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 such a 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 500-million-to-one-billion Afrikan Descendants around the world living outside the Mother Continent, SRDC has dedicated itself 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 (AU) 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 representation in the AU’s 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 in our communities around the world 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, Afrika 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 several public forums where they learn about the effort, develop their own set of needs and ideas (a “Pan-Afrikan Agenda”), and 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 (several smaller countries in a common area), 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 combined 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 has yet to be made; we continue to press the AU to make the promised assessment and help us determine how we can move that process forward according to the AU’s own plan and objectives.  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.  As of this writing SRDC has held fourteen (14) International Summits since the fall of 2007, which have included contingents from several US states, and affiliates from Canada, Central America, Europe, the Caribbean and other Pan-Afrikan organizations.  SRDC’s work continues apace, and they invite you to come and work this model with them.  Contact SRDC by emailing info@srdcinternational.org or cliff@kuumbareport.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 simply 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, the MDW NTR and others, to find a way to come together in a true Spiritual Alliance.  We need our Cultural and Artists 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 the rim of a large circle, with the objective of a free, prosperous and just Afrika in the center of that circle and their missions as lines that extend from the rim of the circle to the center.  The conceptual image thus generated is that of a spoked wheel.  A spoked 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, and ultimately will break down and collapse.  The result is what we have been getting: we crash on the side of the Road to History while other committed efforts that have not allow themselves to be disrupted (politically conservative groups, socialist/communist organizations, LGBTQ advocates, women’s groups, Latino organizations, Asian organizations and White Male organizations) pass us by.

It’s long past time for Afrikan People to work together in a more cooperative and effective way.  In 2009, a “Super-Coalition” was proposed on the international level that pursued a vision of Pan-Afrikan Cooperation based on the principle of “Unity Without Uniformity”.  It was called the Pan Afrikan Diaspora Union (PADU).  PADU is currently inactive, but efforts to move its laudable objective of building true, cooperative Pan-Afrikan Unity forward are continuing.  In Maryland, where I live in the United States, we are working to build the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition, based on the conviction that we must learn to truly work cooperatively before announcing anything as grandiose as a Pan-Afrikan United Front.  (Ancestor Amilcar Cabral had warned us all to “tell no lies … claim no easy victories.”)  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 and the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition, feel free to contact me by email at cliff@kuumbareport.com and I can tell you more about them and how to contact them officially.

The mindset we have too often insisted upon following until now, that of rivalry and competition, has been the equivalent of taking a saw to the spokes of 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, an I-Have-The-Answer, 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

Building the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition in Maryland

The Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition is building right now.  The work is far from complete.  We have been meeting on Zoom on a monthly basis since January 2022, getting to know each other and proposing ideas for projects and agreements that we all can embrace together, including support for Black Media, developing and coordinating grassroots-led community-education initiatives, proposing agreements for mutual and community protection and planning community Town Hall-style events when concerns about the COVID Pandemic have lessened.  The organizations listed below and others are part of that Coalition, but there are many other organizations that are not yet part of it, and their involvement and input are most welcome and needed if we are to achieve truth, justice and righteousness in our society.  In short, we are building this Coalition, but we have a long way to go before we accomplish that which we seek.

Spokes of the Wheel
Grassroots Organizing:
Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC)

Spokes of the Wheel
Arts and Culture:
Teaching Artist Institute (TAI)

Spokes of the Wheel
Spirituality:
Souls of Life Society

Spokes of the Wheel
Pan-Afrikan Media:
The National Black Unity News

Spokes of the Wheel
Political Organizing & Lobbying:
Ujima Peoples Progress Party (UPP)

Spokes of the Wheel
Revolutionary Organizing:
Organization of All Afrikan Unity (OAAU-BPC)

Spokes of the Wheel
Elder Guidance:
Maryland Council of Elders (MCOE)

Spokes of the Wheel
International Pan-Afrikanism:
Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC)

For more information on the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition and how you or your organization can become involved, please write an email to cliff@kuumbareport.com.

This piece was initially written as an email to two Elders who have often bemoaned the lack of unity that we as African people have demonstrated over these many generations since the Ma’afa (a Twi word meaning “great disaster”, used by Pan-Afrikan historians and activists to describe the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Arab Slave Trade, the Scramble for Africa and the suffering African people have endured as a result).  I meant it as a helpful response to their question (which was probably rhetorical anyway) about why our people continue to act in such a self-destructive manner, refusing to hear the words of our knowledgeable Elders and instead preferring the siren song of the corporate interests who wish to keep us subjugated as compliant consumers and labor lackeys to keep the wheels of their industry moving.  When my email was returned to me with the message “the recipient is only accepting mail from specific email addresses”, it became clear to me that, while the message was meant to be distributed broadly so that all could hear the wisdom of their words, they did not themselves wish to hear the words of the rest of us.  In other words, this was to be a one-way discussion.  And, apparently (and unfortunately), the only answer they wished to see or hear was the rest of us unifying under their leadership.

I’ve encountered a number of wise and well-meaning activists and organizers, such as these respected Elders, who have taken this view, that they are the ones with the answers and all others should simply follow their banner.  The organization I belong to, the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC), is a coalition-based organization that realizes that such an approach will often fail to attract allies who already have ideas and organizations of their own.  SRDC has attempted to form cooperative partnerships with other organizations whose response was simply “join under us and then we will work together.”  These partnerships failed to materialize because we could not subordinate our mission to someone else’s, but we were willing to work side-by-side with other organizations in areas of shared interest, an offer which has often been refused.  Our various organizations’ utter failure to work together in such a unified and cooperative manner (despite our avowed reverence for the principles of Kwanzaa, specifically Unity–Umoja–and Collective Work and Responsibility–Ujima) actually underlines the primary reason why the words of our enemies carry so much more weight than do our own with our own people.

