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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Guest Author: Chinweizu - Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the prospect of African power

Below is the text of the lecture I gave last Saturday in Lagos on the theme of the race war. It contains the lecture itself, plus several appendices that support some key points made in the lecture. May I draw your attention especially to the sections on AIDS and the AIDS-bombing of Africa on pp. 13-14, 40-51. And to the sections on GM crops on pp. 12-13, 55-56.
Please fwd to as many Africans as you can.
Chinweizu


Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the prospect of African power

By Chinweizu
[A public lecture delivered at the Agip Recital Hall, Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos on 18 February, 2006.]

In a nutshell, my presentation today argues that:

1] The 20th century has been the most disastrous century, so far, for Black Africa. It was the century in which, under colonialism, Black Africa was subjected to culturecide at the hands of White Power. That culturecide destroyed our ability to resist the genocide that is now taking place. As a result, this 21st century is likely to see the physical extermination of Black Africans, unless those now under 30 organize and defeat the extermination campaign that white power has already unleashed on Black Africa. Therefore,

2] The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity.

3] We should particularly note that Lugardism is a false framework, and these Lugardist states, Nigeria included, are the wrong foundation for building African Power

Introduction:

I just want to get us started on an examination of the awful situation in which we find ourselves in Nigeria, and in Africa, at the start of the 21st century, after some 50 years of fake independence, and more than 500 years of race war. We, Nigerians and Black Africans as a whole, have been in a race war for 500years or more, and we have no chance of surviving it if we refuse to recognize that fact and act on it.
Since 1960, many attempts have been made to diagnose the trouble with Nigeria. Chief among the usual suspects have been, “tribalism,” corruption, and bad leadership. May I submit that these are symptoms, not the underlying causes; the fevers, not the malaria or typhoid parasites. Our problems are much more serious than corruption & co. They include identity crises of various kinds, a lunatic elite, cultural schizophrenia, Eurotoxification and the fact that Nigeria is not a nation but a noyau—i.e., a society of inward antagonism, one held together by mutual internal antagonism, one which could not carry on if its members had no fellow members to hate. And if we want to end the troubles of the Nigerians, we must dig deeper to find the fundamental causes. And I would like, today, to draw your attention to some of the systemic causes that do not usually appear on our radar.
1] First of all is Nigeria itself: The fundamental trouble with Nigeria is Nigeria itself—the Nigerian state. This Lugardist state, by which Nigeria was invented and is maintained, has been a disaster for the Nigerian peoples/nationalities and their society.
2] Second, is the refusal by Nigerians to recognize the race war in which Lugardism is a key weapon that white power is using against Black Africans.
3] Third is our failure, in Nigeria and in Black Africa as a whole, to study the Haitian experience and learn from it.

I, now, invite you to examine the following theses:
1] The Lugardist state is an enemy to the Nigerian population;
2] Black Africans, including Nigerians, are in the semi-final phase of a race war with the European and the Arab branches of White Power.
3] Nigeria has been Haitified--Turning Nigeria into a Haiti has been a way to totally defeat its people and all of Black Africa in this semi-final phase of the race war. For, just as Haiti in 1804 was the hope of the Black race, even so, in 1960, was Nigeria the hope of Black Africa. And, for your information, the Haitification of Nigeria is almost completed by now.
4] The key enemy weapons in the race war today include the AU, NEPAD, and the organs of the New World Order, especially the UN and its agencies.
5] If Africans do not build African Power now, and use it to prevent their final defeat in the race war, Africans will be exterminated in this 21st century. This, therefore, is the do-or-die century for Africans.

Recognition of these facts is the first step on the road to liberation and survival for the Nigerian peoples/nationalities. I shall say a little to introduce each thesis, and we can then together explore and illuminate them through questions and answers that, I hope, will continue long after we leave this hall.

Thesis #1: Lugardism and the Lugardist state
In a broadcast on January 15, 1970, General Yakubu Gowon, the then Head of the Lugardist state of Nigeria, proclaimed the Lugardist doctrine that justifies the continued existence of the Nigerian state. He said:
"Our objectives in fighting the war to crush Ojukwu’s rebellion were always clear. We desired to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria. For, as one country, we would be able to maintain lasting peace amongst our various communities; achieve rapid economic development to improve the lot of our people; guarantee a dignified future and respect in the world, for our posterity and contribute to African unity and modernization. On the other hand, the small successor states in a disintegrated Nigeria would be victims of perpetual war and misery and neocolonialism. Our duty was clear, and we are today vindicated."
--Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Excerpt from his speech on Jan. 15, 1970 formally accepting the declared Biafran surrender and the end of the civil war.
Source: Insider Weekly, August 8, 2005

This doctrine states the reasons for the continued existence and public toleration of this Lugardist contraption called the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I think we are all living witnesses to the fact, which our newspapers daily confirm, that none of these claims is true and that none has been vindicated. Has the Lugardist state preserved the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria? No! Just think of Bakassi. Has it maintained lasting peace amongst our various communities? No! Just think of the inter-communal clashes reported periodically from Plateau, Kano, Taraba, Benue, Delta states and elsewhere. Has it achieved economic development, let alone ‘rapid economic development’ or improved the lot of our people? No! Just think of the daily deterioration in the condition of life of our people, and recall the coup-day rhetoric we heard regularly for the past 40 years, denouncing each ousted regime for its failures in this regard. Has it guaranteed a dignified future and respect in the world for our posterity? No! Unless it counts as earning the respect of the world Nigeria’s appearing, year after year, on the list of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world? Have we escaped neo-colonialism? If so, why are we still in the debt trap where we are being robbed by the Paris Club and the transnational corporations? And what are the agents of the IMF, the World Bank and other imperialist organs doing in the offices and corridors of power in Nigeria?
What has the Lugardist state actually accomplished in its century of existence? It has destroyed our sense of community and atomized us into the Hobbesian condition of a 'war of everyone against everyone' in the ruthless struggle for money to buy what it has brainwashed us to consider 'the good life'; a condition of chronic insecurity, of 'continual fear and danger of violent deat'— as from 'accidental discharge' from the guns of its policemen; or from its rampaging soldiers, like at Odi, or Zaki-Biam and other places, or from assassin's bullets targeted even at such big winners in its system as Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane, Alex Ibru, Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, A.K. Dikibo, etc in the last decade; a condition where life has been 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' for everyone—even for Generals like Bisalla, Vatsa, Shehu Musa Yar Adua, and Chief MKO Abiola, let alone for the APO Six and countless ordinary victims of the police and armed robbers. Thus, even without Nigeria's disintegration, we have been victims of misery, neocolonialism and perpetual war inflicted on us by the Lugardist state itself.
From the foregoing, we can see that each and every one of the itemized claims of Lugardist doctrine is demonstrably false. The Nigerian state has failed to satisfy any of its own advertised justifications for its continued existence. This goes to show that Lugardism is a hoax, and Nigeria is a failed state even by its own criteria.

In 45 years, under local comprador management, this Lugardist state has reduced Nigeria to a shanty country, a refugee camp where there is no order or authority; where social anarchy reigns, since government has abdicated its responsibilities and anyone can, with impunity, disturb the peace and, with noisy loudspeakers blaring songs and drums and prayers all night long, keep others from sleeping.
"Development" has been so successful that we now have industries everywhere: the 419 industry; the ‘wetin-you-carry’ industry that recently yielded N70billion to its Chairman of the Board; the lootocrat or Authority-stealing industry that has piled up billions of dollars in the foreign bank accounts of high state officials; and the gospel and miracles industry on every street; the thugs and ethnic militia industry that provide "jobs" for the tens of millions of the unemployed and lets them extort their livelihood from people on the roads. We have all these strange industries, but no iron-and-steel or machine tools or aerospace industries. It seems that the comprador managers of the Nigerian state overheard that a STEEL industry was vital for development and have built a STEAL industry instead. That’s probably their best understanding of what a steel industry means!
This Lugardist state has, within a century, destroyed every society and killed every culture it trapped in its prison, and has reduced its traumatized captives to a 100 million mob of Hobbesian idiots who have lost all sense of community and solidarity with one another. Nigeria is now a place where the unspeakable is routine news. With the decay of both the state and social authority structures for arbitrating disputes, neighbours resort to do-it-yourself justice using privatized violence—hence the spate of acid and machete attacks by people on their neighbours. Nigeria has been reduced to an amoral land where greedy people think nothing of kidnapping their neighbour’s children and selling them to be killed for fresh body parts to be sold abroad for organ transplants. That’s the racket being covered up by the epidemic of so-called ritual murder we read about these days. It used to be that, in Lagos, if you were attacked by robbers and you shouted Ole! Ole! ( i.e. ‘Thief! Thief!’) your neighbours would assemble and lynch the thief in solidarity with you. Not anymore! Now, the people around will run away and leave you to the mercy of your attackers. Fear, acute individualism and deep insecurity have killed the community spirit.
In the 35 years since Gowon propounded his doctrine, this Lugardist state has been unable to do those things that, it claimed it exists to do; and it has done terrible things that it ought not to do to the society. It has inflicted cultural schizophrenia and social decay; it has fostered an ethos of greedy incompetence; it has replaced the work ethic with a criminal instant-riches mentality, and it has turned governance into brazen gangsterism and enthroned Al Capone on Aso Rock [the Presidential palace in Abuja]. It has thereby been an instrument of large scale culturecide.
How did this Lugardist state achieve this feat of social destruction and culturecide? The chief instruments were economic: principally, [1] the commoditization of land and the introduction of individualist land tenure a century ago, which slowly dissolved the communal holdings; [2] the emergence, with the discovery of oil, of a rentier state which dominates the economy with its huge rent revenues derived from foreign concessionaries-- this has turned the economy upside down, and made everyone dependent on state favours instead of keeping the state dependent on taxing the economically active population for its revenues; [3] the Land Thief Decree, a.k.a. Land Use Decree, which robbed communities of their ancestral land, thereby quietly turning the population into a vast rootless proletariat with no landed communal interest to sustain their local structure and cohesion; [4] the ravages of SAP and other economic policies which have impoverished most people and left them without financial stamina; [5] a culturally alienating, white supremacist education system that inculcates possessive individualism and trains people for non-existent bureaucratic jobs, which makes its products unfit for self-employment in productive activities. By such measures, imposed in the course of a century, this Lugardist state destroyed the communitarian foundations of the African societies it trapped in its cage.
This Lugardist state nowadays parades itself as a federal republic and a democracy. But it is neither federal nor republic. And its democracy is all fake. So,
what is Nigeria actually?
Nigeria is a prison camp into which British soldiers, merchants, missionaries and political agents herded the peoples of the assorted villages, towns, statelets, kingdoms and empires they had, between 1850 and 1914, conquered by force or fraudulently dispossessed of sovereignty. The herding process was begun by Sir George Goldie, and was finalized by Sir Frederick Lugard in 1914 when he set up this Lugardist state apparatus to control the prisoner-of-war camp which he named Nigger Area, or Nigeria. What Lugard, the founding father of Nigeria, set up was a despotism to serve British interests, an instrument of the British monarch, for the subjugation, exploitation and control by terrorism of the captive population, for the profit of the British. This despotism of the British monarch was handed over, in 1960, to comprador agents recruited from among the black inmates of the prison camp. The original state imposed by Lugard has never been disbanded and reconstituted by the population. It lives on under black management, and has continued to behave despotically towards the population it got into its absolute power long ago. After all, none of its so-called constitutions has been submitted to the population for approval. As John Locke stated in his “Second Treatise of Government” (1690):
He who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life.

We can, therefore, see that this Lugardist state contraption has been making war on us, the victim population which it got into its absolute power a century ago.
It should not, therefore, surprise us that, since its agents see us as prisoners of war, they extort from us and plunder us at every opportunity. And they kill us with impunity whenever they feel the itch to shoot. And to keep us cowed and discourage rebellion they go on pacification sprees in which they massacre whole towns and villages. So, you see, there is a method to the madness of the ‘mad dogs’ at Odi and Zaki-Biam, and to the accidental discharges at Apo and countless checkpoints. These are random acts of state terrorism that are calculated to instil fear in the population and keep us insecure and passive.
This despotic, Lugardist state apparatus has never been reconstituted as a republic by the people. The Nigerian state is not an instrument or agent of the Nigerian people. It is not under their control, or answerable to them, and never has been. For the first half of its existence, i.e, 1914-1960, that was clearly the case. Since then, it has remained the case, the so-called independence notwithstanding. Whenever the Nigerian people have tried to actualise their nominal sovereign control, tried to become the masters of what claims to be their state, the state has rebuffed them. It has been a case of a novice horseman trying to mount his new and wild horse, and getting thrown off each time. The coups of 1966 aborted the initial attempts by the people’s elected representatives to sit securely in the saddle into which the departing British had lifted them. The coup of 1983 ended the second attempt. The June 12 annulment in 1993 aborted the third attempt. The emasculation of the National Assembly by the executive branch since 1999, together with the flagrant rigging of the 2003 elections has killed off the fourth attempt. The claim that Nigeria is now a democracy, or, as some prefer, a “nascent democracy,” is false. Nigeria is no democracy at all! Never has been. And is not likely ever to be. The Lugardist state will not permit it. It continues to do as it pleases, regardless of what the people say or wish. And the Nigerian people have yet to find enough courage and skill to make and enforce demands on the untameable state apparatus.
Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that, as Frederick Douglass said “power concedes nothing without a demand.” We resignedly think that some day God-- that imaginary big-man-in-the-sky who is part Santa Claus and part Ojuju Calabar-- will intervene and solve our socio-economic problems and rescue us from the despotism of the VIPs—the Vampires In Power. We forget or haven’t heard Martin Luther King’s remark that, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.” “Shuffering and shmiling”, we wait and hope that things cannot get worse, yet they get worse with each regime. We forget or haven’t heard that there is no limit to which tyranny will not go if unopposed. We haven’t heard what Frederick Douglass said: “If you want to know how much a tyrant will impose on a people, find out how much they will take.”
And the Lugardists keep proclaiming that we should accept this prisoner-of-war camp as a blessing, as a gift from those British who said they came to civilize us by enslaving, terrorizing and robbing us. Well, that’s like the guards at the Nazi concentration camps claiming that the camps were a blessing and should be preserved at whatever cost; that remaining obediently in it is the duty of the prisoners. But the guards would say that, wouldn’t they? But do the inmates have to accept the guards’ doctrine? Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that Nigeria is going nowhere because, Nigeria is like an elephant with two heads, one in front and one behind, with each head pulling in the opposite direction from the other. Clearly, for any two-headed elephant to move properly, one of its two heads must vanish. In Nigeria's case, one head is incorrigibly nostalgic for the ways of seventh-century Arabia; the other head lusts for the conspicuous capitalist consumerism of the European world. Note that I have not accused it of lusting after capitalist producerism -- which it passionately abhors. Now, since neither of these two heads on the Nigerian elephant is appropriate for national survival, there is a need to chop off, not one, but both heads, and to graft on a new head -- a single head that is passionate for production, that is indoctrinated with producer values and nationalism.
By the way, I must stress that Lugardism is not peculiar to Nigeria. All the states now in Africa are Lugardist. They were founded by white imperialist invaders from Europe for the exploitation of Africans to the benefit of Europe; every one of them in the AU is Lugardist. Lugardism is the doctrine that they are sacrosanct and should be preserved, that they should continue to exist even if they destroy the societies they hold prisoner.

Thesis #2: Race War
Mention race war to Africans and they react as if it is some future danger that must be avoided at any price, even at the price of voluntary enslavement. They refuse to realize that we already are in it, and have been in it for at least five centuries. I shall try to show, as briefly as possible, that such is, indeed, our situation.
Two initial points of clarification: first of all, just because bullets are not flying about and swords are not flashing around us does not mean there is no war going on; there are other modes of warfare, including economic, political, psychological and intellectual warfare. For example, the Cold War, in the 20th century, between the capitalist and communist power blocs was mostly a non-military affair. It was mostly a propaganda and economic war, with occasional military flashpoints. Secondly, when the aggressor identifies the target of its attack on the basis of skin colour, the war is a race war. Black Africa is in the throes of two simultaneous race wars. It is being attacked from two fronts: The European front and the Arab front. Lets consider them one by one. First ,
The Euro-African Race War
When did it start and why?
Europe’s race war on sub-Sahara Africans may be said to have begun when
The captains of two of Prince Henry [of Portugal’s] exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed.

Not long after that, Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) spelt out and blessed a war, in the name of Christ, on the world’s non-Christian peoples:
We, after scrupulous reflection, are granting by our Bull full and entire freedom to King Alphonso [of Spain] to conquer, to besiege, to fight, and to submit all the Saracens, Pagans, and other enemies of Christ, wherever they may be; and to seize the kingdoms, the dukedoms, the princedoms, the lordships, personal properties, landed properties, and all the wealth they withhold and possess; and to submit these persons to a perpetual slavery; to appropriate these kingdoms, duchies, principalities, counties, lordships, properties and wealth; to transmit them to their successors; to take advantage and make use of them personally and with their offspring.
--quoted in Jordan K. Ngubane, Conflict of Minds: Changing Power Dispositions in South Africa, Books in Focus, Inc. 1979

As Jordan Ngubane pointed out “The Pope thus authorized the commitment of crimes and sins against all and linked the division of the world into Portuguese and Spanish spheres with slavery, colonialism, racism and apartheid….”
Pope Alexander’s Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 divided all the “heathens” of the world with their resources between Portugal and Spain. And then, Pope Clement VI in Intra Arcana, the Bull he issued on May 8, 1529, and addressed to Charles V [of Spain] urged him on to the war:
We trust that, as long as you are on earth, you will compel and with all zeal cause the barbarian nations to come to the knowledge of God, the maker and founder of all things, not only by edicts and admonitions, but also by force and arms, if needful, in order that their souls may partake of the heavenly kingdom.
--quoted in Jordan K. Ngubane, Conflict of Minds: Changing Power Dispositions in South Africa, Books in Focus, Inc. 1979


That global war, declared by Europe in the 15th century in religious terms, is still going on, in different transformations. The most prominent version today is Bush’s “War on Terror”, which was initially announced as a Christian “crusade” against the Jihadeers of Islamic Fundamentalism. Another version is imperialism. We particularly must note that imperialism is war, and the imperialism of whites over blacks is race war.

What have been the signs of this Euro-African race war?

The branch of this European war upon the world that most concerns us, has been waged on the African race mainly in the guises of what Europeans call the Slave Trade, The Scramble for Africa, Colonialism, Neo-colonialism and Racism. If we examine each of them, we will uncover its race war character.
1. Slave Trade When the era of the so-called Slave Trade is examined, what do we find? Its main features were interminable wars, forced labour and terrorism; and the targets of all were the Black/African Race; and the entire thing was organized by Whites of European stock, and they were its prime beneficiaries. It was a system of war and violence on four continents and on their interconnecting seas. This war system operated in three zones:
Zone A: Africa, the war front, the zone of daily battles, skirmishes, raids, kidnappings and ambushes, which yielded war prisoners for carrying off into slavery.
Zone B: the Diaspora zone, the rear area of the Europeans, made up of the transit waters (the Atlantic and Indian Oceans), together with the territories of the Americas as well as the plantation islands in the Indian Ocean, off shore from East Africa (Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, Zanzibar, etc). For the Black war captives, this was the zone of permanent martial law and terrorism (especially on the plantations, mines and slave-holding towns); the zone of deadly forced labour (the super-Gulags and Siberias of their time. For example, “In French Saint Domingue, now called Haiti, slaves were literally worked to death. The average life span after being sold into slavery was about seven years”—The Irritated Genie, p. 24); This was the zone of daily resistance by the captives, and of their periodic escapes, mutinies and revolts, and of the brutal suppression thereof (there were some 250 recorded revolts in the USA alone, an average of one a year for the era before Emancipation); This was the zone of guerrilla wars between the Maroon communities (hundreds of which existed at any one time all over the Americas) and the slave-owner communities around them which sought to re-enslave them; and the zone of full-scale wars between the slave-owner states and the liberation movements, as between France and its slaves in Haiti, or between the USA and the Black Seminoles. And then there was
Zone C: Europe, the headquarters from where the entire far-flung system of daily warfare was masterminded, stimulated, coordinated, armed and financed, and to which the bulk of the resulting riches was taken.

Seen in its totality, this was a vast war on the Black/African Race that was most cunning in its grand strategy. In Africa, the first zone, Europeans made war on Blacks by inducing Blacks to make war on one another. It was “divide and conquer” at its devilish worst, applied to an entire Black race on the vast African continent, by a well-disguised white European hand manipulating from afar. For the kidnap victims and the war prisoners who were carried off into captivity, there was a second zone, a zone of total war -- military, cultural, economic, psychological, ideological; a total war waged against them by whites, clearly and visibly by whites, and designed to break each of them into an obedient workhorse for the rest of life. When taken altogether, this was the most devious and satanic of war systems ever contrived: Europe was the headquarters, Africa was the war front, the Americas were the prisoners-of-war camp, chattel-slavery was the kind of forced labour to which the prisoners-of-war were subjected in that camp, the produce and profits which went to Europe were the peculiar booty from this most peculiar of wars. As for all the Blacks caught up in it, the overwhelming majority, probably as much as 99.9%, were victims of different kinds and to different degrees: the war captives shipped abroad, the war dead and the war survivors left back in Africa, all those who resisted the pressure to collaborate, and even those among the Black procurers, far from the coast, who never made contact with the Whites but unwittingly served the interest of the European war fomenters. All were caught in the toils of a devilish system whose totality they were in no position to see or guess; all were driven by overpowering forces beamed and controlled from outside their societies, forces which crushed all resistance, even those put up by African kings and queens, such as Affonso of the BaKongo and Nzinga of the N’gola. They were, one and all, victims of a satanic European bourgeoisie, which devised the entire thing and kept it going for its own profit.

