Mandela

Thousands of people were killed by the forces of Apartheid. Mandela was just one of them who was picked up and imprisoned. Unlike Steve Biko and many others Mandela was not killed while imprisoned. Maybe the Apartheid boys saw something in him they could use if and when necessary. And they were right.

Mandela was much more angry with his wife for not being completely faithful during 27 years of imprisonment than he ever was with those who imprisoned him and robbed him of his freedom. And that’s exactly what they saw in him: a man who deep down adored his oppressors and only wanted to be their equal and live with them despite their inhuman criminality and wickedness. And that’s why he is liked by whites–because they see a man who feels so inferior that he would excuse anything an European does.

Why the big birthday party in London and not in South Africa? And why hardly any African faces in the big crowd watching some black and white faces sing and dance for him?

Mugabe

Mugabe himself was imprisoned for many years by the white settlers in Zimbabwe but I think that the years spent in Ghana during the days of Nkrumah helped him retain a portion of his African self-consciousness. Mugabe also nurses a serious grudge against the British for the callous way he was treated at the death of his very young son.

Sure, under normal circumstances Mugabe has overstayed his time as President of Zimbabwe, but circumstances were/are not normal. He is the only one I see who could have handled the tricks played by the British government as it maneuvered to ensure that the settlers did not give up their stolen lands–as in Nambibia, South Africa and Kenya. Another leader would just have sold out–after all that massaging by the British: knighthood, honorary doctorates, state dinner at Buckingham Palace, etc.

All that Mugabe had to do was to be a craven negro stooge and he would have been home safe. Who would have heard of Mugabe if he had just let the whites stay with their stolen booty–lording it over Africans treated like slaves on their own lands, working for just slave wages on those white farms?

Zimbabwe was offered independence in 1980 and the land issue dragged on until 2002 when Mugabe and the war veterans said “enough is enough” then proceeded to seize back the stolen lands. And ever since that time the whole world-wide white kith and kin collective has been going ballistic over Mugabe. All I can say is that given the amount of rage and anger it has to be a very special experience to be a person of European extraction in this world. I just cannot understand their rage and anger. To say it’s just racism, doesn’t really answer the question. It must be a special kind of racism having to do with a very complex set of issues.

The People of Zimbabwe

There is something strange about the people those parts of Africa where the Europeans first killed thousands of people then seized their lands. One thing that is noteworthy is that they never seem to wear African clothing–African parlimentarians who attempted to wear Africa clothing were chided and there was a law in Kenya forbidding African clothing to be worn in Parliament– and they seem to be completely taken in by Christianity.

I write the above to say that the massive sanctions placed on the economy of Zimbabwe had the desired effect. Unlike the Iraqis who experienced death dealing sanctions from the West and the Palestinians a large section of the people of urban Zimbabwe just fell for the white-led and financed MDC. It’s as if they didn’t understand the implications of what they were doing. Sure, if you want to oppose ZANU then form political parties by all means, but why choose to support the party funded and promoted by the settlers and their backers in the West? And that’s why I think that the hard-core ZANU supporters saw that voting for Tsvangirai was pure treachery.

– Words by a respected anonymous

["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, link]

There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.

Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.

Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’

As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:

the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.

The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.

It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting
mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.

The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched

as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:

Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.

D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to

recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.

The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.

That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:

At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.

Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its
main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.

Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.

That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.

By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101

Barack Obama versus Black Self-Determination

Barack Obama versus Black Self-Determination

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Obama has repeatedly telegraphed his contempt for any worldview that fails to glorify the U.S. rise to global dominance.”

Obama-ism - a thoroughly corporate political concoction soaked with banalities and wrapped in fraudulent brown packaging - presents a clear and present danger to perhaps the greatest legacy of the Black Freedom Movement: African Americans’ embrace of their right to self-determination. Although African American yearnings for self-determination are evident in all previous eras, the general and dramatic emergence of this fundamental understanding among Blacks of their distinct “peoplehood” and inherent right to shape their own collective destiny, free of veto by or need for validation from dominant whites, marks the Sixties as a transformational period in African American history.