I’m not saying that the Elder’s complaint was without merit; quite the contrary.  He is absolutely right: our grassroots communities easily and readily swallow the brainwashing and propaganda that is fed to them by the powers that be.  Where I differ with the Elder is in his seeming surprise and bewilderment as to the reason why this is happening.  It is not because of some magic spell that has been cast over our people.  It is not because of some myth of intellectual or moral inferiority that right-wingers try to sell us.  It is not even so much because of Western “tricknology”, though it is a tool that is used to deliver the poisonous messages our enemies feed us.  It is because, as much as anything else, of our own inability, or refusal, as self-styled “leaders”, to actively model the unity and cooperation we want the masses to practice to lift our communities up.

The messages with which our communities are bombarded–Look out for Number One, Individual Freedom, Personal Responsibility, I Gotta Get Mine–have profoundly influenced us, and not for the better.  While it took military coups d’état and the imposition of military dictatorships to turn communities in Latin American countries and even villages against each other, the unraveling of the fabric of our Village was accomplished more through a coup d’esprit–the conquest of our spirit through a combination of drugs, deprivation, fear and propaganda.  The major entertainment media (which often masquerade as news) and the corporate interests that control them were able to pull off this stunt in a way that was well-coordinated and affected our collective psyche across the board.  This is largely because of the fact that they are well organized in spite of belonging to different organizations and corporations.  While they all have their specific organizational interests (mainly profit), they all agree on the basic narrative to feed to our people, and thus their message is well crafted, organized and unified.  They often sit on each others’ Boards of Directors and, though they may be competitors in many ways, they have learned to support each other in a variety of projects.  Even going back in history, we see this level of cooperation.  At the Berlin Conference, supposedly-competing countries “cooperated” to divide Mother Africa up so that each of them was given control of specific, resource-rich sectors of our ancestral home, knowing that they would all benefit at our collective expense.  This spirit of cooperation would ultimately serve them well in the two World Wars, when first Otto Von Bismarck, then Adolf Hitler and the Axis Powers, decided to attempt to conquer all of Europe for themselves.  The countries of Europe, including the United States and Russia in World War II, not only cooperated militarily, they also worked together to develop and implement the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe.  Thus, our historical oppressors from the United States and Europe have been practicing “Ujima” (Collective Work and  Responsibility) and “Umoja” (Unity) for hundreds of years before we even mouthed the words.

We as African people do no such thing.  With the exception of the occasional slave revolt, civil-rights march  or presidential election, we seem unable to truly come  together and cooperate on anything without our own self-interested aims derailing our efforts.  (The African Union is trying to provide an example of cooperation among member states, but that project, much like the Organization of African Unity which it replaced, is being challenged as well, from inside and from outside the organization.)  Our different organizations are still involved in the “me-first” game and no other strategy is acceptable.  To us, unity seems possible only through conquest and the absorption of other groups’ members.  If people do not join our organization and follow our specific organizational agenda, we assume that they do not wish to work with us and that they are against Pan-African Unity.

This, our refusal to even work in cooperation with each other while our enemies have been doing so for generations, is the main reason why our message goes unheeded by the masses of our people.  We are so busy competing with, contradicting and fighting ourselves that our messages of liberation and uplift sound jumbled and self-contradictory; why should anyone listen to us talking about unity when we all fight amongst ourselves?  The corporations, while they do compete with each other for the biggest share of the profits, are at least selling us, by and large, the same thing, and have agreed to use their common media outlets
to send us the same basic message of what we should call ourselves and what dreams we should seek to attain.  Our ironically self-described Pan-Afrikan organizations, however, disagree on what we should call ourselves, what our relationship should be to Africa and what is best for us as a people, and they all seem to insist that they alone are the path to our psychological, economic and political freedom and that all others must join them and them alone.

The fact is that our different organizations are not going to join each other.  You may have no interest in “joining” my organization, the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus or SRDC (not that I’m insisting that you do) because you want to continue to build your organization, and I don’t have the time or energy to join other organizations because I’m quite busy with more than enough unpaid work helping to build SRDC.

However, this need not be a major problem or an impediment to our organizing efforts.  While we in SRDC are still focused on building our organization and establishing a means to bring the voice of the Grassroots Communities of the African Diaspora to the World Stage (be that through the African Union, World Social Forum or other vehicles), we also recognize that, while our different organizations are not ready to join each other, they can, and must, find a way to work together cooperatively for the education, mobilization and general uplift of African people, as the corporations of our adversaries do in their effort to strengthen their control over us.

I have been reaching out, on behalf of SRDC, to other organizations that have shown an interest in working cooperatively.  I’ve concentrated my efforts in the area near where I live, and as a result I’ve gotten a few interested responses from some of the Continental African organizations in the Washington DC area, even though many of them would tell you that their perspective on who the African Diaspora is (that the Diaspora is primarily Continental Africans who emigrated from the Mother Continent to the West) are often quite different from that of SRDC and of African Descendants in general (that the Diaspora includes all people of African descent who live outside the African Continent).  Still, if there is a way for Continental Africans and African Descendants to engage in constructive planning so that we can eventually develop a narrative of Diaspora Unity instead of the individualistic disunity and thoughtless consumerism that our adversaries teach us, I hope to be a part of that planning process.  I don’t expect these organizations to join SRDC, but my hope is that they will agree to work alongside us to reach out to, organize and galvanize the African Diaspora so that the aims of all our organizations can be attained.

If this sounds like an acceptable arrangement, I am prepared to hear from you so that we can make plans to move all of our people forward.  Just leave a comment here, or send an email to cliff@kuubareport.com.

Peace and Power,
Bro. Cliff

Divide And Conquer