Conquest and colonialism
That centuries-long slaving phase of this race war was followed by the phase of undisguised military conquest and colonization, i.e. a phase of conquest of black Africans by white Europeans and of foreign white rule over blacks. The conquest phase, principally between 1884 and 1914, is Eurocentrically called “The scramble for Africa”. In this phase, Blacks would now be conquered, Christianized (See Appendix 8 at pp.57-60) and prepared for civilization [i.e. Europeanization] in Africa itself, and the job of doing that was dubbed the “White Man’s Burden”.
In furtherance of the project of Christianizing and Europeanizing Africans, (i.e. of treating them to culturecide), Black Africans were subjected to genocide, terrorism, land expropriation, property confiscation, forced labour, and taxation by the implanted Lugardist states. The starkest and best-documented varieties of this were in King Leopold’s Congo Free State (formerly Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo), France’s Congo (now Congo-Brazzaville), Portugal’s Angola, Germany’s South-West Africa (now Namibia), Britain’s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the British-Boer Republic of South Africa. In the Belgian example, a “System” was devised to terrorize and exploit the Blacks to the point of utter ruin. (The book to read is The Black Man’s Burden by E.D. Morel) Colonialism, thereby, was the worst disaster to have ever struck Black Africa thus far. The culturecide it accomplished has left Africa so demented that it still can’t get its act together even today.

Neocolonialism or the race war today
Since the mid-20th century, following the withdrawal of European expatriates from formal and visible political control of their African colonies, Europeans have prosecuted the race war using Black Africans as their agents, much like during the slaving phase of the Euro-African race war. This current phase is what is called Neocolonialism, in its various forms-- economic, political, ideological, cultural etc.
Let me briefly indicate a few of its features.
When the IMF, World Bank etc lure African countries into their Debt Trap and saddle them with the debt burden -- that is economic warfare. When the WTO enforces “free trade” rules that prevent fair trade, and ensure that trade results in resource and financial drain from Africa to Europe and America -- that’s economic warfare. And when the WTO insists that Africa must accept genetically modified (GM) crops that are engineered to be infertile and so destroy our food independence and food security, that’s economic warfare. It is warfare by induced and premeditated starvation. [see Appendix 7 on GMO crops at p. 55]
When African governments are conned into implementing NEPAD policies that block the industrialization of Africa -- that’s an economic side of the race war. The net effect of such measures is to keep the African race poor and weak, so it cannot defend itself from white power.
When the US Government invents AIDS for the declared purpose of global depopulation (through its Special Virus Cancer Program that spent 15years, 1962-1977, and $550 million, and on which Dr Robert Gallo was a Project Officer); and when the World Health Organization (WHO) vaccinates 97 million Africans with smallpox vaccines that were secretly infected with the AIDS virus, that’s biological warfare on the African race. And when there is a US Patented cure for AIDS (US Patent #5676977 granted on Oct. 14, 1997), and the Government of the USA still does not publicise it, but instead allows ineffective remedies to continue to be deployed in Africa, that act of malign neglect is an act of war, and a part of the race war on Africans. AIDS is a New World Order bioweapon for global genocide.
[On the origin of AIDS, the book to read is State Origin: The Evidence of the Laboratory Birth of AIDS, by Boyd E. Graves, J.D.; see also
AIDS: 'The Manufactured Virus'
From the Official U.S. Govt. Documents House of Rep.
American Masses Hoodwinked
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/aids2.pdf
Proof: Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970
H.B. 15090
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/aids.pdf ]
On the World Health Organization (WHO) role in bombing Africa with AIDS through vaccines [See “Smallpox Vaccine ‘triggered AIDS virus’ ” by Pearce Wright, London Times May 11, 1987, p.1; also Who Murdered Africa? By Dr. William Campbell Douglas]
On the US Patented cure for AIDS [To see the patent, go to : www.google.com , type in US patent 5676977 to read all about it.]
----------------------------------------
For more on all aspects of AIDS visit www.boydgraves.com
Or contact Boyd Graves thru zygote@sunflower.com or zygotemedia@boydgraves,com

or contact Dr. Len Horowitz for his "Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?" (Tetrahedron, LLC., 1997; ISBN:092355012-7;$29.95) It may be ordered toll free by calling 1-888-508-4787).
To invite Dr. Horowitz to speak to your group, please contact:

Tetrahedron, LLC
PO Box 2033
Sandpoint, ID 83864
Toll free order line: 888-508-4787
e-mail: tetra@tetrahedron.org.

For a brief introduction to the data on AIDS, see the Appendices attached at the end of this essay at pp. 40-51}
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Thus, through measures like the Debt Trap, unfair WTO rules, genetically modified/ GM-crops and the AIDS bomb, white European powers continue to wage race war on Africans even as we speak today.

There is one last aspect that needs to be touched on, the aspect which has featured in every phase, that widely-misunderstood thing called racism. So,

What exactly is racism?

Nowadays, it has become fashionable to reduce racism to color discrimination; to say, as was done at FESTAC 77, that:
By racism we mean ethnocentric pride in one’s own racial group and preference for the distinctive characteristics of that group; belief that these characteristics are fundamentally biological in nature and are thus transmitted to succeeding generations; strong negative feeling towards other groups who do not share these characteristics coupled with the thrust to discriminate against and exclude the outgroup from full participation in the life of the community.
-- Quoted in Sebastian Charles, “Black Civilization and the Religious Dimension”, in Okpaku et al., The Arts and Civilization of Black and African Peoples, Vol. 7, Lagos: CBAAC, 1986, p. 38.

Contrary to such fashionable and ‘politically correct’ misdefinitions, racism is far more than mere ethnocentrism or mindless color prejudice or color discrimination. It is, in fact, the white supremacist color-caste mechanism of the Eurocentric Global System wherein status is assigned, and functions, opportunities and privileges are apportioned on the basis of skin color. It might, alternatively, be called colorism. The system is justified, legitimized and defended by the superstition of racial hierarchy and by the dogma which posits, contrary to evidence, that the white skinned are thereby inherently superior to all others and that the black skinned are thereby inherently inferior to all others. Though unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that is the status ranking which European power self-servingly chose, back in the 15th century, to impose on humanity, by force and fraud.
For those who have forgotten, or who are confused, let me here define racism clearly and firmly:
RACISM is a system of domination, of one race by another, which combines a superstition of racial hierarchy with a structure of domination and exploitation, and which is instituted and maintained by the violent practices of conquest and suppression, including torture, lynching and mass murder.
And, it must be stressed, the only case of racism on the historical record is that instituted by white supremacists.

There are many other aspects of this war today, but these, I hope, are enough to help you recognize it. “Slave Trade” was race war; Colonialism was race war; Neo-colonialism is race war; Racism is race war; AIDS in Africa is Race war; GM crops for Africa is race war! Yes, European white power has for centuries been waging race war on the Black race as part of its global war on all non-Europeans. And this race war is still going on, even though most Africans foolishly refuse to recognize it for what it is.

The Arab-African Race War

The Arab-African Race War began with the invasion which led to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 AD. By 700 AD, the Arab invaders had seized all the lands as far west as the Atlantic coast of North Africa. But well before that, indeed soon after taking Egypt, they turned their aggression southward to Nubia and the rest of the Nile Valley. Here are some highlights of this other race war on the Blacks of sub-Sahara Africa:

Nubia 7th to 14th centuries AD
In 652 AD, Arabs invaded from Egypt into Nubia but got no further south than Dongola. The Egypt-Dongola treaty of 652 AD required 400 slaves to be sent to Egypt each year. It lasted till 1315AD, when a muslim was installed King of Dongola. With that, the tribute was abolished but the Arabs resumed their penetration up the Nile. By the end of the 14th century, Arab tribes were pouring into the Sudan to settle. [“Dongola” in Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) 1965, Vol. 7, p.585]

Ancient Ghana, 11th century AD
In 1076, the Almoravids, a group of Arabs and Arabized Berbers from Morocco, attacked and overran Koumbi Saleh, the capital of Ancient Ghana, in present day Mauritania, and broke its power and converted its people to Islam. Ghana regained its independence sometime after 1087, but never recovered its power or its empire.

Ethiopia, 14th -16th century AD
From the 13th century, immigrant Arabs established various sultanates on the Red Sea coast of eastern and southern Ethiopia. These recognized the leadership of a dynasty at Shoa, which traced its genealogy to the Arab tribe of the Makhzumi. In 1332, the Sultan of Ifat, Sabr al-din attacked the Ethiopian King Amda Seyon but was defeated. Other muslim princes renewed the war on Christian Ethiopia for the next two centuries. But not until 1530, under their leader Mohammed ibn Ibrahim, nicknamed Gran by the Ethiopians, did these invaders conquer a great part of the Ethiopian plateau and convert the people to Islam.

Bornu, 14th century AD
In 1391, the muslim King of the black African kingdom of Bornu, Uthman Biri ibn Idris sent a protest letter to the King of Egypt asking for the return of those already captured, including his own brother. He wrote:
The Arabs who are called Judham and others have taken captive our free subjects—women and children and old people, and our relatives, and other muslims. Among these Arabs are polytheists and apostates: they have raided the Muslims and killed a great many of them in a war which broke out between us and our enemies. . . . These Arabs have harmed our land, the land of Bornu, continually up to the present, and have captured our free subjects and relatives, who are Muslims, and are selling them to the slave-dealers in Egypt and Syria and elsewhere, and some they keep for themselves.
--“Diplomatic Note from Bornu to Egypt,” in Thomas Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives, 1960/1975:104
Thus, being muslim did not protect Blacks from enslavement by the Arabs, for when it comes to enslaving blacks, Arabs are quick to disregard their own Islamic law.

Songhay, 16th century AD
In 1591, a Moroccan expedition crossed the Sahara and attacked the Black African Empire of Songhay. It defeated the Songhay army at the battle of Tondibi, seized Gao, Timbuktu and Jenne and looted them; many of Songhay’s scholars were taken in chains to Morocco. The empire and people of Songhay were ruined by the wars, famine and pestilence which the Moroccans unleashed on them.

Zanzibar, 17th centuryAD
In 1698, Omani Arabs captured Mombasa and extended their rule to Zanzibar.
Their white-minority Sultanate of Zanzibar lasted till 1964 when it was ended by an African rebellion, led by John Okello.

Sudan 19th century
In 1820, Muhammed Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt, decided to conquer Sudan, primarily to recruit black slaves and to bring the sources of the Nile under Arab control. In the subsequent raids on the hinterlands of the White Nile and the Nuba Mountains, some 10,000 Negro slaves were annually exported to Egypt, where the able-bodied males were pressed into the army and the rest were taken into domestic slavery. These slave raids went on for decades, in the course of which an estimated one million blacks were enslaved or destroyed.

20th century:
The Arab-African race war continued in the Afro-Arab borderlands—in such places as Sudan, Mauritania, and Chad, flashing into bloody battles when it met African resistance, like the Anya Nya War (1956-1972) and the SPLA War (since 1983) in Sudan. The only clear African victory against the Arabs was in Zanzibar where, in 1964, the Africans overthrew the Arab white-settler minority rule and ended its regimen of black slavery.
In Chad, Libya’s Gaddafi annexed the uranium rich Auzou strip and tried to install his Chadian puppets in power.
Somalia and Djibouti were induced to join the Arab League and to Arabize themselves culturally, despite their non-Arab populations. Joining the Arab League requires that Arabic be made the official language of a country, so that Arabic becomes the mother tongue of its citizens, thus converting them into Arabs.
In Ethiopia, the Islamized province of Eritrea was given substantial Arab support in its war of secession from Black, Christian Ethiopia.
Beyond the borderlands, in Uganda, Central African Republic, etc, Arabs made proxy war on Africans through their local black agents.
In the Central African Republic, Gaddafi propped President Patasse in power in exchange for a concession to exploit the country’s diamonds and oil for 99 years. [See Lucy Jones, “Ceaucescu’s legacy in the heart of Africa,” Guardian Weekly, October 3-9, 2002, p.3]
In Uganda in the 1970s, using Idi Amin as his local agent, Gaddafi pursued a project of bloody Islamization and Arabization until Tanzania intervened militarily and drove out Idi Amin in 1979. Idi Amin then went into luxuried exile in the land of his Arab masters, first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia where he died in 2003.

The OAU/AU in the Arab-African Race War
From its formation in 1963 until its demise, the OAU [Organization of African Unseriousness], was consciously used by its Arab members as an instrument for their race war on the Africans. They used it primarily to inhibit the Black African countries from giving organized support to those Africans who were being attacked by local Arab settlers, such as in Sudan and Mauritania. In the OAU, the Black African leaders conspicuously failed to define and defend the Pan-African interest. They, in effect, served as sell-outs, fifth columnists and fellow-travellers of the Arab expansionists. The switch from OAU to AU has merely been an anti-African switch from a smothering alliance, the OAU, to a suicidal union the AU [Africa Unmanned, i.e. castrated].
( The work to read on the Arab use of the OAU to pursue their race war on Africans is “Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism” by Opoku Agyeman, Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994, pp.30-72, See Appendix 9 at pp.60-101)



The 21st century
Today in Sudan, the Janjaweed Arab militias, sponsored by the white minority Arab government of Sudan, are still busy, looting, raping, destroying and enslaving the Black Africans in Sudan’s Darfur province in an ethnic cleansing campaign to seize lands from Africans and settle Arabs there. According to one report in THE GUARDIAN, NAIROBI, Wednesday, Jul 21, 2004,Page 6:

During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang in praise of the government and scorning black villagers. According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: "The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. "The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God." The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village, saying: "You are gorillas, you are black and you are badly dressed." The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said. The militiamen "are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish," a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based on over 100 statements from women in the refugee camps in neighboring Chad.
For more on this story, see
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/07/21/2003179810
As this story makes clear, the Janjaweed are quite explicit about the race war and genocidal character of their activities. Yes, the conflict in Sudan is race war!
Thus have Arab invaders, century after century, pressed their war of aggression on Africans, and seized more and more of African lands and killed or carried off millions of Africans into slavery in Arab countries and beyond. By now, they are not only in possession of all of supra-Sahara Africa, but also of much of the Sahelian borderlands, and are thrusting deeper up the Nile to take over the entire Nile Valley, all the way to Uganda on the equator. Despite that relentless aggression, the governments of Black Africa refuse to acknowledge what is happening, let alone that a race war demands effective and concerted opposition from them. It will be a disgrace to the entire African race if, having barely survived European aggression, we succumb to Arab aggression, especially through our own leaders collaborating with the Arab enemy.

Thesis #3:The New World Order, UN Imperialism etc

About 10 years ago, in the early 1990s, there was public discussion in the imperialist press about their need to recolonize Africa. Some of us protested against the idea and tried, with little success, to alert the African intelligentsia and governments on the need to prevent such a thing. You may be surprised and shocked to learn that that Recolonization has been accomplished and most Africans have failed to even notice. They even welcome the instruments and institutions of their own recolonization. Chief among these are the AU [Gadafi’s Arabist Underwear], NEPAD [the New European Practical-joke for Africa’s Destruction], and the New World Order instruments of UN Imperialism, namely the IMF [Imperialist Ministry of Finance], World Bank/ officially the IBRD [Infrastructure Bank for Robbery and Destruction], WTO [Wealth Thieving Outfit], The World Court, the War Crimes Tribunals (for Rwanda, Sierra Leone etc), the UN Peace Keeping and Peace Enforcing Missions, and the ideological package of globalization, democratization, privatization, marketization etc.
Why do I say that Africa has been recolonized and that the New World Order’s UN, AU and NEPAD are all part of it? Is the UN an imperialist outfit? Yes, it is. This UN that is, allegedly, being reformed, and on whose Security Council Nigeria is campaigning to get a Veto seat? Yes, it is. And is the AU an imperialist outfit? And NEPAD too? Yes, they are. Let me indicate just how these organs and institutions are carrying on the imperialist project.
The AU is a joint instrument of the Arabs and Europeans for waging race war on Black Africa. Its NEPAD policies serve European power, while its use as a political/diplomatic inhibitor of organized African resistance to Arab aggression serves Arab power.
The AU was formed at the initiative of Libya’s Gaddafi. It was part of his offering to appease the West so it would end its sanctions against Libya and resume non-hostile relations. Another item in that package of offerings was his surrender of two Libyans to be tried for the Lockerbee bombing. He roped the African countries into his AU [Arabist Underwear] for easier imperialist control. And the West proceeded to con them to implement its NEPAD recipe for Africa’s economic destruction.
As for the New World Order, it is actually not as new as it is made to appear. It is simply the UN Global Order of 1945 as it enters the final stages of its construction. What was made possible in the 1990s, by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the ending of the Cold War, is the final plastering and painting and furnishing of what was organized in Bretton Woods in 1944 and in San Francisco in 1945. Among these final steps is the creating of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to replace the stop-gap institution GATT; the establishment of an International War Crimes Tribunal with headquarters at The Hague; the move of the UN from peace-keeping to peace-enforcement, as attempted in Somalia and Bosnia; and the clear emergence of NATO as the enforcer of last resort for the UN Security Council – as in the former Yugoslavia.
This so-called New World Order is simply the collective phase of capitalist imperialism; the institutional arrangement for the collaborative imperialism of those great powers, now known as the G-8, whose rivalries inflicted the carnage of two World Wars on all of humanity during the first half of the 20th century. Their paramount objective now is to ensure that, after five centuries of unrestrained rivalries and warfare, these great winners shall no longer make war on one another as they compete for the labor and resources of the rest of the members of the UN. Their second objective is to ensure that rebellion against their collective imperialism, by any of its victim peoples, shall be collectively crushed. This collective imperialism, whose slogan is “World Order”, is upheld, not, as in the 15th century, by the fiat of the Pope, but by the economic, diplomatic, military, cultural and propaganda might of the G-8 imperialist alliance against the rest of humanity. The only thing new about this 1945 edition of the Eurocentric Global System is this: after fifty years of delays in its construction, it is at last emerging fully in the form designed originally by the U.S. and U.K. --its main planners and beneficiaries.
As the UN Charter is the blueprint for this current edition of the Eurocentric Global System, it is imperative to ask: What really is the UN and what manner of imperialist beast is this UN Global Order? At the level of the utopian chatter of the UN Charter, and of the sales rhetoric of its propagandists, the UN is a dream scheme that shall save humanity from the scourge of war, promote social progress and better standards of life, develop respect for the equal rights and self-determination of peoples, reaffirm faith in the dignity and worth of the human person, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah! So claims the UN Charter. As for the New World Order, it is “a new just order that permits fair competition and protection of the weak from the strong . . . a joint undertaking of realizing the common aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law . . . an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony” (so said George H. W. Bush). It is “a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace . . . under . . .free institutions” (Bill Clinton); with the UN there “to protect human rights, maintain peace and security for all and to deter aggression” (George H. W. Bush). What glorious and inspiring images these are: peace, prosperity, just order, security, freedom, democracy, cooperation, social progress, equal rights, self-determination, fair competition, harmony, human dignity, world without war, protection of the weak from the strong, etc., etc.!
All this New World Order rhetoric touting Freedom, Democracy, Peace, Development, etc is quite attractive. But is what is preached anything like what is meant, let alone what is practiced? Let us go, for illumination, to those who have closely studied the details of the matter. And let’s consider just three revealing examples: Freedom, Democracy and Development Aid.
In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the Allies were fighting for Four Freedoms—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. But Noam Chomsky has pointed out:
Roosevelt spoke of Four Freedoms, but not of the Fifth and most important: the freedom to rob and to exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the only one that really counts. A careful look at history and the internal record of planning reveals a guiding geopolitical conception: preservation of the Fifth Freedom, by whatever means are feasible. Much of what US governments do in the world can be readily understood in terms of this principle, while if it remains obscured, acts and events will appear incomprehensible, a maze of confusion, random error and accident.
—Noam Chomsky, Turning The Tide, p.47

So much for their freedom rhetoric. By the way, contrary to official propaganda, America grew rich and powerful, not because of the four official freedoms, but because of the Fifth Freedom: its freedom to rob and exploit, starting with the land of the exterminated Native Americans and the forced and unpaid labor of the enslaved Black Africans.
Chomsky also has cast light on the peculiar American usage of the term democracy. Commenting on the situation in the 1980s, he said:

Take the idea that the United States is supporting “democracy” all over the world. Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true. But what does it mean? When we support “democracy,” what do we support? I mean, is “democracy” something where the population takes part in running the country? Well, obviously not. For instance, why are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic,” but Nicaragua [i.e. under the Sandinista Party] not “democratic”? Why? Is it because two of them had elections and the other one didn’t? No. In fact, Nicaragua’s election [in 1984] was a hundred times as good as any election in El Salvador. Is it because there’s a lack of popular political participation in Nicaragua? No. Is it because the political opposition can’t survive there? No, the political opposition is barely harassed in Nicaragua; in El Salvador and Guatemala it’s just murdered. Is it that there can’t be an independent press in Nicaragua? No, the Nicaraguan press is one of the freest presses in the world, much more so than the American press has ever been—the United States has never tolerated a newspaper even remotely like La Prensa in Nicaragua [opposition paper supported by the U.S. during the contra war], not even close: in any time of crisis here, the American government has shut down even tiny dissident newspapers, forget a major newspaper funded by the foreign power that’s attacking the country and which is openly calling for the overthrow of the government. That degree of freedom of the press is absolutely inconceivable here. In El Salvador, there was an independent press at one time—it was wiped out by the U.S.-backed security forces, who just murdered the editor of one newspaper and blew up the premises of the other. Okay, that takes care of that independent press.
So you know, by what criteria are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic” and Nicaragua not? Well, there is a criterion: in Nicaragua [under the Sandinistas] business elements are not represented in dominating the state much beyond their numbers, so it’s not a “democracy.” In El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments are run by the military for the benefit of the local oligarchies—the landowners, rich businessmen, and rising professionals—and those people are tied up with the United States, so therefore those countries are “democracies.” It doesn’t matter if they blow up the independent press, and kill off the political opposition, and slaughter tens of thousands of people, and never run anything remotely like a free election—all of that is totally irrelevant. They’re “democracies,” because the right people are running them; if the right people aren’t running them, then they’re not “democracies.”
--Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 42

In Americanese, a government is “democratic” if it is run by people who serve U.S. interests, and “undemocratic” if it is not. American rhetoric gives the impression that the U.S. supports democracy around the globe whereas in fact it has a long record of blocking democracy and overthrowing democratically elected governments or assassinating their leaders. Here are just a few notorious examples: Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Ecuador 1981, Grenada 1983, Haiti 1991, Venezuela 2003. And an example happening right now is the case of Palestine, where the U.S. is unwilling to accept Hamas as the party democratically elected by the Palestinians to govern them. Because Hamas is committed to serving the Palestinians and protecting them from Israeli armed attacks, the U.S., Britain and Israel have threatened to not accept or work with it. It is as if Bush, Blair and Natanyahu are Palestinians and as if their three non-votes should veto the votes of all the real Palestinian voters who overwhelmingly elected Hamas. So much for the rhetoric that America supports democracy around the world.
Now, let’s consider Development AID. The best guide on the rhetoric and practice of foreign AID is probably John Perkins. In the 1970s [1971-1980] he worked as one of America’s Economic Hit Men (EHM)—consultants who are paid, “well paid--to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars” and to ensnare them “in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty.” In his recent (2004) book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins says:
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs. extortion, sex, and murder. I should know; I was an EHM,” he adds. [Confessions, p.ix]
He goes on to say:
Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard comments like, “If they’re going to burn the U.S. flag and demonstrate against our embassy, why don’t we just get out of their damn country and let them wallow in their own poverty?” People who say such things often hold diplomas certifying that they are well educated. However, these people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant turning the American republic into a global empire. Despite credentials, such people are as uneducated as those eighteenth-century colonists who believed that the [American] Indians fighting to defend their lands were servants of the devil.”
—[Confessions p. 16]
He goes on to set the record straight:
Claudine [his clandestine NSA trainer for his undercover work as an EHM] told me there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to . . . U.S. companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans . . . so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources. . . . the unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors, and to make a handful of wealthy and influential families in the receiving countries very happy, while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world. The larger the loan, the better. The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health, education, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration. . . .The loans of foreign aid ensure that today’s children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back.
—[Confessions, pp. 15-16, 48]

So, that’s that, as it were, from the horse’s own mouth, from one who worked to lure countries into the debt trap. He further tells us that “we make loans to countries with the full knowledge that they will never repay them; in fact, we do not want them to honor their debt, since the non-payment is what gives us our leverage, our pound of flesh.” [Confessions, p.212] Incidentally, you can now see why imperialism will not allow Nigeria to escape the debt trap, even after OBJ hands over your foreign reserves to the Paris Club.
With the advantage of such expert insights, we can better appreciate what the World Order, whether the Old or the New, is really all about: Plunder of the weak. Or as Chomsky says:
The basic rules of world order remain as they have always been: the rule of law for the weak, the rule of force for the strong; the principles of “economic rationality” for the weak, state power and intervention for the strong. As in the past, privilege and power do not willingly submit to popular control or market discipline, and therefore seek to undermine meaningful democracy and to bend market principles to their special needs.
—Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, p.271

(The key books to read for basic education on Imperialism since 1492, the New World Order, American power etc are On Power and Ideology: the Managua Lectures, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Turning the Tide, Understanding Power, World Orders Old and New, all by Noam Chomsky; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins; Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney; The West and the rest of Us, by Chinweizu; and The Black Man’s Burden, by E. D. Morel)

Thesis #4: The Haitification of Nigeria

Haiti, the first formal black republic, was founded with high hopes in 1804 by self freed ex-slaves who defeated the army that Napoleon had sent to re-enslave or, if necessary, exterminate them. What is the path whereby Haiti has arrived at its present condition of chaos where desperately poor Haitian boat people are fleeing the country as economic and political refugees?
Let us take a look, first at Haiti in 1803-04; then at Haiti in 2000-2005; and then see how the sad decline was inflicted.

Haiti 1803-04
In November 2005, the poets known as The Maroons had this to say in celebrating the birth of Haiti:

On this day [in Nov. 1803], 202 years ago, African slaves on the island of Haiti (then known as St. Domingue) defeated the one and only Napoleon Bonaparte. . . . On this day, 202 years ago, Maroons of the past, African soldiers (former slaves) ripped off the shackles of slavery and spit them into Napoleon's face. Under the command of men like Toussaint Louverture (hailed as the Black Spartacus), Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Petion, Boukman, Biassou, Hyacinthe and Makendal the chains of slavery cried out in pain as West African slaves and the newly rising mulattoes/Afranchi gave birth to an independent nation, the first black republic...Haiti.
202 years ago, Rochembeau bowed down to Dessalines power. He fled with his tail between his legs and returned to Napoleon a defeated general, defeated at the hands of a former slave. On this day, 202 years ago, African cultural continuity played a pivotal role in the outcome of the slave uprising. With their age-old beliefs, history and culture intact, the enslaved Africans were able to forcefully and relentlessly resist the oppression they encountered in St. Domingue. Though largely misunderstood and maligned by Westerners, the Vodun religion our ancestors carried across the Atlantic Ocean infused them with a fiery determination to free themselves from human bondage.
Dessalines, at the head of the triumphant indigenous army, entered Cap on Nov. 30, 1803. On December 4, the French also surrendered the northwestern peninsula and Mole St. Nicolas to the victors and the French occupation and control of Haiti ended forever." (Heroes of Haiti, W.F. Burton Sellers)
27 days later, the first free black nation was born, the first black republic, the originator of freedom,
--Excerpt from “The Maroons Salute The Battle of Vertieres...on this day, 202 years ago” By The poets known as The Maroons

But now, two centuries later, this is Haiti:

Haiti 2000-2005
Let me quote from a news report datelined Nov. 17, 2005:

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world and getting poorer.
Only parts of sub-Saharan Africa are worse off. The armed rebellion that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide early last year [2004] and the continuing insecurity ever since have steepened the decline. Prices rose 15 percent this year, while most incomes stand still at less than a dollar a day. And many Haitians fear that elections later this year will erupt in violence.

''We will never let the election find us in Haiti,'' said Jippy Hamilton, a 29-year-old mechanic.
For the past eight months, Hamilton and his childhood friend Ricardeau Felix have been scouring the city for scrap, building a 16-foot speedboat for a rare direct shot at Miami.
. . .
''I have no life here,'' he said. ``Even if I die at sea, I have no choice. There is no life for me in Haiti.''
--- . . .
In this old French colonial port, one sailor plans to smuggle his own family out. A journalist is fleeing political gangs. An unemployed mechanic hopes to be a better father from afar. A single mother prays that she can find a future for her children in Miami, even as she leaves them behind.
They are people whose wrenching personal stories are often lost under the category of ''economic refugees.'' They drown, they get robbed, they climb into the most wretched of boat holds, packed body to body in steaming heat, hoping to go anywhere but here.
Haiti's relentless poverty has bred a paralyzing sense of helplessness, with thousands of people concluding that the only way to take control of their lives is to leave - no matter what the risk.
They make news now and then, as in the televised landing of 220 Haitians on Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway in 2002 and the drownings of three women whose bodies washed up in Pompano Beach on Nov. 5. But mostly, they are invisible.
U.S. and Bahamian officials stopped about 3,200 migrants in the last fiscal year [i.e. 2004], fewer than in some years, more than in others. The Coast Guard has clamped down since the 2002 incident, dramatically reducing the number of migrant ships sailing straight into Miami. Smugglers have reacted accordingly. They carry fewer people at a time, charge more and take a circuitous route.
Migrants often make several attempts just to complete the first leg of the journey, to Providenciales in the British colony of Turks and Caicos, 150 miles north of Haiti. From there, they hope to move into the Bahamas and then try to slip into Florida on speedboats.
In the north coast port of Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, handmade boats with anywhere from 10 to 200 passengers sail into the pipeline every week. Many more leave from the northern town of Port-de-Paix and the offshore island of La Tortue.
Some make it to their destination. Others don't.
Storms sink them or drive them far off course. Winds die and stall them for weeks as passengers run out of food and water. Coast Guard cutters intercept them, destroy their boats and send them home.
Smugglers deceptively loop around and drop them back off in Haiti, or leave them to perish on uninhabited islands. Armed bandits attack them.
Ima Pyrrhon, 23, lost her husband on a trip that left here with 15 people in August. She was told that he and six others drowned when the boat capsized. She says she can barely speak since it happened.

``We had three children and another baby on the way. ... We made this decision. We had no choice. He was all I ever had.''

---Excerpt from “Sailing north only way to escape for some Haitians” by JOE MOZINGO, Knight Ridder Newspapers, KRT Wire, Nov. 17, 2005

How Haiti got there: the Haiti Highway
Now, how did Haiti get from the high achievement of defeating Napoleon, two centuries ago, to this desperate poverty and fleeing boat people of today? As Noam Chomsky put it:

Haiti, in fact, is a parable of Western savagery. That was one of the first places Columbus landed, and he thought it was a paradise—it was the richest place in the world, and also probably the most densely populated place in the world. And in fact, it remained that way: France is a rich country in large measure because it stole Haiti’s resources, and even early in the twentieth century, before Woodrow Wilson sent the U.S. Marines to invade and wreck the country in 1915, American scholarship and government studies on Haiti were still describing it as a major resource center—it just happened to be an extremely rich place. Well, take a look if you fly into Haiti today. The island consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the Dominican Republic we’ve [i.e. the U.S.] also brutalized, but Haiti much more so—and you can just see if you look down from the plane: on one side its brown, on the other side its sort of semi-green. The brown side is Haiti, the [once] richest place in the world. It may not last another couple decades—literally it may become uninhabitable.”
--Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, pp. 400-401

A little chronology of events will help here.
1791-1804: The War of Independence. The Republic of Haiti was founded in 1804 by
Dessalines the conqueror of Napoleon, with a constitution that forbade foreigners from owning land in Haiti.
1825: France exacted reparation of Fr.150m for the loss of its slaves; this was the
condition for recognizing Haiti, and letting it into the global market. This reparations debt led to decades of French domination of Haiti’s finance, with catastrophic effects on the new nation’s economy. This debt was not liquidated till 1887.
1849-1913: In total disregard of Haitian sovereignty, U.S. Navy ships entered Haitian
waters 24 times to “protect American lives and property”.
1915: U.S. Marines invade, occupy and begin administering Haiti on the excuse of
humanitarianism and enforcing America’s Monroe Doctrine.
1916: A “treaty” turned Haiti into a political and financial protectorate of the U.S.A.
1918: A “plebiscite” conducted by the Marines “approved” a U.S. sponsored
constitution that allowed foreigners to own land in Haiti. U.S. investors move in and take large tracts of land for plantations worked by extremely cheap labor. [23¢ per day compared to $3 per day in Panama, in 1926]
1922: the U.S. grants loans to fund Haiti’s national debt.
1934: U.S. Marine rule ends.
1947: Haiti liquidates the 1922 debt to the U.S. ending U.S. control of Haiti’s finance.
1934-1957: A succession of Haitian presidents attempt unsuccessfully to change the
constitution to allow them extra terms in office. Some were blocked. One, Lescot, was overthrown by students and mobs.
1957:Dr Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier elected President; rules Haiti with the help of
the state-sponsored death squads-- the Tonton Macoute.
1964: Papa Doc “elected” President-for-life.
1971: Papa Doc dies. His son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier inherits position of
President-for-life. Under the Duvaliers, in the 1960s and 1970s, US-owned assembly plants move in to exploit labor kept extremely cheap by Tonton Macoute terror. In the early 1980s, Haiti is subjected to the dogmas of IMF Fundamentalism. Under USAID-World Bank programs, 30% of the cultivated land is shifted from food for local consumption to export crops. As tourism booms and poverty deepens, and terror blankets the land, boat people begin to leave in the 1970s. (For an example of USAID destructiveness see Appendix 6 at pp. 51-55)
1986: Baby Doc overthrown
1990: Aristide elected President; inaugurated in Feb. 1991; He tried, against USAID
opposition, to raise the nominal minimum wage from 25¢ to 37¢ an hour; was overthrown seven months later by the Duvalierist military, plunging the country into a political crisis from which it has not fully emerged.

Haiti as a theatre of the race war
It is important to view Haiti properly in the context of the race war. Since Columbus first visited the island, the whites [first the Spanish, then the French, and then the Americans] have attacked and exterminated or enslaved the non-whites they found or brought there.
Phase One: The Spaniards vs theAboriginal “Indians”
Columbus described the people he found as “lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous,” and their land as rich and bountiful. Hispaniola was “perhaps the most densely populated place in the world,” Las Casas wrote, “a beehive of people, “ who “of all the infinite universe of humanity, . . . are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity.” Driven by “insatiable greed and ambition,” the Spaniards fell upon them “like ravening wild beasts, . . . killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing and destroying the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard before, and to such a degree” that the population is barely 200 persons, he wrote in 1552, “from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed.” “It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel,” he wrote: “not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.” “As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures, . . . [they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked.” . . . The Spanish effort to plunder the island’s riches by enslaving its gentle people were unsuccessful; they died too quickly, if not killed by the “wild beasts” or in mass suicide. African slaves were sent for from the early 1500s, later in a flood as the plantation economy was established.
--[Chomsky, Year 501, pp. 198-199]
That was the Spanish war of extermination on the native Indians.

Phase Two: The French vs the Africans
With African slave labor, Saint Domingue, as the French renamed the Island, became the greatest wealth-producing colony in the Americas. By 1789, it was producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar, and was also a leader in the production of coffee, cotton, indigo, and rum. In coercing the labor for this production from 450,000 African slaves, the French
hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars . . ., forced them to eat shit, . . . cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or unto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos, . . .threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup” – when not “flaying them with the lash” to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men’s club. [Chomsky, Year 501, p. 201]

Against such horrors, African rebellions were frequent. These rebellions finally exploded into the liberation war that began in 1791 and that saw the defeat of Napoleon’s army in 1803. That was the first part of the French-African phase of the race war that the whites inflicted on the blacks, and the Africans won it in the end.
The second part of this French-African race war in Haiti began with the indemnity/reparations imposed on Haiti by France in 1825. It was a long economic war and the French won it.

Phase Three: The Americans vs the Africans
This American-African phase of the race war began in 1915 when Woodrow Wilson, --the man famous for his “idealism” [Wilsonian Idealism] who, in his oratory, defended the rights of small nations to self-determination; the apostle of world peace who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919—sent in the U.S. Marines to occupy Haiti. In their 20 years rule, “Wilson’s troops murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery” as Chomsky says. They indulged in “indiscriminate killing of natives” and some of them boasted that they “hunted the Cacos [i.e.Haitians] like pigs.” [Chomsky, Year 501, p. 202]
The economic side of this race war has continued till today and has produced the exodus of boat people since the 1970s. They are, indeed, refugees from an economic war orchestrated by the World Bank and USAID to produce a situation where “Haitian wages, expressed in U.S. dollars, had fallen 39% from 1983 to 1991; “where assembly workers spent as much as one-quarter of their daily wage, and two hours of time, just getting to and from work”; where, “in 1990, an estimated 70 per cent of the Haitian workforce was either unemployed or underemployed: and where each job in the assembly export sector in Haiti feeds an estimated five to seven people”. “How do seven people survive on a wage of 14 U.S. cents an hour?” Here are two reported examples of how:

1] “An extremely competent looking woman in her late thirties who had worked in the plant for four years as an inspector made H$4 a day. . . . the equivalent of US$1.48 a day. Travel cost her 52 U.S. cents a day and she spent 37 cents a day on food. That leaves 59 U.S. cents. To make H$4.00 she works a nine hour day. She has two sons, eight and ten. She told us, ‘The money goes very fast. Often there is nothing left for the weekend.’. . .

2] A young man had worked in the plant for four years. He was making H$3 a day. He had a wife and two children, aged one and four-and-half. It cost him 41 U.S. cents a day for transportation and he skipped lunch. This meant he could go home with 70 cents a day. He and his family can afford only one meal a day. His home is a one-room straw hut. . . When it rains, the house becomes flooded and everything is drenched. For such a house for his family, he pays US$115 a year rent. What else can you afford on wages of 14 cents an hour?”
--from “Sweatshop Development” in The Haiti File, pp.136, 137

When you reflect on these phases, it is clear that despite beating Napoleon in battle, the Africans of Haiti have come full circle in 200 years, from chattel slavery and its physical brutalities back to wage slavery with its economic and physical brutalities today.

(The books to read on Haiti are The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James; The Irritated Genie by Jacob Carruthers; The Haiti Files ed by James Ridgeway; “The tragedy of Haiti”, Chapter 8 of Year 501: The Conquest Continues by Noam Chomsky; AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer)
Now, let us inspect the key spots on the Haiti Highway on which Haiti has been forced to travel since 1804: Haiti was dragged into the Debt Trap in 1825; It was held in the Debt Trap, by trick or by force till 1947; The USA repeatedly violated its sovereignty in the second half of the 19th century and finally invaded it in 1915; occupied it till 1934 and re-organized it for American economic control and exploitation; Haiti has never recovered from the damage inflicted by the American occupation and by IMF fundamentalism with its dogma of a foreignized and export-oriented, open-door economy. In Haiti’s case this means that foreign companies pay no taxes, and can get virtually free labor at less than $2 a day. Hence the exodus of Haiti’s boat people. This journey has taken Haiti 200 years to accomplish.

How Nigeria is almost there too
Nigeria has already gotten itself into imperialist economic and political control through the debt trap and the dogmas of IMF fundamentalism; the U.S. Navy is already in physical possession of Nigeria’s off-shore oilfields in the Gulf of Guinea; its economy, through the OBJ foreignization program, is largely in foreign hands; and the number of political assassinations suggests that Nigeria’s equivalent of Haiti’s Tonton Macoute already is active. OBJ is already taking land from Nigerians and settling on it white, racist Rhodesian farmers expelled from Zimbabwe. Blacks who welcome and give land to white refugees to settle ought to note what happened to Lobengula in the 19th century:
On Welcoming Predators
(In memory of Lobengula who welcomed in Cecil Rhodes)
With open arms
He welcomed a smiling tiger into his home;
With open jaws
The tiger welcomed him into his belly.
After all, smiled the beast,
One good welcome deserves another.
--Chinweizu, from Energy Crisis and other Poems, 1978, p. 34

OBJ has already instigated a shift of farmland from cassava for local consumption to cassava for export. Predictably, this short-sighted policy will lead to mass starvation like the Irish Potato Famine in the 19th century. But what country today can welcome 100 million starving refugees from Nigeria? The economy is already in ruins. All in all, the Haitification of Nigeria is almost completed. The large oil revenue is all that masks the full extent of the economic and social disaster. As for the exodus of desperate Nigerians, it has been on for sometime now: the members of the economically destroyed middle class have been “checking out” to seek employment elsewhere; young women have been escaping to Europe to engage in prostitution; able-bodied young men have been stowing away or paying human trafficking syndicates to smuggle them into Europe. Thus, Nigeria has managed to go very far on the same road, almost reaching, in just 45 years, where it took Haiti 200 years to reach. If OBJnomics persists and gets entrenched, it can’t be long before the exodus of desperate Nigerians reaches Haitian proportions.
So long as we remain trapped on the Haiti Highway, if you want to see Nigeria’s future, just look at Haiti today. The longer Nigeria continues to exist, the greater the disaster it will bring upon the Nigerian population.