Barack Obama, whose disdain for what he calls the “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” is palpable, seeks to eradicate all vestiges of Black self-determination, root and branch. The Senator has never made a secret of his intentions, dating from his 2004 Democratic National Convention declaration that “there is no Black America,” to his categorical rejection of the Black counter-narrative of American history, as preached by Rev. Jeremiah Wright and understood by most African Americans.

Obama has revealed himself as a rabid nationalist of the standard, white America variety. “I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country,” says Obama - which pretty much says it all. The candidate has repeatedly telegraphed his contempt for any worldview that fails to glorify the U.S. rise to global dominance - a ritual that collides instantly with truth as it actually exists, with history as Black people have known it, and with Black aspirations to make their own way in the world unencumbered by the burden of white lies. Obama promises that he will oppose, with all the powers of his office, those who, like Rev. Wright, “use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.” (Philadelphia “Race” speech, March 18.)

If Obama were already president, dissidents would have cause to shop for a safehouse or foreign getaway.

Victims as Perpetrators

Clearly, if the United States is inherently good, then Black people and Native Americans must have done something catastrophically wrong to bring down upon themselves such suffering at the hands of the U.S. government - not to mention the sins committed by Vietnamese, Nicaraguans, Angolans and all the other peoples that have gotten in the way of white American Manifest Destiny.

President Obama will wage war against the heresies of deviant worldviews that dare to question America’s moral superiority - as exemplified by Rev. Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”

If racism is merely an aberration in American life, as Obama believes - and which is the greatest concession that general white society is prepared to make to Blacks - then all the fuss about institutional racism, endemic police brutality and such are insults to the “national honor.” Certainly, Obama behaves as if he thinks so. Every manifestation of Black entitlement to self-determination - that is, the right to rely on one’s own people’s collective memory and sense of the truth - must, from Obama’s standpoint, be resisted, denounced and suppressed as “divisive” and, in general, against the national interest.

In order for Obama’s vision of America to be true, most of Black America must be liars, Black self-determination equals treason, and the Sixties era was the Mother of Corruption.

Sixties Transformation

A half-century ago, in a veritable end-of-marathon sprint to self-emancipation, Black Americans not only achieved full legal citizenship within barely the space of a decade, but in the process threw off the chains of subservience to the oppressor’s national historical narrative, the legitimizing mythology of white American Manifest Destiny. Inevitably, and in the glare of a global anti-colonial firestorm, African Americans finally perceived en masse the true nature of the centuries-old crime still-in-progress - that distinct and peculiar monstrosity, U.S. imperialism. Born of the Middle Passage and Pilgrims making bonfires of Pequot Indian women and children, 20^th Century U.S. aggression against mainly non-white peoples abroad was inextricably linked to chain gangs and street cop justice at home. African Americans focused their “third eye” that could see across oceans and centuries, a political optic that discerned not just blood kin on The Continent, but peoples on other, distant shores, also victims of Euro-American predation, and equally deserving of Black solidarity.

“U.S. aggression against mainly non-white peoples abroad was inextricably linked to chain gangs and street cop justice at home.”

African American solidarity with continental Africans - and with Vietnamese who “never called me nigger” - grew in tandem with the Black domestic struggle for self-determination: the fight for political rights with which to defend, control and shape the futures of Black communities. It is a truism that those who are engaged in struggle for their own people’s self-determination are most sincerely empathetic towards others seeking liberation - especially when it is understood that the two peoples share a common antagonist. The period loosely defined as The Sixties saw not only unprecedented popular mobilization on domestic issues (10,000 separate demonstrations in 1965, alone, the vast bulk of them “civil rights” related), but soaring Black identification with liberation movements elsewhere in the world. African Americans were preparing themselves to become full fledged citizens of the planet, not just the United States.

