mindless pseudo-intellectual pablum that is fed to us regularly by the flag-waving, corporate-influenced right wing of the US (which now includes many of the Democrats anyway) and the western world. Drop your collective Bwana Complex and start organizing, mobilizing and ruling yourselves as Afrikan People.

Divide And Conquer

We Are Allowing Our Oppressors To Keep Us Apart

So many identities.　 So many nations.　 So many names.　 So many perspectives.

We are Afrikans (with a “k” or a “c”).　 African-Americans. Blacks. Negroes. “Coloreds”.　Moors.　Nubians.　 Nuwaubians.　Kosmosans.　Egyptians.　Kemites.　Ma’atians.　 Afro-Asiatics.　Rastafari.

We are Muslims.　 Christians. 　Hebrews.　 Yoruba. Santeria.　 Wolof.　 Dogon.　 Vodou.　 Mdw Ntr.

We are Republicans. Democrats. Greens. Independents. Socialists. Communists. Anarchists, even.

We are NAACP.　 Urban League.　 Alpha.　 Kappa.　 Sigma.　 “Q-Dog”.　 Delta.　 Zeta.　 AKA.　 Sig-Rho.　 Iota.

We are OAAU.　 SCLC.　 SNCC.　 NOI.　 BPP.　 N-BPP.　 WADU, PADU and GADU. A-APRP.　 Kawaida.　 GAC.　 PAOC.

We are doctors. Lawyers. Entrepreneurs. Farmers. Community activists. Engineers.　 Warriors. Philosophers. Priests. Politicians. Activists. And even slackers.

We are liberals. Conservatives. Pan-Afrikanists. Black nationalists. Cultural nationalists.　 Revolutionaries.

We are also confused. The whole lot of us.

It often seems that we spend more time talking “at” each other than we do talking “with” each other. All the while insisting that Afrikan Unity (or some form of it) is important to us.

The source of that unity must be the realization that, despite the small differences that have been manufactured (from the initial migrations that Dr. Chancellor Williams described so well in The Destruction of Black Civilization to the present time) to keep us apart, we share things that are much more important that should be bringing us together:

We are all separated from our ancestral home.

Even those of us still living in Afrika are separated from the most productive farmland, the minerals under the ground that are the source of the continent’s great wealth, and the life-giving waters of the Nile, the Congo, the Niger and other great rivers and lakes.

We are not recognized as a people on the World Stage.

Those of us on the Continent are often “ruled” by the heirs of neocolonialism who marginalize the masses for the benefit of their Western paymasters, and those of us in the Diaspora have no seat in the United Nations at all.

We are turned against each other.

Xosa vs. Zulu in South Afrika.　 Hutu vs. Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi and Congo.　 “Arab” vs. “Afrikan” (a truly contrived conflict if ever there was one) in Sudan.　 Christian vs. Muslim vs. Hebrew vs. “Pagan” everywhere (where the hell did we, who are　treated as　”foreigners”/”pagans” around the world,　get that　concept?), especially since the current practiced forms of the major religions are not indigenous to Afrika even though their seeds were all grown there.　 In the US, it’s Crip vs. Blood, Panther vs. Kawaida/United Slaves, North Side vs. South Side, even East Baltimore vs. West Baltimore (the major US city closest to me).　 Internationally, it’s Afrikan vs. Afro-Caribbean vs. Afro-American in some kind of mad internecine free-for-all as we race to the bottom of the human food chain.

And all the while, the oppressors laugh as they plunder our land in Afrika and our bodies and minds elsewhere in the Diaspora.

In the Baltimore (“Harriet Tubman City”) area, there are many activists and organizations who do work that is praiseworthy. I applaud Bro. Carlos Muhammad for his effort several years ago to bring the community together through the Luv4Self Network.　 I applaud Bro. Manifest for his ongoing work with Richmond, Virginia’s Happily Natural Day.　 I certainly owe a debt of gratitude to Baba Dalani Aamon for founding the Harambee Radio Network (broadcasting around the world over the Internet at www.harambeeradio.com), which gave me more than an hour every Sunday afternoon for six years to share information when I couldn’t afford to print the Newsletter.　 Baba Keidi Obi Awadu has done a similar great deed with the establishment of Harambee’s “sista” Internet station, LIB (Living In Black) Radio.　 Major shout-outs go to Bro. Anpu (Ruffmic) and Bro. Heru (Freedomwriter) of Precise Science for bringing the Pan-Afrikan cultural and moral vibe to music.　 People like Bro. Imhotep Fatiu (Pan-Afrikan Liberation Movement and Urban Youth Initiative Project), Bro. Jabari and Bro. Sundiata (Reality Speaks/Solvivaz Nation), Sista Ertha Harris (Millions More Movement-Baltimore) and Baba Ade Oba Tokunbo (OAAU-BPC) are others right here in Maryland with whom I am personally familiar who do great work in an attempt to organize us around critical issues of the day.　 And there are others. Still, not enough of these organizations and leaders talk to each other.　 Some do, but some remain separated from each other because of differences in spirituality, political focus, issues of self-identity, personal conflicts, or simply because of the perception that the barriers that separate us are insurmountable.　 This must be true, for if they did not believe so, these barriers would have been overcome and destroyed long ago, and for all time.