Thesis #5: African Power

I have presented a brief picture of where we have arrived after a century in the prisoner-of-war camp that is Nigeria, and of what our prospects are if we stay in it.
I have tried to clarify that
“Slave Trade” was race war;
Colonialism was race war;
Neo-colonialism is race war;
Racism is race war;
AIDS in Africa is Race war;
Pressing GM crops on starving Africa is race war;
Imperialism in Africa is race war;
Arabism in Africa is race war;
the conflict in Sudan is race war;
the chaos in Haiti is race war;
Africa in debt trap is race war!
It should be clear that our disasters over the centuries have been caused by African powerlessness. (See The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams; and Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah) Therefore, if we want our disasters to end, we need to build African power. Like Marcus Garvey said: “The only protection against INJUSTICE in man is POWER—physical, financial and scientific.” If we want to survive the race war, we must, like Garvey also told us, “create for ourselves a political superstate, . . . [one] strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.” But where do we start, where do we start? I would say, lets start with awareness of the essentials. (The principal book to read on African Power is Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey).
For a millennium or more, the ultimate source of all our disasters has been the abject and chronic powerlessness of Africa. We must therefore pose the problem of African power, and do so starkly and sharply, without evasions. We must solve the problem of African power with rigor and vigour or we shall be exterminated in this 21st century. We must face up to the fact that the AU, NEPAD, the UN, Liberalism, Humanism, Marxology, Christianity, Islam, etc are antithetical to African Power. We must realize that the development we need is not the development of African consumerism or contractorism, but the development of African Power. And the key to that development is Afro-modernization, the project of putting African culture and societies on an industrialized foundation. And we must accept that, for industrialization, Bourgeois democracy, Sharia, Christianity, Islam, Humanism, Arabization, Europeanization etc., are, at best, wholly irrelevant or decoys. Industrialization is the only key. That’s the secret behind the power today of the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Americans, Russians, Indians etc.
The question now is: If you don’t want to continue to be ground down, and to end up like the people of Haiti in your life time; if you don’t want your children and grand children to be exterminated by the end of this century, like what happened to the Native North Americans in the 19th century, and to the indigenous population of Haiti in the 16th century,
What is to be done?
In bringing about change, the first thing is awareness. Like Noam Chomsky said:

Begin with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there is something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition.
--Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, p.187

But what kind of awareness, specifically, do we most need in Nigeria today? I would suggest we follow the advice of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese sage and master strategist who said: “Know yourself, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.” That’s a good place to start, by educating ourselves about Nigeria, about Africa and its history, its place in the world and how that has come about.
We must especially become fully aware of the aspects of the race war in the 21st century. These include:
1] The AIDS bombing of Africa, by white (European) power, a covert attack that is exterminating Black Africans all over the continent.
2] The wars of ethnic cleansing and extermination to expropriate the Nile basin that the Arab League is waging on Africans.
3] The economic war by debt trap, unfair trade, genetically modified crops, globalization, etc, being inflicted by the European powers.
4] The cultural warfare through Europeanization, Christianization, Arabization and Islamization of Africans.
5] The intra-African proxy wars being orchestrated by white powers from afar, like those in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, the Congo, Uganda etc.
But there a few other things we need to know:
6] The fact that most Africans today are Christians or Moslems and culturally schizoid, the fact that we are conducting this lecture in English, are the results of our ancestors’ defeats in the race war; defeats that made possible the culturecide and cultural dementia inflicted on us in the 20th century.
7] Lugardism, the AU, NEPAD etc, are not just irrelevant decoys; they are indeed among the prime obstacles to our building African Power. For instance, what good is a NEPAD development that is preparing you for powerlessness and extermination?
8] The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity. If we are not building African power we are doing worse than nothing, and we might as well be dead already.
9] To learn how African Power can be built, we need to investigate how Japanese power, Chinese power, Soviet power and Indian power were built in the 19th and 20th centuries, against determined opposition from European White power.
10] African membership in the UN, the AU, the Arab League, the British Commonwealth (for former British colonies), l’Organisation Internatinale de la Francophonie or the Organisation of French speaking countries (for former French colonies), and Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa or the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (for the former Portuguese colonies) are symptoms of African powerlessness. They are the problem, not parts of the solution.
11] The development and the culture we need to fashion are those that make African Power possible. For that, Sharia, Anglo-Saxon law, Bourgeois democracy, Humanism, Christianity, Islam, Marxology etc are simply irrelevant.

12] Above all, we must accept that the next 50 years are do-or-die for Africans.
If we don’t build African Power by 2060, we’ll be exterminated by 2100. The few that are not wiped out by AIDS and other black-specific virus bombs, will be hunted down and killed off by the ethnic cleansing militias of the Arabs, like the Janjaweed of Sudan. The very few that escape both AIDS and Arabs, will end up in zoos and reservations, just like the native Indians of North America did in the 19th century.
These Lugardist states that litter the African landscape, with their AU, NEPAD etc, are coffins. Those who fail to get out of them will be buried by them. They are the false frameworks and wrong foundations for building African Power.
No matter how poor or rich you are, the rest of this century will be hell for you if you don’t build African Power. Even if you do a Mobutu or an Abacha, and steal every dollar of your country’s revenue, you’ll live through hell unless there’s African Power to protect you.
Unless you build African Power to prevent it, you’ll be killed off either by AIDS or by Arabs. If you are under 30, you have your life mission spelled out: help to build African Power! It is up to you to decide to fulfil or betray that mission.
Wherever you find yourself each day, the paramount question you should ask yourself is: What can I do from here to help build African power? It doesn’t matter whether you are a cook or a carpenter, a soldier or a shrine attendant, a poet or plumber, a gardener or general, a farmer or trader, a teacher or a singer, an engineer or an economist, a mother or a father, a village head or a head of state. You should ask and answer the same question each and every day.

Conclusion
In a nutshell, what is my message to you today? What should you take away from this talk? If you want Black Africa to survive and thrive and end its litany of woes and humiliations, you should pay attention to three things and act accordingly:
1] The 20th century has been the most disastrous century, so far, for Black Africa. It was the century in which, under colonialism, Black Africa was subjected to culturecide at the hands of White Power. That culturecide destroyed our ability to resist the genocide that is now taking place. As a result, this 21st century is likely to see the physical extermination of Black Africans, unless those now under 30 organize and defeat the extermination campaign that white power has already unleashed on Black Africa. Therefore,

2] The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity.

3] In setting forth to build African power, you must understand that Lugardism is a false framework and the Lugardist states are the wrong foundation for building African Power. Escape from these coffins and start afresh.
Thank you.

Feel free notice

Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce it, unedited and in its entirety, to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not change, cut or add any word or otherwise mutilate the piece. In short, use as it is or not at all.
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© Chinweizu 2005



SUPPLEMENTS/APPENDICES

[Appendix 1] AIDs: Origination and rationale for inventing it
THE ORIGINATOR OF AIDS
On June 9, 1969 (the same month as the Stonewall Uprising launched the Gay Rights Movement) Pentagon spokesman Dr. Donald MacArthur testified before Congress: "Within the next five to ten years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organism. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately five years at a total cost of $10 million." (HB 15090, pg 129) Indeed, "a disease-causing organism... refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease" appeared within "5 to 10 years." HIV is the first and only disease to fulfill such a definition."
http://konformist.com/1999/aids/manmade.txt

[In his testimony to Congress,] Dr. MacArthur added, "It is a highly controversial issue and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to another method of massive killing of large populations."
The Secretary of Defense at that time, and responsible for approval of the 1969-1970 budget, was Robert McNamara, followed by Clark Clifford of BCCI notoriety. The final decisions for the AIDS program was made by McNamara and Clifford.
On October 2, 1970 just 15 months after Dr. MacArthur requested an appropriation for AIDS development, Robert McNamara, now World Bank President, made a speech to international bankers in which he identified population growth as "the gravest issue that the world faces over the years ahead."
In his speech to the bankers McNamara argued that population growth was leading to instability, that a 10 billion world population would not be "controllable."
Said McNamara, "It is not a world that any of us would want to live in. Is such a world inevitable? It is not sure but there are two possible ways by which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way."
In brief, Robert McNamara was in the final decision making role for development of AIDS at the very time he was contemplating the idea that "world death rates must go up." THIS IS MORE THAN COINCIDENCE.
Our conclusion is that Robert McNamara knowingly encouraged development of AIDS as a means to reduce the worlds' Population. It is difficult to arrive at any other Conclusion.
Matching the time frames and the opportunities for decision making there is at least a prima facie case, well worth investigating, that Robert McNamara knowingly and deliberately encouraged development of the AIDS virus.
Phoenix Letter views the McNamara program, continued by Clark Clifford, as genocide.
-- Phoenix Letter, Suite 216C, 1517 14th St West, Billings, MT 59102
---------------------------------------------------------
“We have MOST of the world's wealth and the 'have- not nations' ARE going to demand that we share a little, but IF WE KILL THEM OFF THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO DIMINISH OUR OVER ABUNDANT LIFE STYLES!” -- Henry Kissinger [See next item]

“I have GOVERNMENT PAPERS they NEVER dreamed I would possess to back this up ALL the way! Not only that but a memo from Henry Kissinger that is so cold blooded it will dumbfound any sane reader! ie, 'we have MOST of the world's wealth and the ' have- not nations' ARE doing to demand that we share a little, but IF WE KILL THEM OFF THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO DIMINISH OUR OVER ABUNDANT LIFES STYLES! ' It is there in black and white, he does not mince matters at all on it!

I ALSO have how it was introduced into Africa and WHY- a flat out plan for genocide! It is OUR government's work! There is one part where they decided they "needed" to infect siblings so they could watch to see which sibling would die fastest!
--Roberta Hamlin of Knoxville, Tn

. . .

and DO use my name and address!
I am Roberta Hamlin
7823 Gleason Road, Knoxville, Tn .37919. My phone is 8656- 769-2289.
email roberta.hamlin@mindspring.com :


Note by Chinweizu
Actually the McNamara premise for massive depopulation, and therefore for manufacturing and deploying AIDS, is unsound. The quickest way to spot this is to note that, as Jacques Cousteau wrote in the UNESCO Courier of November 1991, "The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics-it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes...” Hence, whatever the carrying capacity of planet earth, it can carry 20 times as many people at the Bangladeshi lifestyle than it can carry at the American lifestyle. The monster to be slain is, thus, not some simplistic “overpopulation,”which could be curbed by genocide, but rather the capitalist-profit-driven ‘over-abundant’ American lifestyle that is being foolishly and relentlessly globalized. As a matter of fact, the arch villain is capitalism, to which McNamara, Kissinger and Co are irrevocably committed, for it relentlessly intensifies the per-capita environmental burden from the American lifestyle. Thus, no matter how many billions are killed off by AIDS, the remainder will soon become “too many” for the earth to support when the profit-driven per-capita burden of the American lifestyle increases sufficiently. But will the U.S. choose to wean itself from capitalism? Not bloody likely. Its rulers seem to have opted for repeated global genocide, using AIDS for a start, and who knows what other bioweapons next, to preserve their wasteful, eco-destructive, capitalist lifestyle.

[Appendix 2] The History of the Development of AIDS
Excerpt from “State Origin: The Evidence of the Laboratory Birth of AIDS”
by Boyd E. Graves, J.D.
In 1962, under the cover of cancer research, the United States charts a path to commit premeditated murder, the “Special Virus” program begins on February 12th. Dr. Len Hayflick sets up a U.S. mycoplasma laboratory at Stanford University. Many believe the “Special Virus” program began in November 1961 with a Phizer contract.

Beginning in 1963 and for every year thereafter, the “Special Virus” program conducted annual progress reviews at Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA. The annual meetings are representative of the aggressive nature in which the United States pursued the development of AIDS.

In 1964, the United States Congress gave full support for the leukemia/lymphoma (AIDS) virus research.

In 1967, the National Academy of Sciences launched a full scale assault on Africa. The CIA (Technical Services Division) acknowledged its secret inoculator program.

In 1969, Fort Detrick told world scientists and the Pentagon asked for more money, they knew they could make AIDS. Nixon’s July 18 secret memo to Congress on “Overpopulation” serves as the start of the paper trail of the AIDS Holocaust.

In 1970, President Nixon signed PL91-213 and John D. Rockefeller, III became the “Population Czar.” Nixon’s August 10 National Security Memo leaves no doubt as to the genocidal nature of depopulation.

In 1971, Progress Report #8 is issued. The flowchart (pg. 61) will forever resolve the true laboratory birth origin of AIDS. Eventually the Special Virus program will issue 15 reports and over 20,000 scientific papers. The flowchart links every scientific paper, medical experiment and U.S. contract. The flowchart would remain “missing” until 1999. World scientists were stunned. The flowchart will gain in significance throughout the 21st Century. It is also clear the experiments conducted under Phase IV-A of the flowchart are our best route to better therapy and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. The first sixty pages of progress report #8 of the Special Virus program prove conclusively the specific goal of the program. By June 1977, the Special Virus program had produced 15, 000 gallons of AIDS. The AIDS virus was attached as complement to vaccines sent to Africa and Manhattan.
. . .
Progress Report # 8 at 104 - 106 proves Dr. Robert Gallo was secretly working on the development of AIDS with full support of the sector of the U.S. government that seeks to kill its citizens. Dr. Gallo can not explain why he excluded his role as a “project officer” for the Special Virus program from his biographical book. Dr. Gallo’s early work and discoveries will finally be viewed in relation to the flowchart. We now know where every experiment fits into the flowchart. The “research logic” is irrefutable evidence of a federal “Manhattan-style project” to develop a “contagious” cancer that “selectively” kills. Dr. Gallo’s 1971 paper is identical to his 1984 AIDS announcement.

Progress report #8 at 273-286 proves we gave AIDS to monkeys. Since 1962, the United States and Dr. Robert Gallo have been inoculating monkeys and re-releasing them back into the wild. . . . Monkey AIDS is also man-made

In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union entered into a biological agreement that would signal the death knell for the Black Population.
. . .

In 1974, Furher Henry Kissinger releases his NSSM-200 (U.S. Plan to Address Overpopulation). It is the only issue of discussion at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania. The men in the shadows had won, the whole world agrees to secretly cull Africa’s population. Today it is Africa and other undesirables. Tomorrow it may be you.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford signs National Security Defense Memorandum #314. The United States implements the Kissinger NSSM-200.

In 1976, the United States issues Progress Report #13 of the Special Virus program. The report proves the United States had various international agreements with the Russians, Germans, British, French, Canadians and Japanese. The plot to kill Black people has wide international support. In March, the Special Virus began production of the AIDS virus, by June 1977, the program will have produced 15,000 gallons of AIDS. President Jimmy Carter allows for the continuation of the secret plan to cull the Black Population.

In 1977, Dr. Robert Gallo and the top Soviet Scientists meet to discuss the proliferation of the 15,000 gallons of AIDS. They attach AIDS as complement to the Small pox vaccine for Africa, and the “experimental” hepatitis B vaccine for Manhattan.
. . .

MK-NAOMI is the code for the development of AIDS. The “MK” portion stands for the two co-authors of the AIDS virus, Robert Manaker and Paul Kotin. The “NAOMI” portion stands for “Negroes are Only Momentary Individuals.” . . .
The flowchart is the absolute missing link in proving the existence of a coordinated research program to develop a cancer virus that depletes the immune system.

--(http://www.boydgraves.com/timeline/)


[Appendix 3] Patent (U.S.) for cure for AIDS – excerpt

( 1 of 1 )

United States Patent 5,676,977
Antelman October 14, 1997

Method of curing AIDS with tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices
Abstract
The diamagnetic semiconducting molecular crystal tetrasilver tetroxide (Ag.sub.4 O.sub.4) is utilized for destroying the AIDS virus, destroying AIDS synergistic pathogens and immunity suppressing moieties (ISM) in humans. A single intravenous injection of the devices is all that is required for efficacy at levels of about 40 PPM of human blood. The device molecular crystal contains two mono and two trivalent silver ions capable of "firing" electrons capable of electrocuting the AIDS virus, pathogens and ISM. When administered into the bloodstream, the device electrons will be triggered by pathogens, a proliferating virus and ISM, and when fired will simultaneously trigger a redox chelation mechanism resulting in divalent silver moieties which chelate and bind active sites of the entities destroying them. The devices are completely non-toxic. However, they put stress on the liver causing hepatomegaly, but there is no loss of liver function.


Inventors: Antelman; Marvin S. (Rehovot, IL)
Assignee: Antelman Technologies Ltd. (Providence, RI)
Appl. No.: 658955
Filed: May 31, 1996

Current U.S. Class: 424/618; 514/495
Intern'l Class: A61K 033/38
Field of Search: 424/618 514/495

References Cited [Referenced By]

U.S. Patent Documents

4415565 Nov., 1983 Wysor 424/618.
4915955 Apr., 1990 Gomori 424/616.
4952411 Aug., 1990 Fox, Jr. et al. 424/618.
5073382 Dec., 1991 Antelman 424/604.
5078902 Jan., 1992 Antelman 424/618.
5089275 Feb., 1992 Antelman 424/602.
5211855 May., 1993 Antelman 424/618.
5223149 Jun., 1993 Antelman 424/618.
5336499 Aug., 1994 Antelman 424/405.
5571520 Nov., 1996 Antelman 424/618.


Other References

"Is The AIDS Virus A Science Fiction?" by Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, Policy Review, Summer 1990, pp. 40-51.

Primary Examiner: Hulina; Amy
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Salter & Michaelson

Parent Case Text



This application is a continuation-in-part of patent application Ser. No. 08/310,859 filed Sep. 22, 1994, now abandoned.

Claims



What is claimed is:

1. A method of treating AIDS-afflicted humans comprising injecting a multitude of tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystals into the bloodstream of the human subject.

2. A method for increasing white blood cell counts in AIDS-afflicted humans comprising injecting a multitude of tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystals into the bloodstream of the human subject.

3. Methods of treating AIDS-affilicted humans according to claims 1-2 where the concentration of said molecular crystals is approximately 40 PPM of the total blood weight of the human subject.

Description



BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to the employment of molecular crystals as anti-AIDS devices, but more particularly to the molecular crystal semiconductor tetrasilver tetroxide Ag.sub.4 O.sub.4 which has two monovalent and two trivalent silver ions per molecule, and which through this structural configuration enables intermolecular electron transfer capable of killing viruses and binding them to the resulting silver entity so that a single intravenous injection will completely obliterate acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in humans.
------------------------------
For full text see: patent 5676977 in the US Patent Database patft.uspto.gov

Or go to: www.google.com

type in US patent 5676977 to read all about it.

--------------------------------
For more on all aspects of AIDS visit www.boydgraves.com
Or contact Boyd Graves thru zygote@sunflower.com or zygotemedia@boydgraves,com,



[Appendix 4] Black-specific Bioweapons already developed
***************************************************************************
This Message Is From: "S. E. Anderson"
***************************************************************************


Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy
In These Times
May 29, 2003

Bio-war and the Apartheid Legacy
by Salim Muwakkil

Just as the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction now seems a
neo-con-concocted mirage, word has begun leaking out about the
spread of bio-weapons far more threatening than anything in Saddam
Hussein's purported arsenal.

A two-part story in the Washington Post on April 20 and 21 revealed that
biological agents developed by the South African government during
its apartheid days have fallen into private hands. Written by Post
reporters Joby Warrick and John Mintz, the piece noted that unique,
race-specific strains of bio-toxins were available on the world market-for
the right price or the right ideology.

Wouter Basson, the man who directed South Africa's clandestine bio-weapons
program, "spoke candidly [to federal officials] of global shopping
sprees for pathogens and equipment, of plans for epidemics to be
sown in black communities and of cigarettes and letters that
were laced with anthrax." The Post said Basson "revealed the development
of a novel anthrax strain unknown to the U.S. officials, a kind
of 'stealth' anthrax that Basson claimed could fool tests used
to detect the disease."

The top-secret program that Basson directed was called Project
Coast, and it lasted from 1981 to 1993. The South African National
Defense Force created it at a time when the white-minority regime
was under increasing threat by indigenous black South Africans.
Daan Goosen, the former director of Project Coast's biological
research division, told the Post he was ordered by Basson to develop
ways "to suppress population growth among blacks" and to "search
for a 'blackbomb,' a biological weapon that would select targets
based on skin color."

Goosen and others involved with Project Coast have insisted,
at least publicly, that Basson's orders were never carried out.
Researchers who have studied the issue are not so sure. According
to a 2002 book by Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast:
Apartheid's Chemical and Biological Weapons Programme, there has
never been any serious outside scrutiny of the project's products
and "no records are available to confirm that the biological agents
were destroyed."

The Washington Post even noted, "Goosen says many scientists
kept copies of organisms and documents in order to continue work
on 'dual-use' projects with commercial as well as military applications."
A May 2002 story on Project Coast in the Wall Street Journal reported
that Goosen said he has been "visited by scores of people looking
for 'stuff to kill the blacks.'" Race-specific weapons naturally
are in hot demand among racists, so it's no surprise that South
Africa's race-specific research is highly coveted.

In January 1999, the British Medical Association (BMA) began
warning the world of the dangers of ethnic weapons. Although the
report, "Bio-technology, Weapons and Humanity," made no direct
charge, it said the BMA could no longer ignore the varied reports
that such weapons were currently being developed. The report concluded: "Weapons
could theoretically be developed which affect particular versions
of genes clustered in specific ethnic or family groups." The possibilities
of producing such weapons have been enhanced with the 2002 completion
of the Human Genome Project.