The language of self-determination, always a strong current in historical Black political thought, entered the popular Black vocabulary through Malcolm X. “We assert that we Afro-Americans have the right to direct and control our lives, our history, and our future rather than to have our destinies determined by American racists,” declared Malcolm’s Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU), in a document scheduled for release on the day of his assassination, February 21, 1965. “[W]e are determined to rediscover our true African culture, which was crushed and hidden for over four hundred years in order to enslave us and keep us enslaved up to today….”

Self-determination was item number one of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Program, promulgated in 1966:

“We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”

Two years later, 100 Black nationalists in Detroit declared the founding of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), to further Blacks’ entitlement to the full rights of a nation. Following the Nation of Islam’s ideological lead and citing Malcolm X as the “Father of the Black Nation,” the RNA identified five southern states - Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina - as the “Promised Land” for Black Americans.

The embrace of self-determination was not limited to the Black Left and land-seeking nationalists, but resonated throughout Black society, from Black capitalists to Marxists and everyone in between. There can be no doubt that the people who Dr. Martin Luther King was certain would “get to the promised land” were on a conscious, mass journey of self-determination. It was up to Black people to decide precisely where the ultimate destination might be - a question over which Dr. King agonized during the last years of his life. “I think we’ll be integrating into a burning house,” King told entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte, in 1968 - a clear acknowledgement that African Americans were not simply a darker variety of citizens, but a distinct people within the United States. King imagined that Blacks would play the role of firemen in the “American” house - but at any rate, that would be their choice to make.

“The call to self-determination was not limited to the Black Left and land-seeking nationalists, but resonated throughout Black society.”

By definition, the right to self-determination is independent of minority or majority status - otherwise, no such right can exist in the face of white majority power. Therefore, self-determination transcends simple one-man, one-vote rule which, in the United States, affords historically hostile white majorities a permanent veto over Black aspirations. U.S. history has provided ample proof that electoral “democracy” is no cure for institutionalized suppression of racial minorities. With Voting Rights legislation secured by the mid-Sixties and understanding the limits of winner-take-all ballots, African Americans, including Dr. King, insisted on the right of Blacks to exercise effective power over their own lives as Blacks. Naturally, such rights would obtain in the growing number of localities in which Blacks were emerging as majorities. However, the principles of self-determination, as interpreted at the time, demanded that Blacks and others claiming “peoplehood” be entitled to control those resources necessary for the development of their group independent of the majority’s wishes - “rather than to have our destinies determined by American racists,” as Malcolm’s organization put it.

The domestic Black American application of self-determination principles were adapted from United Nations language that states: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

The UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Economic Rights fit the Black liberationist sentiments of The Sixties to a tee. Just as small nations have rights that powerful nations are required to respect, so the Black minority in the United States has the right to speak and act for itself, and to claim a share of the national treasure for itself, regardless of majority claims and sentiments. In a world of evolving standards of civilization, true “democracy” does not allow the big to lord it over the small.

Although there was not to be a land-based Black “nation” within U.S. borders, the core principles of Black self-determination have been largely incorporated into the political outlook and expectations of African Americans, and grudgingly acquiesced to by most whites. Blacks and, later, other minority groupings in white institutions, most notably academia, demanded and received resources based on their standing as Blacks within the larger body. The autonomy of Black political sentiment has, until recently, been at least paid lip-service by whites throughout U.S. society. Indeed, much of what some whites mean-spiritedly call “playing the race card” is simply Black assertion of group rights and prerequisites that should not be curbed by white majorities. Television programs produced by and for Blacks, now nearly extinct, were responses to demands that Black people be allowed to speak for themselves - a right under the umbrella of self-determination. In Democratic Party circles, at least, “the Blacks” cannot appear to be left out of decision making exercises, which usually require the (cosmetic) presence of trustworthy African Americans as a semblance for Black group inclusion. The moral authority of Black caucuses (including that which has been frittered away by the Congressional Black Caucus) is derived from the larger authority of self-determination principles.