That much is clear from the chronic miscommunication between groups, the lack of cooperative organizing with many of our important causes and campaigns, the lack of support I see for many important organizing efforts, and the occasional sniping I’m forced to endure between people who should be fighting for, and not with, each other.

I don’t wish to get into a debate over which spiritual, political or philosophical perspective of all the ones I mentioned above (and countless others I didn’t) is the best, or the correct one.　 What we need to do is bring those perspectives together, so we may all learn from each other and ultimately see, through each other’s examples, the most effective path(s) that we need to follow.

The ultimate purpose of this particular commentary is to offer one solution, which is to continue the call I’ve been putting out for the last several years: to bring Afrikan people together, city by city, state by state, country by country (but starting, for me, in my home state, Maryland), in a series of Pan-Afrikan Town Halls.

I’m currently the Maryland State Facilitator of an Afrikan-Diasporan organization called the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC), which was formally developed in 2006 to organize Afrikan people on a city, state, country, regional and ultimately Diaspora-wide basis to seek representation at the table in the Civil Society committee (Economic, Social and Cultural Council, or ECOSOCC) in the African Union (AU).

Before people start jumping up and getting hysterical about the shortcomings of the AU, let me state that I see a much larger mission here.　 SRDC’s purpose is to seek entry into the AU for the Diaspora as a voice of influence to move Afrika in a more positive direction for her people and the Afrikan Diaspora.　 But at the same time, what we will achieve is the restoring of positive, constructive communication and cooperation between Afrikan people throughout the Diaspora and on the Afrikan Continent.

How do we do that if we can’t even get along within the same city or country or discussion group, I hear you ask?　 Well, that’s the first and, apparently, the most difficult step.　 It’s certainly the most important step, as all other steps build on this.

Every member of the Pan-Afrikan community who is reading these words must become involved in some way in bringing us all together, not to put a stop to our debates, but　to make our debates a bit less important than our cooperative plans to achieve our global unity and liberation.

To Bro. Carlos: I hope to put something together with you, based on your networking from the Luv4Self Network, and combine those efforts　with those of other Maryland-area groups, from individual organizations to the coalition that puts together the successful Kwanzaa event in Baltimore every winter, so we can continue to chart the course which you and others have helped put us on and strengthen the organization in Maryland, where I live and serve as the Facilitator.　 I and the other SRDC Facilitators would also like to be able to formally present the SRDC plan for the states in the US where we are not already established, establish a Community Council of Elders , and at least propose to the people in those states that we nominate and elect the next slate of Representatives and Observers who would pursue a Pan-Afrikan Agenda, through SRDC, with other similar groups that already exist across the United States (California, Washington State, Ohio, New York, South Carolina, Oregon, Maryland and Tennessee) and throughout the Diaspora (Nicaragua, Martinique-Guadeloupe, Canada, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Germany, and others).　 This call has been made, by myself and other SRDC members in the areas listed above, to not only continue the efforts at strengthening Pan-Afrikan unity in their states, but to plant the seed in neighboring states and areas of the Diaspora as well.

To be able to achieve true unity across communities of Afrikan descent in the US and the Diaspora, we must organize in at least a “critical mass” of local communities across the US and throughout the Afrikan Diaspora. Because SRDC was founded in the United States, our initial aim is to do this in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, to show Afrikan people throughout the Diaspora that those of us in the United States are indeed capable of coming together as one, despite the way we often behave which has led others to compare us to “crabs in a barrel”.

There have been some who have expressed misgivings, or at least uncertainty, about what it would mean to participate in SRDC’s effort.　 Some of these misgivings are from misconceptions that are understandable, and some are expressions of personal exhaustion from having fought as long as some of us have, but others are simply due to some irrational fear of the loss of personal influence or from inertia and old habits, while still others are because of personal beefs and petty bickering that have no place in efforts to forge Pan-Afrikan unity.

Let me address some of the misconceptions first.　 Your organization will not “lose itself” by aligning with SRDC.　 It is a coalition of a variety of organizations that have come together to achieve a common goal: the establishment of a Diasporan voice in the African Union and the forging of global Pan-Afrikan unity.　 People don’t have to individually become “members” of SRDC, and the different groups don’t have to take some loyalty oath to it (there have been some who apparently think that they must subordinate their own organizations to comply with　SRDC’s goals), but we do need the input of the Pan-Afrikan community to examine and discuss the SRDC plan and to choose Representatives, Observers and a Council of Elders (either through Afrikan Consensus or democratic elections) if we are to say that any state truly has Representatives that can speak for Afrikan people of that state, and by extension, if we are to say that Afrikans in the US and Afrikans in the Diaspora truly　have representative leadership.