The 1999 BMA study was provoked in part by a 1998 story in the
London Sunday Times alleging that Israel already had developed
a genetically specific weapon. "Unnamed South African sources,"
according to a report cited by the Times, "[say] Israeli scientists
have used some of the South African research in trying to develop
an 'ethnic bullet' against Arabs." Reported links between Israel's
ethnic weapons and South Africa's Project Coast are tentative;
some would say tenuous. But the possibility of such links is terrifying,
and justifies as much scrutiny as was focused on Iraq's imaginary arsenal.

It also appears that the anthrax incidents of 2001, in which
five people died and 13 were sickened, may also have a South African connection.
The Post noted that officials found evidence in a Frederick, Maryland,
pond that may explain how the perpetrators of the deadly attacks
used water to handle the lethal toxin without infecting themselves
or loosing the anthrax spores.

On May 11, the Post said the water theory is the result of the
FBI's interest in one person, Steven J. Hatfill, a medical doctor
and bio-terrorism expert who formerly worked for the U.S. Army,
and who lists South African diplomas in diving and underwater
medicine on his résumé. A June 2002 article in the Hartford Courant
reported that Hatfill also worked with a guerilla unit of the
white-supremacist Rhodesian army from 1978 to 1980, when "an anthrax
outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers."
He also lived in South Africa, "where he completed various military-medical assignments."

Hatfill's connections to South African and Rhodesian apartheid
are much more apparent than his alleged link to the anthrax mailings.
But the legacy of Project Coast blurs that distinction considerably.

==================
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has
worked since 1983, and a weekly op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open
Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders
in leadership positions in the black community.

[Appendix 5] The WHO and the AIDS-bombing of Africa



Smallpox Vaccine ‘triggered Aids virus’
By Pearce Wright, Science Editor
The (London) Times, May 11, 1987, pp.1 & 18

The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaign which eradi­cated smallpox.
The World Health Organization, which masterminded the 13-year campaign, is study­ing new scientific evidence suggesting that immunization with the smallpox vaccine Vaccinia awakened the unsuspected, dormant human immuno defence virus infection (HIV).
Some experts fear that in obliterating one disease, another disease was transformed from a minor endemic illness of the Third World into the current pandemic.
While doctors now accept that Vaccinia can activate other viruses, they are divided about whether it was the main catalyst to the Aids epidemic.
But an adviser to WHO who disclosed the problem, told The Times : "I thought it was just a coincidence until we studied the latest findings about the reactions which can be caused by Vaccinia. Now I believe the smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of Aids."

‘In obliterating one disease, another was transformed’
Further evidence comes, from the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington.
While smallpox vaccine is no longer kept for public health purposes, new recruits to the American armed services are immunized as a precaution against possible biological warfare. Routine vaccination of a 19-year-old recruit was the trigger for stimulation of dormant HIV virus into Aids.
This discovery of how people with sub-clinical HIV infection are at risk of rapid development of Aids as a vaccine-induced disease was made by a medical team working with Dr Robert Redfield at Walter Reed.
The recruit who developed Aids after vaccination had been healthy throughout high school. He was given multiple immunizations, followed by his first small pox vaccination.
Two and a half weeks later he developed fever, headaches, neck stiffness and night sweats. Three weeks later he was admitted to Walter Reed, suffering from meningitis and rapidly developed further symptoms of Aids and died after responding for a short time to treatment.
There was no evidence that the recruit had been involved in any homosexual activity.
In describing their discovery in a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine a fortnight ago, the Walter Reed team gave a warning against a plan to use modified versions of the smallpox vaccine to combat other diseases in developing countries.
Other doctors who accept the connection between the anti-smallpox campaign and the Aids epidemic now see answers to questions which had baffled them. How, for instance, the Aids organism, previously regarded by sci­entists as “weak, slow and vulnerable”, began to behave like a type capable of creating a plague.
Many experts are reluctant to support the theory publicly because they believe it would be interpreted unfairly as criticism of WHO.


p.18 (Continued from page 1)
In addition, they are concerned about the impact on other public health campaigns with vaccines, such as against diptheria and the continued use of vaccinia in potential Aids research.
The coincidence between the anti-smallpox campaign and the rise of Aids was discussed privately last year by experts at WHO. The possibility was dismissed on grounds of unsatisfactory evidence.
Advisors to the organiza­tion believed then that too much attention was being focussed on Aids by the media. It is now felt that doubts would have risen sooner if public health authorities in Africa had more willingly reported infection statistics to WHO.
Instead, some African countries continued to ignore the existence of Aids even after US doctors alerted the world when the infection spread to the United States.
However, as epidemiologists gleaned more information about Aids from reluctant Central African countries, clues began to emerge from the new findings when examined against the wealth of detail known about smallpox as recorded in the Final Report of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Ertadication.
The smallpox vaccine theory would account for the position of each of the seven Central African states which top the league table of most-affected countries; why Brazil became the most afflicted Latin American country; and how Haiti became the route for the spread of Aids to the US.
It also provides an explanation of how the infection was spread more evenly between males and females in Africa than in the West and why there is less sign of infection among five to 11-year olds in Central Africa.
Although no detailed figures are available, WHO information indicated that the Aids league table of Central Africa matches the concentration of vaccinations.
The greatest spread of HIV infection coincides with the most intense immunization programmes, with the number of people immunized being as follows:
Zaire 36,878,000:
Zambia 19,060,000;
Tanzania14,972,000;
Uganda 11,616,000;
Malawi 8,118,000;
Ruanda 3,382.000
and Burundi 3,274,000.
{Total = 97,300,000- by Chinweizu}

Brazil, the only South American country covered in the eradication campaign, has the highest incidence of Aids in that region.
About 14,000 Haitians, on United Nations secondment to Central Africa, were covered in the campaign. They began to return home at a time when Haiti had become a popular playground for San Francisco homosexuals.
Dr Robert Gello, who first identified the Aids virus in the US, told The Times: "The link between the WHO programme and the epidemic in Africa is an interesting and important hypothesis. "I cannot say that it actually hap­pened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV
"NO blame can be attached to WHO, but if the hypothesis is correct it is a tragic situation and a warning that we cannot ignore.”
===================================================
Charity and health workers are convinced that millions of new Aids cases are about to hit southern Africa.
After a meeting of 50 experts near Geneva this month it was revealed that up to 75 million, one third of the population, could have the disease within the next five years.
Some organizations which have closely studied Africa, such as War on Want, believe that South Africa’s black population, so far largely protected from the disease, could be most affected as migrant workers bring it into the country from the worst hit areas further north.
The apartheid policy, they predict, will intensify its outbreak by confining the groups into comparatively
small, highly populated towns where it will be almost impossible to contain its spread.
=========================================================
Aids was first officially reported from San Francisco in 1981 and it was about two years later before Central African states were implicated. It is now known that these states had become a reservoir of Aids as long ago as the late 1970s.
Although detailed figures of Aids cases in Africa are difficult to collect, the more than two million carriers and 50,000 deaths, estimated by the World Health Organization are concentrated in the countries where the smallpox immunization programme was most intensive.
The 13-year eradication campaign ended in 1980, with the saving of two million lives a year and 15 million infections. The global saving from eradication has been put at $1,000 million a year.

Comment by Chinweizu
Of course, the claim that the vaccine ‘triggered’ some dormant AIDS virus, is pure fabrication to cover up the fact that the vaccines had been deliberately contaminated with the AIDS virus. As Boyd E. Graves found out:
By June 1977, the Special Virus program had produced 15, 000 gallons of AIDS. The AIDS virus was attached as complement to vaccines sent to Africa and Manhattan.
--Boyd Ed. Graves
There was no AIDs virus, dormant or not, in Africa or anywhere else, until the US Army manufactured AIDS in its labs and infected vaccines with it. It was the WHO which brought AIDS to Africa. Its as simple as that..
And given its role in AIDS-bombing Africa, Africans would be stupid and suicidal to believe the WHO’s assurances on the safety of polio vaccines or any vaccines whatsoever. In fact, since it is the AIDS-bomber of Africa, the Who’s credibility is finished, or should be.


[Appendix 6] Destructive Foreign Aid, Haitian example:

SWINE AID
Paul Farmer
The exodus from Haiti's countryside, so eagerly desired by the international banking and aid agencies, was not easily engineered. Living on tiny plots of land was a long-established way of life in Haiti, but the international agencies' program received an important boost due to a fortuitous epidemic of swine fever. In 1978, African swine fever was detected in the pigs of the Dominican Republic, and that caused the United States to launch an investigation of pigs in Haiti, some of whom were found to be infected with the disease, although the actual numbers appear to have been small and the Haitian pigs seemed to be resistant to the disease. At any rate, if African swine fever ever made its way to the United States, the University of Minnesota estimated it would wreak $150 million to $5 billion worth of damage. And so, at the behest of North American experts, a great pig massacre began—an event which Bernard Diederich described as "the worst calamity ever to befall the peasant." Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist who has worked in Haiti for over a decade, describes the pig de-bacle in his book AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame.
¬
In 1978, the appearance of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic led the United States to spearhead an epidemiologic investigation of the porcine stock in neighboring Haiti. Haitian pigs in the Artibonite Valley were found to have been infected. Curiously, however, few Haitian pigs had died. Some veterinary experts felt that this might be because the kochon planch, as the Haitian pig was termed, had become remarkably resistant to disease. Some peasants were sure there had been no swine fever, that the entire epidemic was a sham staged so that the North "Americans could make money selling their pigs."
North American agricultural experts feared that African swine fever could threaten the U.S. pig industry, and bankrolled PEPPADEP (Programme pour l’Eradication de la Peste Porcine Africaine et pour le Developpement de 1'Elevage Porcin), a $23 million extermination and restocking program. This would be no small task, as there were an estimated 1.3 million pigs in Haiti, and they were often the peasants' most important holding. The significance of the Creole pig, as it was called after its extermination, is well known to anyone who has studied the rural Haitian economy:

The peasant subsistence economy is the backbone of the nation, and the
pigs were once the main components of that economy. With no banking
system available to him, the peasant relied on hog production as a bank
account to meet his most pressing obligations: baptism, health care, schooling, funerals, religious ceremonies, and protection against urban-based loan sharks who would grab his land at the first opportunity.[1]
130 | U.S.AID AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY


The Haitian peasantry was shaken cruelly by this latest twist of fate. Years later, it became clear that PEPPADEP had further impoverished and "peripheralized" the Haitian peasantry, if such a thing were possible, and had generated an ill will whose dimensions are underlined by Elizabeth Abbott: "PEPPADEP, the program to eradicate every last one of these Creole pigs, would be the most devastating blow struck [to] impoverished Haiti, but until there were actually no more pigs, the awesome consequences of PEPPADEP were neither understood nor predicted."2 Initiated in May 1982 (well after the abatement of any clinical disease in Haiti), the pig slaughter ended in June of the following year. By August 1984, with no pigs left, the nation was declared free of African swine fever.
It is unlikely that a single Haitian peasant celebrated this veterinary victory. [Do] Kay [a rural village of about 1,000 people near Haiti's central plateau] resident Luc Joseph refers to the slaughter of the pigs as "the very last thing left in the possible punishments that have afflicted us. We knew we couldn't have cows. We knew we couldn't have goats. We had resigned ourselves, because we at least had our pigs." "I don't know how we're going to get over this one," said Dieugrand, another of the water refugees [who were forced to move to Do Kay from more fertile land nearby that was flooded as the result of a new dam], in the spring of 1984. "This hill is just too steep to climb." He is echoed by a Haitian economist, who observes that, although the value of the destroyed livestock has been estimated at $600 million, "the real loss to the peasant is incalculable.... [The peasant economy] is reeling from the impact of being without pigs. A whole way of life has been destroyed in this survival economy. This is the worse calamity to ever befall the peasant."3 As apocalyptic as such evaluations sounded, they were soon revealed to be true:
School opening that October, the first after PEPPADEP's final eradication of the nation's pigs, revealed that [school] registration had plunged as much as 40 to 50 percent. Street vendors of cheap notebooks and pencils went hungry. The Lebanese and Syrian dry goods merchants had unsold stockpiles of checkered cotton for the traditional Haitian school uniforms. Deschamps Printing Company's orders for Creole and French textbooks plummeted. All over Haiti children stayed at home, understanding that something was happening to them and that times were suddenly much harder.4
In Do Kay, the number of children reporting for the first week of school was down by a third, and Mme. Alexis, headmaster Maitre Gerard, and mission treasurer Jesula Auguste spent days bringing uniforms and other "classical furnishings" to the homes of the no-shows. They were all determined that not a single child would be prevented from attending school because of the pig disaster, and with Pere Alexis [local priest of the Eglise Episcopale 'Haiti] were actively planning to restore the pigs to the peasants.
SWINE AID | 131

Working with USAID and the Organization of American States, the Haitian government announced a pig replacement program, act two of PEPPADEP. As "suspicious" Haitians had predicted, the replacement stock was purchased from U.S. farmers. In order to receive Iowa pigs as a "secondary multiplication center," program participants were required to build pigsties to specifications and also demonstrate the availability of the capital necessary to feed the pigs. This effectively eliminated the overwhelming majority of peasants. Pere Alexis decided that helping villagers to replace their lost pigs was an undertaking that fell squarely within his mission, despite his distaste for USAID. In the space of two months, he and his team had erected a sturdy tin-roofed sty that was, as many noted, "better than the homes of Christians." The priest's plan was to breed the pigs and distribute gratis the piglets, with the request that one piglet from each subsequent litter be returned to the project. In that way, he announced, the cycle could be continued until everyone had pigs. Since the new pigs were promised by North American agronomists to have litters of six to ten piglets, the proposal was greeted with satisfaction by the community. Dozens of villagers watched with delight as more than a score of sturdy piglets were delivered in the summer of 1985.
It did not take long for this auspicious beginning to go awry. The pigs looked little like the lowslung, black Creole pigs that had populated Haiti for centuries. Although the new pigs, soon termed kochon blan ("foreign pigs"), were very large, they were manifestly more fragile than their predecessors. They fell ill and required veterinary intervention; they turned their noses up at the garbage that had been the mainstay of the native pigs' diet. The kochon blan fared well only on expensive wheat-based, vitamin-enriched feed—a commodity also sold by the government. Although public proclamations assured the people that the price of pig feed would be controlled, artificially created shortages soon led to a thriving parallel market that netted fortunes for a few in the Duvalier clique and its successors. The cost of feed each year for an adult pig ran between $120 and $250, depending on the black market.
There were, in addition to technical difficulties, dilemmas of a more cultural order. With the help of his staff, Pere Alexis had decided that the first litters of pigs should go to the community councils of Do Kay and surrounding villages, where they were to be held communally. This idealistic plan was approved in a large public meeting held in Do Kay shortly after the introduction of the new livestock, and well before the arrival of the first litters. Once distributed, the pigs did very well in two or three of the ten villages with which the Kay-based staff was working. In many of the others, however, there soon were difficulties. In some settings, the pigs simply did not thrive. Villagers admitted that they were unaccustomed to caring for communally held property. In at least two villages, one member of the community council attempted to claim ownership of one or more of the pigs. In Vieux Fonds . . . machetes were drawn during the course of pig-related arguments. In a community outside the limits of Alexis's sphere of
132 | U.S. AID AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

action, the priest and his coworkers were accused of "spreading communist ideas," an accusation that was to recur in 1987. Pere Alexis concluded that his error had been to exaggerate the local population's enthusiasm for the idea of shared property. There would be less division, he was sure, when pigs were distributed to individual households. But the slow process of distribution meant that for well over two years, some had pigs and some did not. Others had lost their pigs to sickness or bad business deals. The setting was ripe for hard feelings. . . . The next eruption of anger was expressed less directly, in kola accusations.
Kola is a root believed, in Do Kay at least, to be particularly noxious to pigs. When mixed with millet or corn stalks, it may be used as a pig poison. If its native toxicity is deemed insufficient, many feel that Kola may be "fixed" by an amate, a specialist in malicious magic. Magically enhanced kola is a far more efficacious poison. In this case, the poison is termed "not simple" (pa senp), a distinction that is invariably made when accusations of pig poisoning are brought up. . . . There seemed to be a kola accusation for every pig death.
Pere Alexis threw up his hands, saying, "I give up! The only way to please everyone would be to import one thousand healthy adult Creole pigs and distribute them simultaneously!" A tour of the communities surrounding Do Kay convinced him that the "white pigs" were simply not suited to Haiti. The new pigs would not eat their predecessors' fare, and the cost of wheat shorts was subject to black market control and well beyond the reach of the rural poor. The dissension and kola accusations discouraged him, and the priest recommended that the pig project be closed down. But Mme. Alexis was insistent that "everybody have at least one pig," and decided that henceforth she would oversee the project.
Mme. Alexis focused her distribution efforts on individual families in Do and Ba Kay, rather than working through community groups. She too met with little success. Although several poor villagers sold their pigs for hand-some profits, many of the kochon blatn did not fare well outside the complex. Some died, others simply failed to thrive. Sows came into heat infrequently and bore small litters. Less than four years after the inauguration of the pig project, Mme. Alexis also declared herself "ready to close down the project. It's a waste of time. These pigs will never become acclimated to Haiti... . Next they'll ask us to install a generator and air conditioning. ..."
NOTES
1. Bernard Diederich, "Swine Fever Ironies: The Slaughter of the Haitian Black Pig," Caribbean Review 14(1), 1985, pp. 16-17,41.
2. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, McGraw Hill, 1988), p. 241.
3. Diederich, p. 16.
4. Abbott, pp. 274-275.
SWINE AID | 133


[Appendix 7] Genetically Modified (GM) crops

BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK | October 5, 1999, Tuesday

MONSANTO TO BAR A CLASS OF SEEDS

By BARNABY J. FEDER (NYT) 1161 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Monsanto Co, lightning rod for furor over so-called 'Terminator' technology that uses genetic modifications to create plants able to resist insect pests and weed killers, seeks to remove itself from inflamed debate over biotechnology; will make no further efforts to market seeds that produce crop plants that are infertile; critics say genetic modification represents drive by agribusiness to make farmers dependent on them and chemicals many of them use; note seeds from engineered crops cannot be replanted, forcing farmers to buy new seeds year after year, rather than saving seeds from normal crops for replanting following spring; suggest pollen from engineered crops could render plants in neighbors' fields sterile without farmers realizing it; hail company's decision (M)
-----------
US may press Africa on GMOs
By Shapi Shacinda Wed Feb 8, 10:35 AM ET
LUSAKA (Reuters) - The U.S. may push Africa to accept gene-altered (GMO) food now that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has ruled the EU broke rules by barring GMO foods and seeds, but Africans vowed on Wednesday to resist.
"We do not want GM (genetically modified) foods and our hope is that all of us can continue to produce non-GM foods," Zambian Agriculture Minister Mundia Sikatana told Reuters in Lusaka.
"The decision by the WTO does nothing to change our stand in this matter."
The WTO ruled on Tuesday that the European Union and six member states had broken trade rules by barring entry to genetically modified crops and foods.
A U.S. trade official confirmed findings of the preliminary ruling, contained in a confidential report sent only to the parties. The closely watched verdict addressed a complaint brought against the EU by leading GMO producers the United States, Argentina and Canada.
The European Union's opponents asserted that the moratorium, which Brussels argued was never official, hurt their exports and was not based on science.
Manufacturers of the biotech seeds, designed to increase yields and resist pests better than normal seeds, maintain they are safe for human consumption.
European consumers, fearing the effects of "Frankenstein foods" have resisted them. Even African countries facing food shortages, such as Zambia, have refused to accept gene-altered food donations, arguing their safety had not been ascertained.
Those countries that take in GMO-food demand stringent certifications and milling before it arrives on their borders.
Regional heavyweight South Africa is one of the few countries on the continent to embrace the controversial technology.
SIGNAL TO REST OF THE WORLD
Campaigners and analysts saw the U.S. using the World Trade Organization ruling to press Africans to accept GMO food imports on the basis that Europe, which has usually backed the obstinate African position, will itself have to take them.
"Politically, I think it is very clear that the U.S. will try and use this case to force GMOs into African markets. American industry is already saying that the result is a signal to the rest of the world," Daniel Mittler, trade adviser at Greenpeace International, told Reuters by telephone.
"They are implying that while the EU may be able to resist an outlawing of national bans on GMOs, developing countries will not and will have to open their markets," Mittler said.
Africans argue that better technology to increase irrigation, more widespread use of fertilizers and pesticides, and improved monitoring of market trends will help deliver improved harvests and defeat hunger.
"It is obvious to everyone that the U.S. will interpret the WTO ruling as a message to Africans that it is now time to eat GMOs and stop the noise-making ... after all, the EU has been put on a leash in the matter," said an agriculture consultant in Malawi, one of the countries that often require food aid.
But Zambian minister Sikatana said there was no looking back: "We made a decision based on facts and those facts have not changed. We hope no one in Africa feels they have to change their views based on that ruling, it will not do."
-- Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard in Johannesburg
[Appendix 8] King Leopold’s mandate to his missionaries and the passivity of Africans world-wide today
--Commentary by Chinweizu

[The letter which follows is Courtesy of Dr. Vera Nobles and Dr Chiedozie Okoro

Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries, 1883
“Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots:
The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact. You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire above all Belgium interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already. They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know. They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground. To avoid that they get interested in it, and make you murderous] competition and dream one day to overthrow you.
Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and, “It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us. I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish-warfare protection-which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear.
Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent’s teachings. The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul. You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason. There, dear patriots, are some of the principles that you must apply. You will find many other books, which will be given to you at the end of this conference. Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. Recite every day-“Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”
Convert always the blacks by using the whip. Keep their women in nine months of submission to work freely for us. Force them to pay you in sign of recognition-goats, chicken or eggs-every time you visit their villages. And make sure that niggers never become rich. Sing every day that it’s impossible for the rich to enter heaven. Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass. Use the money supposed for the poor, to build flourishing business centers. Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker. Teach the niggers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours. Never present a chair to a black that comes to visit you. Don’t give him more than one cigarette. Never invite him for dinner even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.