Solidarity

The 1960s Black embrace of political self-determination freed African Americans from the burdensome inheritance of United States’ enemies. As Muhammad Ali is said to have declared in 1966, “No Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” Self-determination meant the right to declare solidarity with whomever one chooses, to side with African kin in the struggle for decolonization of the continent while the U.S. thwarted true liberation at every turn; and to identify as friends those who shared status as designated enemies of the U.S. government, abroad.

“International law is treated as a dead letter, by corporate Democrats as well as Republicans.”

During the Sixties, it was discovered that African Americans, whose foreign policy opinions had previously been only sporadically surveyed, were more opposed to American military adventures abroad than any other U.S. ethnic group. The basis of Black anti-war sentiment was rooted in, not some vague group pacifism, but the conclusion that Washington is a bully who revels in abusing persons of color (and gets rich doing it). African Americans had amassed centuries of experience as victims of U.S. government policy, treated as foreigners in their own land. Blacks, therefore, harbor the healthiest skepticism about U.S. motives, especially regarding non-white peoples. The right of self-determination, as African Americans understood it, liberated Blacks from any obligation to support Washington’s depredations around the world. Moreover, bonds of solidarity with Africa required active opposition to U.S. foreign policy.

For many Blacks, the “newfound” knowledge of self-determination principles meant, literally, the right to enjoy freedom of speech for the first time! African Americans had always understood that Washington cared as little for the interests of foreign non-whites as it did for “colored” folks at home. Now, they could shout it, without fear of being branded traitors - at least, not by other Black people. By 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King found his true voice and began speaking in what was essentially solidarity with the Vietnamese people.

Two generations later, the contradictions of ailing U.S. imperialism become ever more acute. The United States challenges as never before the rights of smaller nations to manage their own resources and political affairs as they see fit. International law is treated as a dead letter, by corporate Democrats as well as Republicans. Barack Obama is no different - except in the imaginations of his fans.

Obama plans to leave 60-80,000 U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely, retain the services of many of the 140,000 private mercenaries (contractors) currently in the country, and add 92,000 additional soldiers and Marines to overall U.S. force structures - the same number the Bush regime requested from Congress. Far from being a peace candidate, Obama favors a huge increase in U.S. war-making capacity, in order to fight yet a third war while still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Washington will have no problem finding locations for its new war(s).

Outside of the Middle East, the fault lines run through Africa and Latin America. George Bush has already begun the occupation of the Horn of African under the ruse of “anti-terror,” with Ethiopia’s brutal dictatorship acting as U.S. surrogate. Backed by every military resource of the United States, including the huge American base in Djibouti, the might of U.S. Indian Ocean naval and air power, and with U.S. Special Operations “advisors” deployed down to the company level, Ethiopia in late 2006 crushed the only stable government Somalia has had since 1994. The U.S.-Ethiopian aggression created what United Nations officials describe as the “worst humanitarian situation in Africa” - worse than Darfur.

Barack Obama has had nothing to say about Somalia except to express outrage at his opponents posting pictures of himself dressed up in the garb of a Somali elder, during a visit to neighboring Kenya (Obama’s father’s homeland) several years ago. Suppression of Somali resistance to occupation threatens to destabilize Kenya, with its large Somali population, and Ethiopia, itself, where ethnic Somalis and others are in rebellion against the dictatorship.

It is fair to say that Somalia is the first African war to be tackled by the new American military command, Africom. So widespread is public opposition on the continent, fearing an attempt to re-colonize the region, no country has agreed to host Africom. But Barack Obama fully supports the robust U.S. military presence. “There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force,” said Obama. “Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action.”

Obama’s enthusiasm for swamping Africa in an ever-expanding “war on terror,” is obvious.

On the western shores of the continent, Obama was rumored in early May to have proposed a cease fire in the guerilla war over oil resources in Nigeria’s Niger River delta. The insurgents, who claim the central government excludes delta residents from the benefits of oil production, have also asked former President Jimmy Carter to mediate the dispute. Whether anything comes of either request, it is certain that Nigeria, Africa’s number one oil producer, will always be a leading candidate for Africom intervention. The presence of guerillas in the delta is all the Americans - including Obama, based on his own words - will need to invoke the terror threat.