To those Veterans who are simply exhausted, I can understand.　 Many of you have been involved in this much longer than I have—I am but a pup in this dogfight—and sometimes even my own energy level sinks dangerously low.　 Activists and organizers who have struggled with no help or support year upon year, or Political Prisoners who have languished in confinement for decades before finally being freed (or not freed) have earned either some time off or outright retirement from the struggle.　 They have been doing already, and for quite some time.　 They have seen marriages and relationships destroyed because of the pressure of this struggle, they have lost friends and comrades to this struggle, they have seen their health decline because of this struggle, and they have received little thanks.　 We do need their guidance and, at times, their admonishments when we go astray.　 But the heavy lifting is up to those of us who follow.　 We cannot drop the load now.

As far as the inertia, old habits, personal beefs and petty bickering are concerned, it’s time to stop it.　 Barack Obama or no Barack Obama, we remain in a struggle for survival across the globe, and time is running out for us.　 We cannot afford to allow this state of disunity to continue any longer.　 Those who oppose this effort to bring us together in some form of Pan-Afrikan unity have apparently aligned themselves with those who have opposed other similar efforts throughout our history, and they owe our scattered and suffering masses an explanation and a heartfelt apology for their obstructionist behavior.

Healthy debate is fine, but I’ve seen too much back-biting between activist organizations and within a number of discussion groups that were created to pursue Pan-Afrikanism and Black Unity.　 And this goes beyond just an effort to root out provocateurs and opportunists in our midst or to distance ourselves from illegal or dishonorable behavior by misguided members; now we’re seeing heated arguments about what name we will use to refer to ourselves and rifts that have developed between committed organizers because someone’s ego has been bruised.　 Don’t you know better by now? Isn’t it time to start putting our differences aside, honoring those unique aspects about each of our belief systems that make us strong, and coming together so we can break our psychological chains?　 Or is the unspoken purpose of the back-biters to achieve the destruction of all organizations and forums that committed Pan-Afrikan organizers have created to help us, to paraphrase Ancestor Robert Nesta Marley, “emancipate ourselves from mental slavery”?

Think I’m being too hard on us?　 Wanna cuss me out?　 Or do you agree with my analysis and want to get involved in a positive way?　 Are you already doing this great and important work and want to link up with others who are tired of watching us rip ourselves apart?　 Do feel free to give a brotha a shout.　 Drop a comment to this piece on our Web Site. Let us know who is out there who is ready to start making a positive difference and bring our people together at last. 　The development of a broad coalition of true Liberation Thinkers, a true Pan-Afrikan United Front, is needed, and I hope we can find a way to bring something like this about at last.　 Mama Pam Africa of MOVE, Bro. Carlos, Baba Dalani, Baba Keidi, Sista Marpessa who struggles for Political Prisoners, and others have been trying to bring us together for years, and I and others in SRDC have seen how difficult it can be to get us to stop screaming at each other and start talking, listening and planning with each other.　 I hear so much from us when it’s time to “vent spleen” and not enough when it’s time to sit down with each other, learn to understand (or “overstand”) each other and truly plan for our own Unity and Liberation.

Peace and Power,
Bro. Cliff
Editor, KUUMBAReport Newsletter
Maryland Representative, Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC)

KUUMBAReport.com

Truth and Justice for Afrika and her Diaspora | Morality, Ma'at and Pan-Africanism

Category Archives: African Diaspora

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onamovellja@aol.com

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Commentary: US Global Justice & Restitution

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Out of the Frying Pan … Into the Skillet?

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Divide And Conquer

We Are Allowing Our Oppressors To Keep Us Apart

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The Stars & Bars vs. the Stars & Stripes

South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession Convention of South Carolina December 20, 1860

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Memorial Service for Phil Africa

The MOVE Organization P.O. Box 19709 Philadelphia, PA 19143 (215) 386-1165 onamovellja@aol.com

Janine Phillips Africa #6309 451 Fullerton Ave. Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238

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An Unrealized Dream

The Death of Trayvon Martin and the Criminalization of Young Black Males

Escaping the Preschool-To-Prison Pipeline

After the March: The Talking Heads Have Their Day

The Relevant

The Not-So-Relevant

Free or Just Loose?

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We Are Allowing Our Oppressors To Keep Us Apart

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South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession
Convention of South Carolina
December 20, 1860

The MOVE Organization
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
(215) 386-1165
onamovellja@aol.com

Janine Phillips Africa #6309
451 Fullerton Ave.
Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238