--- “The above speech which shows the real intention of the Christian missionary journey in Africa was exposed to the world by Mr Moukouani Muikwani Bukoko, born in the Congo in 1915, and who in 1935 while working in the Congo, bought a second hand Bible from a Belgian priest who forgot the speech in the Bible.—Dr Chiedozie Okoro
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Please reflect especially on the 7 specific measures highlighted in the document:

1] Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent’s teachings.
2] The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul.
3] teach students to read and not to reason
4] Teach the niggers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours.
5] You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us.
6] Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker.
7] you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground. To avoid that they get interested in it, and make you murderous] competition and dream one day to overthrow you.

They are a recipe for turning Africans into niggers—docile, unrebellious and incapable of self-organized resistance to their white exploiters. Their successful implementation is sufficient to explain African passivity before white power.


We should note:

1] that all missionaries carried out, and still carry out, that mandate. We are only lucky to have found King Leopold’s articulation of the aim of all Christian imperialist missionaries to Africa.

2] Even the African converts who today manage the older churches in Africa (the priests, bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals etc of the Roman and Protestant sects), and especially also those who evangelize Born-Again Christianity, still serve the same mandate. Which is why they demonize African gods and Anglicize African names, and drop the names of African deities which form part of African names; and still attack and demolish the African shrines that have managed to survive , e.g. Okija.

3] Those Africans who voluntarily converted to Christianity before the colonial conquest—such as Affonso I of the BaKongo in the 15th century—probably did not discern the purpose of the brand of Christianity that was supplied to them. Which was probably why they fell easy prey to the missionaries and the white traders and pirates who followed them.
But their Japanese counterparts probably did discern the game, even without access to some version of Leopold’s letter. But even if the Japanese Shoguns did not intuit what Leopold makes explicit, they clearly realized the danger of Japanese converts to Christianity forming a fifth column within Japanese society and state, a fifth column loyal to their co-religionists in Europe. To rid Japan of that danger, in the late 16th century, the Shoguns began their expulsion of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries on the grounds that they were forcing Japanese to become Christian, teaching their disciples to wreck temples, taking and trading slaves, etc. Then, in 1596, it became clear to the Japanese authorities that Christianization had been a prelude to Spanish conquest of other lands; and it quickly dawned on them that a fifth column loyal to Rome and controlled by the priests of a foreign religion was a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of a newly unified Japan. Soon after, the persecution and suppression of Japanese Christians began. Early in the 17th century, sensing the danger from a creed that taught obedience to foreign priests rather than the Japanese authorities, all missionaries were ordered to leave and all Japanese were ordered to register at the Buddhist temples. When Japanese Christians took part in a rebellion, foreign priests were executed, the Spanish were expelled and Japanese Christians were forbidden to travel abroad. After another rebellion, largely by Christians, was put down, the Japanese Christians were suppressed and their descendants were put under close state surveillance for centuries thereafter. In the 1640s all Japanese suspected of being Christians were ruthlessly exterminated. Thus did Japan, by 1650, save itself from the first European attempt to mentally subvert, conquer and colonize it.

4] The African captives who were taken abroad and enslaved, and the Africans at home after the European conquest, having already been forcibly deprived of their autonomy, were in no political position to resist Christianization. Thus the Christianity still practiced in all of the African American diaspora, just as that in the African homeland since the start of the 20th century, continues to carry out the Leopoldian mandate.
Hence, for example, whereas the White Born-Agains of the USA, when in US Navy ships in WWII, sang:
“Praise the Lord,
And pass the ammunition,”
the attitude of African Born-Again converts today is best summed up as :
“Praise the Lord,
And lie down for the manna.”

Thanks to a century or more of this Leopold-mandated missionary mind control, African Christians are not an activist, self-helping, politically engaged and resolute, let alone militant bunch. Hence their putting up with all manner of mistreatment and exploitation by their misrulers, white and black. The most they are disposed to do to their misrulers is to admonish them to “Fear God!”—as one protester’s miserable placard read in the last Lagos demonstration against the latest of the murderous fuel price hikes by the Obasanjo Misgovernment. The idea of an uprising to tame their misrulers is alien to the religiously opiated frame of mind of the Nigerians.

5] The lesson in the contrast between an Africa that the Christian missionaries brainwashed and subverted, and a Japan where this brainwashing and subversion was forcibly prevented, is stark and clear. What then must Africans of today begin to do to save themselves from brainwashing by their White World enemies here on earth?—That is the question.

--Chinweizu

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[Appendix 9] Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism* by OPOKU AGYEMAN

On the strength of the nature and outcome of the historical links
between Africans and Arabs over the last thirteen centuries, it is the
hypothesis of this chapter that the two ideological-political move-
ments, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, are antithetical and that,
in the final analysis, there is no room for the coexistence of the two
on the African continent. An underlying premise of this hypothesis
is that African-Arab relations have, to date, been woefully un-
balanced and that this asymmetry, as expressed especially in inter-
national and inter-racial political relations, has been weighted in
favour of the Arabs and woefully to the disadvantage of the Africans.
It needs to be emphasized, from the onset, that the terms
"Africans" and "Arabs" are used here as racial, not cultural
categories. As Chancellor Williams has noted, the Arabs are "a
white people," and of the same racial stock as the European Jews
"against whom they are now arrayed for war."1 J. S. Trimingham's
conception that the term Arab "has significance in a linguistic and
cultural, rather than in a racial sense," and is therefore to be properly
used in reference "to the result of the recent admixture" of Arabs
and non-Arab peoples,2 smacks of ethnographic inaccuracy and has
dubious analytic utility. The acculturated African in Northern
Sudan is no more Arab than the Black-American is European. "In
studying the actual records" in the history of the races, then, as
Chancellor Williams counsels, "the role of White Arabs must not be
obscured either by their Islamic religion or by the presence of the
Africans and Afro-Arabs among them".3 As we shall see presently,

1. Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 BC to 2000AD. Chicago: Third World Press, 1976, p.23.
2. Cited in O. Aguda, "Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," The Journal of Modem African Studies, Vol. II. No. 2.1973, p. 180.
C. Williams, op. cit., p. 24.

* Excerpt from The Pan-African World View
30 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994


PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

the Arabs themselves insist that blood ties constitute the essence of
their identity.
The Arabs played a role in the invasions and conquests that
wrought destruction on the ancient Black Kingdoms and empires of
North-East Africa, as well as on the West African Black states of
Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The Arab slave trade in Africa was a
destructive force that raged from the 9th through the 19th centuries
in the Eastern seaboard of Africa, both preceding and outlasting
even the transatlantic slave trade on the West Coast. The Arabs
made depredations on the Sudan through the murderous campaigns
of Muhammed Ali at the beginning of the 19th century, and joined
in the European Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the same
century in an effort, once again, to carve out an African empire for
themselves. Through this nexus of social, economic and political
assaults, the relations between Arabs and Africans took on the
confirmed asymmetry of victimizer and victim.
Despite their awareness of the glaring disproportion in the ex-
changes between the two races, the Africans, supposedly on the
basis of geopolitical considerations flavored with presumptions of
Third World solidarity, argued their way vigorously, in the post-
World War II era, into a political alliance with the Arabs. As
Nkrumah put the case, Africa's freedom "stands open to danger just
as long as a single country on the continent remains fettered by
colonial rule and just as long as there exist on African soil puppet
governments manipulated from afar."4 The construct involved here
is one of a "marriage" founded on the conception that both the
Africans and the Arabs on the continent shared identical interests
in the independence of Africa — that together they shared the
aspiration of liberating Africa from the imperialist encroachments
of the Boers to the South and Israelis in the Middle East.
To lay bare the essentially expedient nature of this "wedlock", we
need only remind ourselves of the core ingredients of Pan-
Africanism, and set them against the dynamics of the ideological-
political movement of Pan-Arabism. The core ingredients of Pan-

4. Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, New York: International Publishers, 1963, p. xvii.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 31
OPOKU AGYEMAN

Africanism include Afrocentricity; positive racial self-concept,
commitment to racial resurgence; racial privacy; positive concep-
tion of African history; corporate racial family; and unity. It is
necessary to bear in mind the element of Afrocentricity in par-
ticular, referring as it does to the Africa of the Africans, of Black
people, and decidedly not to a geographical area which includes
Africa's invaders — whether they be the Arabs who set foot there
over a thousand years ago, or the Dutch who made their incursion
some five hundred years ago. In Chinweizu's observation: "The
Arab world, even if part of it shares the same land mass with us
(Africans), is still the Arab world. Their preoccupation is Pan-
Arabism."5
Pan-Arabism
And what is Pan-Arabism? In a word, it is an ideological- political
movement representing a conscious effort to create a united Arab
nation. Its underlying principle is that the Arab states are parts of
one indivisible Arab nation. Nasser articulated this principle, for
example, in justification of the UAR’s interference in Iraq's internal
affairs:
We are one Arab nation. Both our constitution and the Iraqi
Provisional Constitution provide in their articles that we are one
Arab nation. Accordingly, every Arab state has the right to
defend Iraq's Arabhood and independence from Britain, the
USA, the USSR, and all other countries. We are one Arab family
in a boat caught in the tempest of international politics.6

There is no question that the concept of Arab "peoplehood" in
play here is a racial one. Nasser himself affirmed this and made it
clear that all other bases of identity among the Arabs — religious,
geographic, etc. — are of secondary importance. Of the three circles
at whose centre he envisioned Egypt to be — Arab, Islam and Africa
the first, the Arab circle, stood out in pre-eminence. "There can

5. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p. 494.
6. Broadcast over Radio Cairo and Radio Voice of the Arabs, April 18,1959; cited in W.A. Beling, Pan-Arabism and Labor, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 1960, p. 28.
32 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

be no doubt," he stressed, "that... (it) is the most important, and
the one with which we are most closely linked."7
The Arabs are, of course, also very much bound together by a
common religious heritage. Indeed, Islam is a core ingredient of
Pan-Arabism. At the same time, being a more inclusive basis of
identity, Islam embraces Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic
states which, W.A. Beling explains, by virtue of their non-Arabic
languages, as well as their racial and other differences, are "excluded
from the Pan-Arab concept."8
Even so, the crucial role of Islam as an instrument of Pan-Arabism
should not be missed. In this regard, it is necessary to remind
ourselves that the religion of Islam arose partly in answer to the
customary indictment by Jews and Christians that Arabs were
"savages who did not even possess an organized church,"9 and partly
in response to the state of feuding separatism and decadence in
which the Arabs were mired. By launching the new religion, by
permeating the nature of his fellow Arabs with an autochthonous
religious impulse, one whose genesis, instrumentality and language
they could readily relate to, Muhammad not only went a long way
toward asserting the Arabs' creative genius, but he also succeeded
in transforming his fellow Arabs, replacing their jealous divisiveness
with a spirit of mutual defense designed to promote common politi-
cal and material interests. His success in this was indeed staggering,
for almost at once Islam proved to be "the most important force" in
the Arabs' political and social rejuvenation.10
Nor was this all. In its external ramifications, Islam soon triggered
Arab empire-building as proselytizing brotherhoods "with an un-
compromising aggressiveness unmatched in the history of religions"
soon pierced into the heartland of Africa and beyond into Europe
and Asia.11 The essentially imperialistic, rather than beneficent or

7. Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, Washington, DC:
Public Affairs Press, 1955, p. 111.
8. W.A. Beling, op. cit., p. iii.
9. The "Prophet" Muhammad's French biographer, Maxime Rodinson, makes the point which is
cited in Time, April 16,1979, p.49.
10. The view of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Arab historian, cited in W. Rodney, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972, pp. 62-63.
11. See C. Williams, op. cit., pp. 215-216; and W. Rodney, op. cit., p.63.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 33
OPOKU AGYEMAN

missionary, role of Islam, is underscored by the fact, for instance,
that it featured as an instrument of the Arab slave trade: the trade
and the religion were "companions throughout, with the crescent
following the commercial caravan".12 Revealingly, following the
Moroccan invasion of Songhay, the African Muslims who had built
and ruled the empire were not spared destruction by the Arab
Muslims.13 This is by no means an isolated case. The historical
sources are replete with complaints by black Muslim rulers about
"holy wars" launched against them to take captives. The enslavement
of black Muslims became very much the confirmed pattern.
As far as Arabs were concerned, therefore, the utility of Islam,
from the first, was seen to lie in its potential as a weapon for
indoctrination, domination and, thereby, the augmentation of Arab
power around the globe. In Nasser's own words:

When I consider the 80 million Muslims in Indonesia, and the 50
million in China, and the millions in Malaysia, Siam and Burma,
and the nearly 100 million in Pakistan ... and the 40 million in
the Soviet Union together with the other millions in far-flung
parts of the world — when I consider these hundreds of millions
united by a single creed, I emerge with a sense of the tremendous
possibilities which we might realize through the co-operation of
all these Muslims.14

From such a trajectory, it comes as no surprise that the remaining
circle in Nasser's orbital schema, Africa, which he characterized as
"the remotest depths of the jungle," featured as merely a candidate
for Egypt's, "spread of enlightenment and civilization" via Islamiza-
tion-Arabisation.15
In all, at the dictates of Pan-Arabism, loyalty to a particular state
in the Arab world has been, in Bernard Lewis' words, "tacit (and)
even surreptitious," even as Arab unity has been "the sole publicly
accepted objective of statesmen and ideologues alike."16 Despite

12. Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 53. No. 4, July 1975. p. 725.
13. C. Williams, op. cit., p. 222.
14. G. A. Nasser, op. cit., p. 113.
15. Ibid., pp. 109-110.
16. B. Lewis, The Middle East and the West, New York: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 94.
34 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

much recent talk, in some academic circles, of the demise of Pan-
Arabism in the wake of the defection of Sadat's Egypt, the ideologi-
cal current remains appreciably strong, as witness the very fact of
the tremendous storm generated in the Arab world over Sadat's
policy — an indication, in itself, of a fight to keep the ideology alive.
At this juncture, it is well to sum up the essence of the Pan-Arabist
ideology by noting that it is founded on the Arabs' belief, "illustrated
by the jihads through which, in the 7th and 8th centuries, they spread
Islam" into North Africa, Iberia and South Asia,

that in a rightly ordered world, dominion should belong to Muslims, and pre-eminently to the Arabs who gave Islam to the world. Since they not only lost dominion to the West but found themselves overrun by the West, they have suffered from a feeling that the universe is out of its proper order. They have therefore, as Muslim Brotherhoods demonstrate, longed for a restoration of dominion to the Faithful so the world will be set right again.17

In terms of goals, the cross-purposes of the two movements are
self-evident. And this means that any "alliance" between them could
only be one of convenience, limited to collaboration in the elimina-
tion of obstacles (as posed by South Africa and Israel) toward the
attainment of what are fundamentally opposed ends. The point
cannot be overlooked, in this connection, that, outside the obliga-
tions of the "alliance", Israel, the adversary of the Arabs, was neither
automatically nor necessarily the foe of the Africans; by the same
token, South Africa, the enemy of the Africans, was neither neces-
sarily nor mechanically the foe of the Arabs.

The lack of mutuality in the "Alliance"
It has to be emphasized that, even within such limited perimeters,
success of the "alliance" depended entirely on a mutuality of com-
mitment to its limited tactical purposes. And yet the evidence
suggests that such a reciprocity was lacking from the beginning. The
Africans drew upon, and were buttressed by, assumptions of Third
World solidarity — "the shared experience of devastation and

17.Chinweizu, op. cit., p. 494.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 35

OPOKU AGYEMAN

humiliation under the boots of an expansionist West . . ."18 In
Nkrumah's words:
The fortunes of the African Revolution ... are linked with the world-wide struggle against imperialism. It does not matter where the battle erupts, be it in Africa, Asia or Latin America, the master-mind and master-hand at work are the same. The oppressed and exploited people are striving for their freedom against exploitation and suppression. Ghana must not, Ghana cannot, be neutral in the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.19

For their part, the Arabs seem to have conceived of the "alliance"
solely in self-interested terms; in particular, there was concern to
ensure their continued access to the waters of the Nile which, to
Egypt, "is a matter of life or death" in the sense that "if the water of
the river were discontinued or were controlled by a hostile state or
a state that could become hostile, Egypt's life is over".20 In Nasser's
words:
The Nile which runs from Lake Victoria to Cairo is not merely a route crossing the ... African continent to the Mediterranean, but is the path of life in the full sense of the word and with all its dimensions.21

This anxiety over the Nile, as old as the Arabs' incursion and
occupation of Egypt from 642 A.D., was a key motivating factor in
Muhammed Ali's annexation of the Sudan to the Egyptian Empire
in the 19th century, and remains as acute as ever, as in Sadat's threat
of June 5, 1980 to "retaliate with force" if Ethiopia interfered with
the river's flow to Egypt. This was in retort to Ethiopia's complaint
to the OAU that Egypt was abusing its rights to the Nile by diverting
it to irrigate stretches of Sinai Desert in a million-acre irrigation
scheme launched by Sadat.22

18. Ibid., p. 23.
19. Kwame Nkrumah, Address to the National Assembly, June 12,1965.
20. The words of an Egyptian army colonel, cited in Fareq Y. Ismael, The UAR in Africa: Egypt's
Policy Under Nasser, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971, pp. 163-164.
21. Statement on September 22,1966, during a State Visit to Tanzania. See The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), September 23,1966.
22. See The New York Times, June 6, 1980, p. A3.
36 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

And now to sum up the essence of the matter. In the eyes of the
Arab leaders, Egypt is the most important entity in the Arab nation.
It therefore matters very much that Egypt's lifeline, the Nile, lies in
African hands. A united and hostile Africa could strangulate Egypt.
Among other uses, then, an "alliance" between Africans and Arabs
could be exploited to forestall such a unification of Black Africa.
Organizationally, the "alliance" was born with the Conference of
Independent African States (CIAS) which Nkrumah convened in
Accra in March 1958, which assembled Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt,
Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana, and to which Nkrumah
declared: "If in the past the Sahara divided us, now it unites us. And
an injury to one is an injury to all of us."23
We now proceed to assess the "praxis" of the alliance since its
inauguration in 1958, drawing on case illustrations in African-Arab
intercourse in the Sudan, Zanzibar, Mauritania and the Organiza-
tion of African Unity (OAU); on the triangular mesh of African-
Arab-Israeli relations; and on the effect of Islam on African-Arab
connections.