“Far from being a peace candidate, Obama favors a huge increase in U.S. war-making capacity.”

Venezuela claims that recent explorations confirm that the South American nation has surpassed Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. Barack Obama is nearly as bellicose as John McCain when it comes to Venezuela’s “rogue” leader, President Hugo Chavez, a hugely popular politician who was fairly elected three times under the watchful eyes of international observers. But democratic credentials don’t matter to American politicians anxious to prove they can play warmonger with the meanest blowhards in the pack.

Obama growls about bringing sanctions against Venezuela for allegedly undermining its neighbor, Colombia, Washington’s narco-death squad-client-state. With the U.S. guzzling down 60 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports, and plenty of other customers willing to take America’s place, the sanctions threat is just plain silly. But Obama’s hostility to Chavez (who does not return the insult, even when Obama derides Chavez’s “predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy”) is a bad omen for peace in the region.

The U.S. supports secessionist efforts by the moneyed classes in Venezuela and two of its closest allies, Ecuador and Bolivia. Not coincidentally, all three plots are centered in the countries’ main oil or gas-producing regions. Another coincidence: after 60 years deactivation, the U.S. Navy this month revived its Fourth Fleet, with responsibility for South and Central America. Eva Morales, President of Bolivia, called it “the Fourth Fleet of intervention.”

The spark can come any time the Americans decide to set off a regional conflict. Barack Obama, the phony peace candidate, is already providing warlike rhetoric, vowing to support Colombia if it repeats incursions into neighboring Ecuador or Venezuela in search of FARC “terrorists.”

“We will support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders,” Obama promised Cuban exiles and their progeny in Miami. “And we will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments. This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation and - if need be - strong sanctions. It must not stand.”

The Southern Color Line

The renewed American threats to Latin American sovereignty occur when Black, brown and indigenous (Indian) populations throughout the region are in the midst of a political awakening, a deep social transformation in which Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa are major players. The non-whites of Latin America are asserting their rights to self-determination - that is, their rights as Indians, or as persons of African descent, regardless of majority or minority status in society. Where they are majorities, non-whites are seizing political power.

Long retarded by the fiction that Latin America has no racial problem, people of color are finally confronting the racial dimensions of Latin American poverty (disproportionately non-white) and oligarchy (always white).

As usual, the U.S. is on the white oligarchy’s side. So is Barack Obama, whose support for the oligarchic, super-corrupt Colombian regime amounts to backing a barbaric, color-coded caste system. One need not be fluent in Spanish to understand the meaning of political cartoons in the newspapers of the rich that portray Hugo Chavez as a monkey.

African Americans and Solidarity

Wider war is coming to South American and Africa, an inevitability given the Democrats’ failure to choose a real alternative to the Republicans. There is absolutely no indication that Barack Obama (or his fading political twin, Hillary) will disassemble the U.S. foreign policy elements that were put in place specifically as tripwires for and facilitators of wars. Quite the opposite. Obama will maintain over one hundred thousand military and civilian personnel in Iraq, with others “over the horizon”; step up the militarization of Africa through Africom, continue backing the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia, and possibly draw neighboring Eritrea into a larger conflict; attempt to destabilize Hugo Chavez and other progressive leaders of mostly non-white constituencies in Latin America, with the aim of seizing control of fossil fuel resources.

“We have still not forgotten our self-determination right to declare solidarity as Black people with whomever we choose.”

African Americans, despite their relative quiescence compared to the roiling Sixties, will respond to these aggressions through solidarity with Washington’s victims on both continents. After 40-plus years, we have still not forgotten our self-determination right to declare solidarity as Black people with whomever we choose. We can confidently predict that President Obama will overreact to dissent, especially to significant Black protest. He already revealed his character and core worldview in the confrontation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Let us revisit the incident:

Barack Obama’s denunciation of Rev. Wright’s narrative on American society’s genesis in genocide and slavery - a narrative with which the vast majority of Blacks are in general agreement - was in fact a demand that Blacks cease telling their own story, in deference to white opinion and the foreign policy interests of the United States.

In framing Rev. Wright’s critique of the United States as “not only wrong but divisive,” Obama came perilously close to charging the minister and those who think like him with something resembling “un-American” activities. Wright’s worldview, said Obama, is “divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”

In short, Blacks of Wright’s political persuasion are culpable for more crimes against the planet than Hitler’s propagandists blamed on the Jews. If any of this were even half-true, most people would agree that all those who sympathize with Rev. Wright should be silenced and imprisoned, for the sake of humanity!

Barack Obama is not yet president, or even the Democratic nominee, but he has already made it clear that he believes African Americans are obligated to uphold the honor and reputation of the United States under any and all circumstances, refrain from actions or statements that might create “division,” and avoid agitation for either their own rights to self-determination or anybody else’s.

I think I smell a thug.

“After being encountered and heavily oppressed by the European over the last 500 years, Africans have mounted resistance campaigns against the oppression, but the main thing to observe is that in the vast majority of the cases, the goal was not to seek independence and autonomy–”you go your way, I go my way”–but to be equal to the oppresser and share things together. The oppresser welcomes this because he already has all the marbles that count,i.e. economic power and resources

This is the way all the liberation movements in Africa went. The only exception was Guinea under the leadership of Sekou Toure–and the French punished him for that move.

Even going back in time–Toussaint of Haiti after driving out the slavers and killing most of them, considered himself French and consequently was easily tricked into capture by Napoleon.

In more contemporary times even Kwame Nkrumah made some mistakes of trust when he he chose an Englishwoman as his confidential secretary and appointed an Irishman, Conor Cruise O’Brien, as first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana

The U.S. Civil Rights movement under King also sought the same “let’s be equal” solution. I admit though that any other alternative would have been been fought against by the U.S. establishment.

In South Africa, this is exactly what happened. There were meetings held with the ANC[the PAC was rejected by the "friends" of the ANC and these same friends were just too afraid of Steve Biko's "Black Consciouness Movement". The solution was to marginalise the PAC and to kill Biko]in which it was agreed to release Mandela on the basis of certain conditions being met. The multiracial ANC agreed and what you get is simply Apartheid with some mutiracial faces sitting at the door–as that famous spook who sat by the door.

And it’s the same all over Africa. There’s this fake organisation called NEPAD which stresses cooperation with the West. The African Development Bank is a docile institutution with big deposits from the West and the Bank director is always vetted by the West. Plus there’s all this UN–effcetively run by the white West through its Security Council, with the odd Chinaman thrown in– oversight from AIDS through Peacekeeping troops–all the way to education.

Is it a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome?”

Found another way to embed this short video. Hope it will work.

Go here for more information.

[Or how woman's body becomes a justification of a capitalist economy. I don't want to miss up Zine Magubane's brilliant essay, but you need to read and print. Once I read the article I appreciated more of my hijab. gess]

The Mammy and the Panopticon: African American Women in the Self-Help Movement

Posted May 8th, 2008 by Zine Magubane

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Which I can’t download.

Click the picture or here.

By Cedric J. Robinson

Race & Class, Vol. 21, No. 4,

… at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed

Richard Wright

The significance of Richard Wright as a black writer, as an intellectual and social activist has yet to be firmly established in the minds of most us. Certainly he was a most powerful writer, but was his literature art or propaganda? Was his work the product of a creative, imaginative and undoctrinaire mind, or the anguished thrust of ideology? And if his writing was essentially propaganda, what were its particular purposes? to whom was it directed? and for whom? These are the sorts of questions which haunt Wright’s image.
The ambiguity surrounding Wright is, in part, a consequence of his own intellectual odyssey. More precisely it is a consequence of his public honesty about the voyage. It was a journey which took him from marxism, and through existentialism, and finally to black nationalism - a journey which could be retraced biographically from his membership in the American Communist Party in the early 1930s to his death in France in 1960.