The Sudan
The backdrop to African-Arab relations in Africa's largest
country (sharing borders with 8 countries, including Ethiopia) is
provided by the Turko-Egyptian conquest of 1821 and the sub-
sequent rule of a Turko-Egyptian government headed by
Muhammed Ali which witnessed, among other things, the traffic in
over 1 million African slaves for the Middle East market.24 This was
followed by the Anglo-Egyptian colonization and rule from 1898
which would end in a grant of independence to a united, Arab-
dominated Sudan in 1956. By the time of the launching of the
"alliance" at the 1958 CIAS in Accra, the Sudan had been inde-
pendent for some two years, during which everything had been done

23. Cited in Ali Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p. 62.
24. Allan Reed, “The Anya-nya: Ten Months' Travel with His Forces Inside the Southern Sudan," Munger Africana Library Notes, Issue No. 11, California Institute-of Technology, Pasadena, California, February 1972, p. 3.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 37
OPOKU AGYEMAN

to complete the process of African political incapacitation and
economic disinheritance in that land.
For instance, on the insistence of the Egyptians, the British
excluded the Africans from the independence talks. Then, a few
months before independence, the Equatorial Corps of the Sudanese
Army, which was based in the South, was disarmed and sent to the
North, for fear that otherwise the Africans might break away from
the imposed unity.25 In the economic area, some 300 African
workers on the Nzara Cotton Scheme were arbitrarily replaced by
Arabs. As for the new Sudanization policy which transferred posts
held by the British to the Sudanese, all that the Africans got out of
it was 4 posts out of the 800. The remaining 796 jobs went to Arabs.26
Even though the Sudan attended the CIAS in Accra, it came away
from it with no wish whatsoever to achieve any Afro-Arab synthesis
in the country in line with the spirit of "solidarity" which the "al-
liance" symbolized. On the contrary, the government continued the
tradition of Arab predominance at the expense of the African
majority. As a former Prime Minister, Sayed Sadiq el Mahdi, con-
veyed the point:
The dominant feature of our nation is an Islamic one and its overpowering expression is Arab, and this nation will not have its entity identified and its prestige and pride preserved except under an Islamic revival.27

This inner purpose has been echoed over the years by successive
governments and remains the guiding principle of the Arabs in the
Sudan to this day. Thus, another Sudanese Prime Minister, Mah-
goub, proclaimed in 1968:
Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations
and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in
Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent.28

25. ibid., p. 14.
26. For additional details on the different economic fortunes of Africans and Arabs in the Sudan,
see 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 199.
27. Dunstan M. Wai, "Revolution, Rhetoric, and Reality in the Sudan," The Journal of Modem
African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1,1979, p. 73.
Interview with the Cairo weekly, Al Mussawar, March 29,1968.
38 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Nor did the "revolutionary rhetoric" spawned by President
Nimeiry after coming to power in the aftermath of a May 1969 coup
d'etat lessen the Arabization drive, as some maintained.29 Indeed,
following Nimeiry's accession to office, the Pan-Arabists "gained
disproportionately high influence," as reflected in his decision in the
Summer of 1970 to sign the Tripoli Charter which committed the
Sudan, Egypt and Libya to a political federation.30 When some
Africans protested the new wave of Pan-Arabist effusion, expressing
the fear that a Pan-Arab federation incorporating the Sudan would
convert the Africans into a minority and thereby worsen their plight,
they were readily dubbed "racialist conspirators" and then ar-
rested.31
Meanwhile, Nimeiry's Prime Minister intoned loudly and clearly
the purpose of his government, for the benefit of those who still
might misconstrue its essential character:
The revolutionary government, with complete understanding of
the bond of destiny and forces of Arab Revolution, will work for
the creation of economic, military, and cultural relations with
brother Arab nations to strengthen the Arab nation.32

Not to be outdone, Nimeiry himself let it be known that the Sudan
"is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the
Arab civilizing mission."33
Even though the African majority's value systems resisted as-
similation into the minority Arab culture, the Arabs insisted on
seeing them as a "cultural vacuum" to be filled by Arab culture "by
all conceivable means."34 In consequence, under the Arab heel, a
sizeable number of Africans Islamized and Arabised themselves to
the point of "giving themselves Arab genealogies."35

29. See, for instance, All Mazrui, "Is the Nile Valley Turning into a New System?", Makarere
University, Kampala, 1971, Mimeo, p. 25.
30. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 83.
31. 0. Aguda, op. cit., pp. 177-178.
32. Ibid., p. 128.
33. See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 27.
34. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.
35. 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 183. See also D. M. Wai, op. cit., pp. 72-73. .
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 39
OPOKU AGYEMAN

The ultimate ambition of the Arabs, however, as the official
quotations cited above portray, was to have the Sudan wrenched
from Africa and absorbed into the Arab fold — made into an
integral part of the Arab world — on the basis of "the unity of blood,
language and religion." To this end, and at the further impetus of a
desire to create a room in the South of the country for settlement
by the displaced Palestinians, they embarked on a policy of sys-
tematic extermination of the African population. By July 1965, as
Allan Reed has ably chronicled, the intellectual class among the
Africans, in particular, had become the object of a furious exter-
mination campaign.36 Nor did this policy of extermination change
under successive governments. As late as December 1969, Allan
Reed witnessed the bombings of the cattle camps in Upper Nile. As
he wrote: "I passed through villages that were totally levelled, just a
few months after Nimeiry had talked about regional autonomy".37
Writing in 1968, The Daily Nation lamented that for years "whole
villages have been destroyed" and untold atrocities committed by
the Sudanese army.38
Inevitably, through their own organization, the Sudan African
National Union (SANU), the Africans resisted this regimen of
carnage; inevitably, this resulted in a civil war pitting the SANU's
Pan-Africanist nationalism39 against the Pan-Arabism of the
Arabs. It was a classic conflict between a people's yearning for
political self-determination and cultural autonomy and, in the
words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, the "flagrant colonialist"
ambitions of the Arabs.40
Meanwhile, even as the Africans outside the Sudan, perhaps out
of embarrassment, affected ignorance of the strife in the Sudan, or
found specious excuses for staying aloof from it, the Arab world, for
its part, threw in its collective weight as Syria, Libya and Egypt,

36. See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 12.
37. Ibid., p. 13.
38. Daily Nation (Nairobi), July 22, 1968, Editorial, “The Sudan Question."
39. For the essentially Pan-Africanist ideology of SANU and its military wing, the "Anya-nya", see Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 26.
40. Interview in Playboy (London), April 1968, cited in D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.

40 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

among others, took on direct combat involvement against the out-
gunned and out-supplied Africans.
The 1972 settlement which granted the Africans regional autonomy in the South was a tactical accommodation that changed little. Writing seven years later, D. M. Wai noted that the only thing that tied the two racial groups together was "a mutually hateful contiguity from which neither could escape."41 It was an "illusion", he emphasized, to think that the schism that separates the two races had been resolved. For, in spite of the numerical superiority of the Africans, and despite the settlement, Africans still remained "at the periphery of central decision-making". Only one person from the south was in the Cabinet; one out of 45 ambassadors was from the
South; only 8 out of the more than 200 Sudanese in the diplomatic service were from the South.42
Subsequent developments have overridden the tactical aims for which the Arabs made that settlement. Upon the discovery of oil in the South, Nimeiry moved, in February 1982, to unconstitutionally dissolve the South's ruling bodies, to replace them with a military-led administration of his own choosing, and to pursue a new policy of dividing the region into three subregions, the better to reduce the South's political influence and dilute its autonomy. When African politicians voiced opposition to these violations of the 1972 settlement, Nimeiry had them promptly detained.
Not a synthesis, then, but the triumph of Arabism over Africanism
is the tale of the Sudan in the era of the "alliance."
The greatest achievement of Arabism in the Sudan has been the unquestioned acceptance by the whole world that this is an Arab state, in spite of the fact that only about 30% of the population is Arab. Indeed, the predominance of the Arab Sudanese in the country's culture, politics, administration, commerce and industry makes it de facto an Arab state.43

The fact of the matter is that, invariably, the Arabs in the Sudan,
like all other Arabs, "have conceived of the universe as rooted

41. D.M. Wai, ibid., p. 88.
42. Ibid., pp. 88n, 89.
43. 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 177.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 41

OPOKU AGYEMAN

fundamentally in Arabism. For them, there is little disagreement
about the national character the Sudan should adopt, and what its
national aspirations and loyalties should be.44

Zanzibar and Mauritania
The Arab slave trade and Arab enslavement of Africans in the
lands they controlled were interrelated, indeed twin, phenomena.
For centuries, African slaves in Arab hands served as domestics,
eunuchs, soldiers, agricultural serfs, and as slave-gangs on irrigation
works, in sugar and cotton plantations, as well as in gold, salt and
copper mines. Known as the "guardians of female virtue", the
African eunuchs served at harems throughout Arabia. Thousands
of African boys between eight and ten years old were castrated every
year and the survivors of the crude and painful operation were
reared into eunuchs.45 For the African military slaves, the tendency
was, once they had outlived their usefulness, to be betrayed into
slaughter by those they served self-sacrificially.46 Nor has the
phenomenon evaporated into the thin air of history. Survivals of it,
Bernard Lewis informs us, "can still be met" in Egypt, for instance,
where the Nubian servant "remains a familiar figure... to this day."47
Likewise, the Anti-Slavery Society reports that there were in 1962
some 250,000 African slaves in Saudi Arabia alone.48
Our concern however, is not so much with the remnants of the
odious institution in some specific Arab countries. In other words,
we are here addressing a historical phenomenon in the Arab world
as a whole, which we deem to have "continued without interruption"
to the present day.49
Consider Zanzibar. It is difficult not to remember that the out-
rage of Arab wholesale enslavement of Africans in that island, which

44. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.
45. See B. Lewis, Race and Color in Islam, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970, p. 85. Also
Leda Farrant, Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade, New York: St. Martin's Press,
1975, p. 2.
46. B. Lewis, ibid., pp. 69, 70, 72, 77.
47. Ibid., p. 82.
48. See Tribune de Geneve, April 30,1973.
49: B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 81; E. P. Alexandrov, Political Economy of Capitalism, Moscow, p. 60.

42 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

began in 1698 with the Omani Arabs' creation of a plantation
economy and a commercial empire in the North-Western Indian
Ocean,50 ended only in 1964 with the Pan-Africanist Okello's heroic
overthrow of the Sultanate. In the period between 1698 and 1964,
Zanzibar attained a dubious distinction as the most important slave
market in the Indian Ocean. It became a land where being "upper
class" meant that one was not only an Arab first and foremost, but
also that one could afford a great number of African slaves. It
developed the convention that, once born an African, one was "a
slave forever, even in the next world."51
Indeed, the Africans were called washenzi — "uncivilized beings
of a lower order"52 — and, on this account, were considered to be
deserving of every abuse. Thus, it was customary to have the wombs
of pregnant African women opened so that capricious Arab women
could see how babies lay inside of them,53 even as it was fashionable
to have Africans kneel for Arab women to step on their backs as
they mounted their mules. Slaves suspected of fugitive intentions
had their necks "secured into a cleft stick as thick as a man's thigh,
and locked by a crossbar. Sometimes a double cleft stick was used
and one man locked at each end of it."54 Routinely, men, women
and children were killed or left tied to a tree,

for the scavengers to finish off when they couldn't keep up with the caravan, either through illness and exhaustion, or starvation, or both. Mostly, they were finished off with a blow from a rifle butt, or their skull smashed with a rock, as in the case of the child whose mother complained that she couldn't go on carrying him and the heavy ivory tusk. Ammunition was too precious to waste on a slave.55

Okello, upon visiting the island, and before single-handedly plan-
ning the coup that overthrew the Arab regime in 1964, learned, to

50. Edward A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade, Historical Association of Tanzania, Paper No. 3, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 10.
51. B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 7.
52. L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 9.
53. J. Okello, Revolution in Zanzibar, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 108.
54. L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 16.
55. Ibid., p. 15.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 43
OPOKU AGYEMAN

his chagrin, that a phenomenon he assumed to be buried in history
was alive and vigorous in that land; he heard an elderly African
lament: "My grandfather was a slave, my father was a slave and I
too am now an Arab slave;"56 and he heard the shrill retort of an
Arab: "Whether you like it or not, you niggers and black slaves will
forever remain under the flag of our Holy Sultan. We shall deal with
you as we please."57
Significantly, Nasser gave the unqualified support of the United
Arab Republic to the Arab oligarchy in Zanzibar. Like the British
Colonial Office, the Arab leader took the side of the Arab minority
against the African majority over the future of the protectorate,
prompting this comment from a British newsletter: "Zanzibar is a
part of Africa and not the Middle East. The Afro-Shirazi are a more
important group than the Arab minority. These facts should be
taken into account before the protectorate ends. If not, there will
be trouble in the sweet-scented remote islands."58 And, once
trouble erupted in the form of an African coup d'etat which even-
tually ousted the Arab political order, it came the turn of Gaddafi
of Libya to take up the championship of Arabism in Zanzibar.
Speaking on October 7, 1972, at a rally at the Tripoli Stadium to
mark the anniversary of the Italian evacuation from Libya, Gaddafi
declared:

Zanzibar was all Muslim, and almost all the people were Arabs ... In 1964, the enemies of Zanzibar plotted and staged a massacre in which they slaughtered over 20,000 Arabs in Zanzibar. It was the most notorious massacre in the world. . . . All the Arabs were annihilated in Zanzibar and African rule developed there.59

Partly in retaliation for this "massacre" of the Arabs, Gaddafi then
set out, on his own admission, to support Idi Amin's Uganda in its
war against Tanzania, the political entity that has, since 1964, incor-
porated Zanzibar.

56. J. Okello, op. cit., p. 88.
57. Ibid., p. 95.
58. Confidential Newsletter, July 15,1960.
59. Daily News (Dar es Salaam), November 6,1972.

44 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

But if Zanzibar in East Africa represents an outrage that has only recently been liquidated, Mauritania in Northwest Africa, occupying as it does another vital zone of interaction between Arabism and Black Africa, symbolizes a raging and perennial Arabian anachronism.
The process began with the invasion of "white Berber nomads"
into the area in the first millennium A.D. An Arab invading force
joined them from the 14th century and, in time, out of the fusion of
the Berbers and Arabs, came the present ruling elite, "the white
Moors." Whatever residual biological differences separate these
"white Moors"60 from pure Arabs, they are now so completely
identified with the Arabs linguistically, religiously, culturally and
ideologically that, to all intents and purposes, they are indistinguish-
able from them. Indeed, a number of historians, use "white Moors"
and "Arabs" interchangeably in their works.
The official designation of this Northwestern portion of Africa is
the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. As in the Sudan, the Pan-
Arabist outlook of the political system has never been in question.
Thus, upon the country's admission into the Arab League in 1973,
President Ould Daddah pledged: "Mauritania will make every effort
and mobilize all its energies for the Arab cause."61 Nor is it any
surprise that a Pan-Arab Ministry was created in the country and
that Jiddou Ould Salek, as its political head, reaffirmed in 1979 the
country's attachment "in its totality to Arabo-Islamic culture."62
Again, as in the Sudan, policies of enforced Arabisation of the
Africans have been the norm. For instance, in 1966, Arabic was
declared the official language of the country, in the teeth of African
opposition.
Out of a population of 1.5 million, the Africans constitute ap-
proximately 500,000. They are all slaves, in varying degrees. As the
Anti-Slavery Reporter has noted, no other nation has so many
slaves.63 Entry into-slavery "is by birth, capture or purchase. The first

60. Anti-Slavery Reporter, The Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights, Series VII, Vol. 13, No. 1, December 1981. p. 16.
61. West Africa, No. 2947, December 3,1973, p. 1711.
62. Confidential Newsletter, February 28,1979.
63. Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 17.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 45
OPOKU AGYEMAN

... is the most common: being born to an existing slave woman."64
Purchase is still current: the sale of children, who, incidentally, all belong to the mother's master, is the most common. Even those among the Africans who have managed to purchase their freedom, and who are thus legally free, continue to be regarded as property by their former Moorish masters. As Le Monde has indicated, whenever these "freed slaves" escape the grip of their former masters, they are hunted down by the police and the administration
and quickly restored to bondage, all "in the name of an interpretation of Islamic law."65
Slavery is indeed the way of life in Mauritania. A typical sight in Nouakchott, the capital, according to Bernard Nossiter, is that of "slaves working in gardens and vegetable plots . . . while their Moorish masters sit under trees, sipping mint tea."66 And the avenues of escape from servitude remain as elusive as ever. As recently as February 1980, demonstrations staged by the African Freedom Movement saw the movement's leaders arrested, held without trial for months, and then tortured to a point where some of them went mad.67
On July 5, 1980, as a way of "calming the slaves until the Govern-
ment (of President Haidala) has had time to work out plans on how
to cope with the anti-slavery movement,"68 and in an effort to
improve the country's international image, the Mauritanian govern-
ment published a decree abolishing slavery. Those who knew that
slavery had been formally abolished twice before and that the
country's independence constitution itself proclaims that "All men
are born free and are equal before the law," could only greet the new
announcement with skepticism.
Indeed, when investigators of the Anti-Slavery Society visited
Mauritania "to see how far the new decree was being put into effect,"
they concluded that it had had no practical effect.69 No wonder, for
"the upper and middle officials of the government, the judiciary, the

64. Ibid.
65. Cited in Africa News, August 4,1980, pp. 2,11.
66. B. D. Nossiter, "UN Gets a Report on Slaves," The New York Times, August 26,1981, p. All.
67. Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. I7.
68. Ibid., p. 18.
69. Ibid., p. 16.

46 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

police and the rest of the civil service", do, for the most part, have their own slaves and are determined to keep them.70 As it happens, the most dramatic consequence of the decree seems to have been the government's decision to set up a national commission, composed of Muslim jurists, economists and administrators, to work out compensation for the enslavers for the loss of slaves they have not yet incurred!
When the Anti-Slavery Society proposed that, to demonstrate its sincerity, the Mauritanian government should ratify the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and the supplementary convention on the abolition of slavery, the slave trade, and institutions and practices similar to slavery, this triggered a revealing rejoinder in August 1981 from the Mauritanian government. It let it be known that it was not the only country which enslaved Africans and that, in any case, any effort "to wipe out this form of discrimination," no matter how earnest, would founder on the rock of Maurtania's technological underdevelopment "which makes all talk about human liberty completely derisory."71
In other words, until the country becomes technologically sophisticated, there is, in the thinking of the white Moors in Mauritania,
every justification for enslaving the Africans. As for Western critics, given the historical record of the West's own victimization of Africans, it was the Mauritanian government's view that they had no moral authority to hold brief for the Africans:

It is very easy for citizens of certain countries who in the past developed this form of discrimination called slavery to its most debasing degree within a framework of pure Machiavellianism and sheer materialism: It is easy ... for these people to try to relieve their consciences by setting themselves up as defenders of victims in countries which have not had the chance to ex-
perience technological development.72

That Arab enslavement of Africans is not a matter of the past but
a continuous, persistent and present scourge is further underscored

70. Ibid., p. 17.
71. Cited in Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 20.
72 Ibid.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 47
OPOKU AGYEMAN

by some gruesome details of "the slave trade route from Africa to
the Arab countries in the 1970s" provided by Tribune de Geneve.73
Research done at the Encyclopaedia Africana Secretariat in Accra
has also pointed up cases of African pilgrims selling their children
to Arabs in order to pay their expenses for the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Scarcely less startling is the news that broke in February 1973 to the
effect that Arab traders had been for years exporting to the Middle
East Ghanaian children "between the tender and undiscerning ages
of thirteen and fourteen to become the virtual slaves of wealthy
Arab families."74 The shock this revelation registered on public
opinion in Ghana is well captured in a lengthy and poignant editorial
of the Weekly Spectator:

Over the past two decades Ghana has led the quest for the restoration of the black man's lost glory and set the pace for the rediscovery of the African personality. It is therefore revolting and exceedingly bewildering to note that this glorious land of liberty is being used for the watersheds of the revival of slave trade.... We recall vividly the uncertain days of the struggle for independence when Lebanese and Syrian merchants in Ghana constituted themselves into a volunteer force and with three-feet-long batons in their hands, cudgelled down freedom fighters in the streets of Accra in open daylight.... It would appear that we have taken our tolerance too far and they have taken our leniency for weakness and are now adding injury to insult by trading our young daughters like apples or any other commodity. ... Our children must be defended against slavery.75

African-Arab relations before, within, and beyond the OAU

If there is any relief from the gloom of a historically victimizing
Arab behaviour towards Africans, it lies in Ben Bella's stirring
rhetoric at the inaugural meeting of the OAU in 1963, pledging
10,000 Algerian volunteers for a showdown in Southern Africa:

73. See Tribune de Geneve, April 4,1973.
74. Weekly Spectator (Accra), February 17,1973 and March 3,1973.
75. Ibid., February 17,1973.