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As’salamu Aleikum Ahmed/Muslem Historian, and apologize for taking so long to approve your comment. usually my comment moderation is turned off, but lately I had couple of hate messages toward Islam and Obama, yes Obama. Sometimes I wonder if these people can read, and those who can read can easily see that I am not a supporter of Obama, but somehow some people assume that I am. Nevertheless, I am strictly against on my blog to be used as platform for hate speech ! And those who know my blog can bear witness that I am not shy of criticism of my writings or my faith. I don’t think I need to explain the difference between criticism and hate speech.

Back to you, Ahmed/Muslem Historian. I have decided to bring your comment on front page:

An informative article on a forgotten chapter of islamic history..but i have some remarks regarding inaccuracies in the text:
1)You say “the son of a learned family in Islamic Jurisprudence from the city of Timbuktu, which had the world’s first university” Timbuktu did not have the world’s first university,spain ,Tunisia and Cairo’s alazhar had universities centuries before timbuktu was ever built.Timbuktu may have been a regional center for a while but never more than that and never even one of the largest five islamic cities worldwide.
2)I notice you provided reference for all koranic verses with the exception of this one ” In accordance with the Qur’anic command: ‘Fight it, and fall not in the test of your mettle. Be bold and establish the flag of Righteousness in the highest places. Thus comes Peace, for which due sacrifice must be made…’” ………….Reason is simply is that it does not exist in koran.
3)you say that there were huge numbers of muslims among the slaves shipped to the Americas, taking into account that the recorded numbers of shipped slaves exceeded 3 millions…that means that at least over a million muslims were among them.That is not correct for many reasons..muslims were not a sizable minority in the slave exporting areas..and their jihad warrior ethic would not have allowed for such numbers to be taken captive.The shores of west africa and the center at the time were mostly pagan.
In reality the slave emancipation movement of Europe and later, Lincolnesque America, of which the African Americans were merely adoptees,came in response to the huge numbers(some say over a million) of European and American white slaves who were captured by the mujahideen of North Africa(Also called Barbary Pirates) who forced the U.S government to pay tribute for safe passage in the mediterranean.
4)Finally, it is understood that the Atlantic trade had a traumatic effect on African Americans but that is no justification to change muslim laws that allow slavery.Companions of the prophet(saw) had slaves and the generations after them did that untill Lincoln and Victoria convinced some secular muslim rulers to release their white and Black slaves and institute Anti slavery laws in the 19th century amost 13 centuries after the revelation of Koran. Slavery in muslem lands was not as cruel, documented cases show hundreds of slaves rose to become rulers of the native muslim populations and establish ruling dynasties.In a way islamic societies were meritocracies where your origin did not count in the face achievements.

The post you refer to is; “The Jihad of 1831–1832: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica” by Dr. Sultana Afroz.

Dr. Sultana Afroz has been very kind to send me this comment:

(a) Regarding the Qur’anic statement, it is not a direct verse from the Holy Quran. It is a part of the commentary from verses 20-38 from Surah Mauhammad (47). It is from Yusuf Ali’s commentary.

(b) New research shows that the majority of the enslaved Africans were of Islamic faith. Sylviane Diouf (1998, 48), writing on the Muslim slaves in the Americas, conclusively asserts, “Therefore, if countedf as a whole, on a religious basis rather than on an ethnic one the Muslims were probably more numerous in the Americas than any other group among the arriving Africans”. For Jamica from 1655 to 1807, in Curtin’s (1969, 160) work on the slave census, 423,900 were Africans from Muslim-dominated areas, representing 56.8 percent of the arrivals. The dominance of the Muslims among the enslaved Africans and that Islam forbids Muslims to enslave other Muslims challenge the thesis established by western metropolitan historians that Muslims were wholesalers in the Atlantic slave trade(c) Enslaved Africans exported through pagan held-coastal areas do not necessarily mean that they were pagans. There are new research work showing that Senegambia, Guniea, Mali, to name a few were major areas from where Africans were brought as slaves. Likewise, it would be erroneous to consider all the enslaved deported through Fante port as from Koromantyn, just as all those shipped through Calcutta as from the state of Bengal in India. Similarly, it would be\n wrong to conclude that enslaved Africans coming from non-Islamic areas were non-Muslims, since many of them were war captives who were Muslims.(c) Timbuktu was the most important center of Arabic and Islamic studies in West Africa. The scholarly elite came from a number of interrelated families representing the varied tribal and ethnic groups, which made up the populace of the city. Scholars sustained Timbuktu society regardless of the fortunes of political regimes such as the rise and fall of Mali and Songhay. Trade sustained the scholarly families, besides investments in cloth, camels, cattle and urban property, patronage of rulers and state officials and donations of their students and disciples, who worked as traders and tailors. For centuries, the scholars of Timbuktu\n maintained a rich and vital tradition of Qur’anic, hadith, and legal studies supplemented by studies in linguistics, history, mathematics, and astronomy.

(c) Enslaved Africans exported through pagan held-coastal areas do not necessarily mean that they were pagans. There are new research work showing that Senegambia, Guniea, Mali, to name a few were major areas from where Africans were brought as slaves. Likewise,

it would be erroneous to consider all the enslaved deported through Fante port as from Koromantyn, just as all those shipped through Calcutta as from the state of Bengal in India. Similarly, it would be wrong to conclude that enslaved Africans coming from non-Islamic areas were non-Muslims, since many of them were war captives who were Muslims.

(c) Timbuktu was the most important center of Arabic and Islamic studies in West Africa. The scholarly elite came from a number of interrelated families representing the varied tribal and ethnic groups, which made up the populace of the city. Scholars sustained Timbuktu society regardless of the fortunes of political regimes such as the rise and fall of Mali and Songhay. Trade sustained the scholarly families, besides investments in cloth, camels, cattle and urban property, patronage of rulers and state officials and donations of their students and disciples, who worked as traders and tailors. For centuries, the scholars of Timbuktu maintained a rich and vital tradition of Qur’anic, hadith, and legal studies supplemented by studies in linguistics, history, mathematics, and astronomy.

[..] Islam, which gave Africa its first higher education institutions that have endured to the present. Indeed, Africa claims distinction as the center of the world’s oldest Islamic universities and some of the world’s oldest surviving universities. They include Ez-Zitouna madrassa in Tunis founded in 732. Next came al-Qarawiyyin mosque university established in Fez in 859 by a young migrant female princess from Qairawan (Tunisia), Fatima Al-Fihri. The university attracted students and scholars from Andalusian Spain to West Africa. Then in 969 Al-Azhar mosque university was established in Cairo, the same year that the city was founded by the Fatimid dynasty from the Maghreb. It came to be regarded as the most prestigious center of Islamic education and scholarship and attracted the greatest intellectuals of the Muslim world, including Ibn Khaldun the renowned historian who taught there. Another major early Islamic university was Sankore mosque university in Timbuktu founded in the twelfth century where a wide range of courses were taught from theology, logic, astronomy and astrology, to grammar, rhetoric, history and geography. [Source Paul Tiyambe Zeleza ]

“Fear God concerning your slaves, Feed them with what you eat and cloth them with what you wear and do not give them work beyond their capacity. Those whom you like, keep, and those whom you dislike, sell. Do not cause pain to God’s creation. He caused you to own them, and had He so wished he would have made them own you”

Lincoln had never been an Abolitionist; he had never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he had emancipated the slaves only on account of military necessity. (p. 153)

Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting.(p. 121)

[Source from this book]

Just 200 pages left to finish Invisible Man.

A brief note. I am convinced that this book is about the life of Richard Wright. Ok,granted, I am on chapter 15, but there are so many parallels we have seen already; childhood in the South (both characters came from poor families), the genuine thought and commitment to help the black working classes. Both of them; the Party chose them, and not the other way around. Both men are gifted; one is talented speaker, the other a brilliant writer, which is why the Party needs them. In Wright’s case, he left the Party, and something tells me that our character in the book will take the same path.

Someone out there who agrees with me, or is it nonsense?