48 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994

PAN-AFRICAN ISM VS PAN-ARABISM

A charter will be of no value to us, and speeches will be used
against us, if there is not first created a blood bank for those
fighting for independence. We must all agree to die a little.76

It was the same Ben Bella impulse which dictated that, having
itself only recently achieved its independence, Algeria would proceed to organize special programmes of training for African liberation movements in Southern Africa. Among those who trained this way in Algeria was a corps of FRELIMO fighters, including Samora Machel, soon to become the President of Mozambique.
To better understand this aberration from the Arab norm, it is
necessary to explore some background facts. These relate to the
tenacity of the support which Algeria received from three "radical"
African states (Ghana, Guinea and Mali) which operated within the
Casablanca bloc alongside two "radical" Arab States (Egypt and
Muhammad V's Morocco) and the Algerian government in exile,
the GPRA. The three African countries not only gave recognition
to the Algerian government in exile, but they carried their support
to the point where they boycotted the Lagos Conference of Inde-
pendent States, held in January 1962, in reaction to the refusal of
the organizers of the conference to invite the GPRA.
Beyond such collective efforts, Nkrumah, for one, tirelessly
proclaimed, in international forums, the justness and the moral
imperatives of Algerian liberation. He also gave Frantz Fanon, the
GPRA's Ambassador to Africa, a base in Accra from which to solicit
support for the Algerian cause among the non-Casablanca African
countries, and to work toward the opening of a southern front
through the Mali frontier to ease the delivery of arms to the FLN.
Hardly forgettable is also the selfless, even self-sacrificial, con-
tribution of Frantz Fanon to the same Arab cause. A black man, and
a native of Martinique, he was soon to discover in his travels that it
was not only in Europe that a black person, "regardless of his level
of education and culture, was always primarily a Negro — and

76. West Africa, No. 2743. December 27. 1969.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 49

OPOKU AGYEMAN

therefore inferior"77; even in the Third World, supposedly united by the struggle against imperialism, racism remained rife against black people. Thus, while he served in the Free French army in North Africa, "the eyes that turned to watch him in the streets never let him forget the color of his skin."78 In Fanon's own testimony, "I was astonished to learn that the North Africans despised men of color. It was absolutely impossible for me to make any contact with the local population." In all, he concluded, there was no question that the Arab "does not like the African."79
For all that, Fanon set out to counterpoise universalism to this
virus of racism, Arab or otherwise. And so, after studying medicine
and psychiatry in France, and while serving the French government
in Algeria in the fifties, he formally joined the FLN in 1956. From
that time on until his death, he devoted himself, in the words of I.
L. Gendzier, "with the intensity and the enormous talents at his
disposal to the many tasks he performed for the FLN and Algeria."
In addition to doing medical work in Tunisian hospitals and
contributing his services to the L'Armee de Liberation Nationale
(ALN) centers for soldiers and refugees, he worked for the FLN
press organs, first Resistance Algerienne and then el Moudjahid. He
also represented Algeria to the Africans.80 On the strength of a
conviction that the plight of the oppressed knows no boundaries, he
made Algeria, rather than Martinique or France, into the focal point
of his life. So seriously did he take his adopted cause that in 1958,
while pleading the Algerian case at the Accra All-African People's
Conference, he was so emotionally overcome that he "appeared
almost to break down."81 All this, even while he continued to
encounter what he himself characterized as an "appalling" level of
racism against Africans in the Arab world.82
Ben Bella, as one of the "historic leaders" of the FLN, was
impressed by this multifaceted black support. After Algerian inde-

77. David Caute, Frantz Fanon, New York: Viking Press, 1970, p. 3.
78. Observation by Simone de Beauvoir, cited in David Caute, ibid., p. 4
79. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, pp. 102-103.
80. See Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, pp. xii, 188; F. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press, 1967, p. 177.
81. I. L. Gendzier, ibid., pp. 190-191.
82. Ibid.. p. 223.
50 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994

PAN-AFRICAN ISM VS PAN-ARABISM

pendence, he moved to show his appreciation through reciprocal gestures both on the African scene, as we have noted, and inside Algeria, in measures commemorative of Fanon.
The point that must be stressed, however, is that these efforts at
reciprocity, given their transience and all, are not so remarkable as the fact that anti-African tendencies inherent in the Arab world quickly extinguished them. Thus, within two years of his Addis Ababa oratory, Ben Bella was ousted from office by forces in Algeria which, among other things, deeply resented Ben Bella's "deviation" from Islamic fundamentalism and Arabo-centrism; forces which, in the post-Ben Bella era, have been concerned to emphasize Algeria's "Arab-Islamic heritage" and, by the same token, to de-emphasize the African orientation in its foreign policy.
The ouster of Ben Bella and the re-orientation of Algerian foreign policy is not unrelated to the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. Visiting the country following Fanon's death and Ben Bella's ouster, Simone de Beauvoir discovered that "no one in Algeria spoke for Fanon." Similarly, I. L. Gendzier, writing in J970, noted that Algerian officials "consistently avoid any discussion of Fanon's political ideas."83 Any suggestion that he contributed significantly to the Algerian struggle was resisted; indeed, there was a "concerted policy" to downgrade him as a theorist of the "Revolution"; to prove "that he was not even Algerian"; to protect the "authenticity" of the
"Revolution" as an all-Algerian, all-Arab and all-Muslim phenomenon. In short, as one official put it, the burden of official effort was to "de-Fanonize" Algeria and, in the process "de-Algerianize" Fanon.84
When all is said and done, then, Fanon's "fatal flaw" as I. L.
Gendzier notes, was that he was neither Arab nor Muslim. It is
significant that, as far back as 1957, he was left out of the political
inner circle — the National Council of the Algerian Revolution. In
a revealing confession, El Mill, an Algerian official, indicated that,
had Fanon been an Arab, he would have been acknowledged as "the
major theoretician of the Algerian Revolution."85 The reality that

83. Ibid., p. 243.
84. Ibid., pp. 243,244.
85. Cited in ibid.. p. 247.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 51


OPOKU AGYEMAN

emerges from all this is that, for today's Algerian officialdom, what
is of paramount importance is "Blood ties as opposed to commonly
held values.86 Though Fanon helped with their cause, he was,
biologically, not one of them and therefore had to be repudiated.
It is no less noteworthy that, either out of customary Arab con-
tempt for things African, or as a function of the reorientation of
national priorities away from African concerns, the Algerians have
studiedly kept those of Fanon's writings that touch on the predica-
ment of black people — such as the text of his statement at the
AAPC in Accra in 1958 and of his lecture delivered at the 2nd
Congress of Black Writers held in Rome 1959 — out of the limelight
of print.
There is no greater evidence of Arab repudiation of Afro-Arab
"common anti-imperialist front" than is offered by this dismal tale
of the dispossession of Fanon in Algeria.
Another specious fruit of the Casablanca "radical" coalition was
the involvement of Morocco, the UAR and, later, Algeria in the
Congo (i.e. Zaire), ostensibly on the side of the pro-independence
forces, as the crisis-engulfed country battled against western
neocolonialist penetration and dismemberment.
The Congo, "the heart of Africa," constituted, economically,
geographically, strategically and politically "the most vital region in
Africa,"' one whose degree of independence would substantially
determine the ultimate fate of the whole continent of Africa. If the
"alliance" was to have a modicum of credibility, it was of the essence
that the Arabs should be seen to contribute appreciably to the
African effort to wrest the Congo from the neocolonialist web of the
West, spearheaded by the Belgians, the Americans and the British.
The point attains special pertinence when it emerges, in
retrospect, that the Arabs had, in their own right and in collabora-
tion with the Belgians, played a not inconsiderable role in the rape
of the Congo. As Edward Alpers has shown, the violence, degrada-
tion and rampage that accompanied the Arab slave trade was "most
noticeable in the Congo ... where the Arabs... totally devastated

86. Ibid., p. 246.
52 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994

PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN.ARABISM

the countryside, killing and seizing hundreds of people in order to
supply the ivory which was being sought.87 Henry Stanley, the
explorer, also had occasion in 1889 to remark, concerning Arab
activities in the eastern Congo, that "slave raiding becomes in-
nocence when compared with ivory raiding.88 In time, and sig-
nificantly, as we have noted, King Leopold of Belgium entered into
association with Tippu Tip, the leader of the Arab slave traders,
appointing him governor of his Congo International Association
whose trademark was the use of the force of arms to compel the
Africans to exploit the country's wealth in rubber and ivory.
Against this backdrop, let us now assess the contribution of the
Arabs to the struggle for genuine decolonization in the Congo. In
the early stages of the crisis of post-independence disintegration,
Morocco and the UAR, in company with the African Casablanca
Powers, contributed troops to the UN peace-keeping force. Upon
the failure of this effort, marked by the assassination of Lumumba,
the neocolonial forces gained ground to a point where, in July 1964,
Moise Tshombe, the Western puppet, assumed office as the
country's Prime Minister. Ali Mazrui states that, from then on,
among those who were "the most forthright" in refusing recognition
of Tshombe's accession were the "radical Arab States."89 This they
did, Mazrui goes on to explain, out of conviction that to recognize
Tshombe was to forgive him for his betrayal of the Congo's inde-
pendence.
Upon a closer look at the evidence, however, it is not at all clear
that the anti-Tshombe exertions of the Arabs in the Congo had
anything to do with an urge to aid the cause of African inde-
pendence. As part of the evidence, we must recall the brutal and
terroristic career of the Organization de L'Armee Secrete (OAS),
an outfit of French settlers in Algeria, in waging for years, and to the
very end, a hideous war in defense of the West and French "civiliza-
tion." Only Algeria's accession to independence drove these
colonists, some 800,000 of them, from Algeria, out of fear of

87. Edward A. Alpers. op. cit., pp. 23-25.
88. Cited in ibid., p. 25.
89. Ali Mazrui, Violence and Thought, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. 1969. p. 237.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 53
OPOKU AGYEMAN

reprisals for their colonialist crimes.90 The connection between all
this and the Congo is that Tshombe, in Arab eyes, committed an
unpardonable offense when he recruited many of these die-hard
former French settlers of Algeria into his army. From all this, it
would seem decidely more plausible to attribute Arab opposition
to Tshombe to a concern to settle old scores with him, rather than
to any motivation to minister to African independence.
The primacy of Arabist aims in the Arab role in the Congo is
further underscored by the incident of July 1967 when the plane on
which Tshombe was traveling was highjacked over the Mediter-
ranean and brought to Algeria. The Congo Government requested
his extradition to the Congo to face a death sentence. In response,
and quite revealingly, the Algerians made the return of Tshombe
conditional on a complete re-alignment of Congolese foreign policy
vis-a-vis Israel.
Overall, the cutting edge of our thesis (that Arab behaviour
toward Africa is motivated, at best by self interest, at worst by
antipathy to Africans, and hardly ever by considerations of
reciprocity in the "alliance") is provided by the role of the UAR and
Morocco, through contributions of troops and logistical support,
and in collaboration with the USA and France, in aiding Mobutu to
push back radical African insurgency across the Shaba Province,
both in 1977 and 1978.91
As for the OAU, the organisational expression of the Afro-Arab
"alliance" since 1963, its very composition illustrates the familiar
imbalance in African-Arab relations. Nine members of the Arab
League — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Djibouti, UAR,
Sudan, Mauritania and Somalia — are also members of the OAU.
While, on this account, Arab interests are well represented in the
OAU, African interests, on the other hand, are hardly represented
in the Arab League. The membership of Somalia and Djibouti in
the Arab League, far from making for the counter-penetration by

90. See D. Ottaway. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. pp. 10-11.
91.. See The New York Times, November 12.1981. p. A7.

54 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994

PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

the Africans, constitutes the triumph of the Islamization-Arabisa-
tion efforts of the Arabs. The explanation of Somalia's Arabisation
lies, firstly, in the age-old conversion of its people to Islam and the
susceptibility to Arab influence that this engendered, and, secondly
in the seduction and entrapment of the country by Arab aid.92 As
for Djibouti, even though its population is made up of the Issas (who
are related to the Somali and the Galla of Kenya and Ethiopia) and
the Afars (who are relatives of the African people of Ethiopia), its
Arab puppet President, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, insists that the
people of the country "are 100 percent Arab" and that this justifies
his decision to adopt Arabic as the country's official language, and
to make the country the 21st member of the Arab League.93
It goes without saying that the Arabs have been doing everything to capture control of the OAU. This was apparent, for instance, at the OAU Summit in Mogadishu in June 1974 when all the Arab members relentlessly pushed for the candidacy of a Somali for the Secretary-Generalship of the organization, as against a Zambian candidate. As Ali Mazrui would observe of the incident: "At least among the English speaking black states there was some bitterness. The behaviour of the Arab states in their lobbying for the Somali was interpreted as an attempt to put the OAU under Arab or Muslim control."94 This scenario was again played out at the eleventh annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Dakar in May 1975 where it became impossible to elect a new president of the bank because the delegates "were bitterly ... and almost equally . . . divided between a Ghanaian and a Libyan
candidate."95
The Arab bid for influence in the organization attained marked
success with the accession of President Moktar Ould Daddah of
Mauritania to the chairmanship in 1971; of King Hassan of Morocco
in 1972; and of the Islamized Idi Amin of Uganda in 1975 upon the

92. See David Laitin, "Somalia's Military Government and Scientific Socialism”, in Carl G. Rosberg and Thomas M. Callaghy, Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 194-195.
93. See Daily News (Dar es Salaam), July 8,1977 and The New York Times, June 12,1980. p. A14, for details of Arab neocolonisation of Djibouti since its independence from France in 1977.
94. Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs. Vol. 53, No. 4, July 1975, p. 740.
95. See ibid.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 55
OPOKU AGYEMAN

holding of an OAU Summit in Kampala in July of that year. It is significant that, in spite of the manifest objectionableness of Idi Amin's Kampala as the venue of the Summit in many African eyes and, on that account, the boycotting of the conference by a number of African countries, the leaders of six of the eight OAU member-states which are also members of the Arab League attended the Summit. In the view of a Tanzanian daily, this highlighted "the Arab world's determination to take Africa along with it in its Middle East policy."96 The well-documented indictment of Idi Amin by international organizations — the International Commission of Jurists, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, the Commonwealth, and the European Economic Community — to the effect that there had developed under him "a consistent pattern of gross human rights violations",97 did not bother the Arabs one whit. Indeed, as Gaddafi pointedly told Newsweek in a 1979 interview: "That's not our business."98 Clearly, Arab interest in Uganda was confined to the promotion of Arab interests — the establishment of a beachhead from which to work for the control of the source of the Nile, as well as the settlement of the displaced Palestinians — through the snare of Islam and the enticement of petrodollars. To this end, the Arabs pushed for the March 1975 agreement on "technical, economic and scientific cooperation" signed between Amin's Uganda and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The consequence of it was the influx of an additional large number of Palestinians into Uganda where, among other things, they took over businesses left by expelled Asians, as well as the training of the Ugandan army. As Obote complained to the OAU: "Cases were known in Uganda in which Palestinians, together with Amin's murder squads, kidnapped and subsequently murdered their victims ... all of whom were Ugandan citizens of African stock.'199 As we know, a large number of Palestinians and over 1,000 Libyan troops were captured by Tanzania during the Ugandan-Tan-

96. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), July 28, 1975.
97. See, for instance, The Weekly Review (Nairobi), August 11, 1978.
98. Newsweek, June 12, 1979, p. 39.
99. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), May 28, 1973.

56 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994



PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

zania War which ended in Amin's expulsion from Uganda and his
migration into Libya.100
For the Arabs, then, the imperatives of the Arab Nation, rather than any concern for solidarity, albeit in a tactical "alliance", account for their membership in the OAU. It is significant, in this regard, that virtually all the Arab members boycotted the 1967 Summit meeting in Kinshasa on the ground that Middle Eastern questions were absent from the agenda. They were, and have been, interested in the organization only to the extent of holding it captive to their purposes. That they have been markedly successful in this objective is reflected in the organization's silence over Arab atrocities in the Sudan, Mauritania, and elsewhere, and over Gaddafi's aggression in Chad and elsewhere, even as the OAU vociferously condemns
Israeli incursions into Arab lands.
The organization's accommodation and indulgence of Gaddafi is especially revealing of its divorce from African concerns. In spite of outcries by Uganda, Ghana, Gambia, Niger and other countries that the Libyan has been subverting their countries;101 in spite of his aggression against Chad, manifested, in part, in his seizure of the uranium-rich Aouzou Strip since 1973, and in his unconcealed bid to absorb Chad into an Islamic union with Libya;102 in spite of his self-proclaimed apostleship of the Nasser doctrine of an Arab civilizing mission to Africa and of the ambition of an Arab-Islamic
empire across Africa into the Middle East;103 and in spite of his demonstrated and menacing zeal to acquire sophisticated military capabilities to enable him to fulfill these anti-African ambitions, he has been allowed to operate within the OAU to a point where he came close to becoming its chairman in 1982.
In the face of so much African acquiescence, Gaddafi felt at
liberty in 1973 to initiate a boycott of the OAU's tenth anniversary

100. See The New York Junes, March 5, 1981, p. A23.
101. For a Ugandan accusation, see The New York Times. February 25, 1982, p. A9 and February 26, 1982, p. A7; for a similar charge from Ghana, see Daily News (Dar es Salaam), October 12, 1977, p.2; for the accusations from Senegal and Gambia, see West Africa, November 10, 1980; and for a more general treatment of the subject, see West Africa, January 19, 1981. p. 98.
102. See West Africa, January 19, 1981, p. 97.
103. See ibid., pp. 98-99; The New York Times. March 4,1981, p. A3; December 14, 1981, p. A27: and January 4,1982, p. A3; Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 93.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 57
OPOKU AGYEMAN

celebrations unless the site was moved to Cairo, or Ethiopia agreed
to break relations with Israel. To nobody's surprise, Ethiopia caved
in and broke relations with Israel.
It is a fitting tribute to African self-immolation in the organization
that the issue which virtually paralyzed it in 1982 was an intra-Arab
one. The matter in question, the abortion of the August 1982 Tripoli
OAU Summit, had nothing to do with African outrage over, for
instance, Arab efforts to carve Eritrea out of Ethiopia and into the
Arab world, but rather over which Arab interests, Moroccan or
Algerian, should prevail over the phosphate-rich Western Sahara.
The decision by the OAU in February 1982 to admit the Polisario
Front as its 51st member opened a split that mortally threatened the
organization. Meanwhile, even as the OAU wallowed in the throes
of demise, the Arab League was left relatively intact to pursue the
Arab business.
A second effort to convene a Summit in November 1982 also
failed, this time on account of Gaddafi's effort to impose the exiled
former leader Goukouni Oueddei on Chad. Gaddafi, the prospec-
tive host, simply refused to admit the delegation of President Hissen
Hebre of Chad, presumably because Hebre had proven to be less
pliant to his neocolonialist designs on the African country. The
Foreign Minister of Chad then appropriately requested "all African
countries present in Tripoli not to take their seats at the side of the
enemies of Africa."104

South Africa and Israel in Africa-Arab relations
The European Jews, as they set their sights on Palestine at the
beginning of this century, also nourished ideas about colonizing a
portion of Africa for their excess population. Thus, upon rejecting
Joseph Chamberlain's offer of Uganda as a home for these
Caucasian Jews, the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore
Herzl, nonetheless went on to concede that Uganda might be
eminently suitable for an extension of Israel. As he put it: "Our
starting point must be in or near Palestine. Later on we could also

104. See The New York Times. November 26, 1982. p. A4.
58 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994

PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

colonize Uganda, for we have a vast number of human beings who
are prepared to emigrate ... "105 Not surprisingly, this expression
by European Jewry of a colonizing intent jarred many an African
ear. Still, there is no question that this colonialist intent pales into
insignificance against the infinitely greater outrage of actual and
historic Arab atrocities in Africa.
At the level of rhetoric, it bears notice that, overall, Israeli protestations of solidarity with African causes have been at least as impressive as any professions made by the Arabs. Golda Meir, for instance, could be moved to articulate the common experience and consciousness of oppression, discrimination, and slavery shared by Africans and the European Jews.106 And Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, could feel called upon to assert:

There is still another question arising out of the disaster of the nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they are black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoners, captured and sold. Their children
grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say... that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist the redemption of the Africans.107

Upon occasion, it developed that there was more to such decla-
rations than words. Thus in July, September and November of 1961,
when the "alliance" between the Africans and the Arabs had already
been struck, the Israeli government openly condemned Apartheid
and voted at the UN General Assembly in favour of sanctions
against South Africa.108 Significantly, these efforts evoked reprisal
from South Africa in the form of a rescission of the special conces-

105. See Julian Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, London: Macmillan, 1951, pp. 262-265.
106. Golda Meir, My Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975, pp. 263-290.
107. Cited in ibid., p. 266.
108. E. A. Nadelmann, "Israel and Black Africa: A Rapproachement?", The Journal of Modem
African Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2,1981, p. 213.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 59
OPOKU AGYEMAN

sions in foreign currency regulations which allowed South African
Jewish organizations to transfer money and goods to Israel.109
In spite of such travail, and despite the flourishing links that
developed via technical assistance and diplomatic representation
between Israel and Africa, Africans made a habit of condemning
Israel to please the Arabs, as in the resolution of the All-African
People's Conference of December, 1958 condemning Israel as one
of the "the main perpetrators of neocolonialism".110
The Africans might be said to have fulfilled their obligations under the "alliance" when they took the side of the Arabs in the 1967 Middle East war. Guinea, Somalia, Burundi, Zambia, Mali, Tanzania and Senegal were numbered among those who vociferously declared their support for the Arabs. The general African reaction was captured in Senghor's statement: "We cannot remain indifferent to the struggle which our brother Arabs are undergoing."111 Significantly, these gestures earned an Israeli retort: "Israel makes it clear to African countries that it could not provide effort, money
and expertise for development if they repaid all this with anti-Israeli demonstrations".112
Undaunted, the Africans were even more forthcoming in support of the Arabs in the 1973 war, on account of which, almost to the last country, they severed diplomatic relations with Israel. This extraordinary display of solidarity was self-sacrificial in the extreme. As Ali Mazrui elaborates:

A suggestion that Africa broke off relations with Israel for the sake of cheaper oil from the Arabs ... distorts the sequence of events. By the time OPEC dramatically raised the price of oil, much of Africa had already sided with the Arabs on the Palestine question . . . The trend against Israel in black Africa started in 1972, and had converted even Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire to its side before the outbreak of the October war, while the energy

109. Ibid., p. 212.
110. Ibid., p. 195.
111. See West Africa, No. 2610, June 10, 1967; No. 2612, June 24,1967; No. 2614, July 8, 1967; No. 2618, August 5,1967; No. 2648, March 2,1968; No. 2625, September 23,1967.
112. Cited in West Africa, No. 2648, March 2,1968, p. 266.

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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

crisis did not hit the world until about the last ten weeks of 1973.113

To better appreciate the altruism in play here, compare the
African response to the Middle East situation in 1973 with the
general African default over the cause of liberation in Rhodesia in
1965, when only a handful of states complied with a unanimous
OAU resolution that member-states break diplomatic relations
with Britain over its foot-dragging policies. Overall, it is fair to say
that when E. Feit pronounced that he knows "of no historical
instance" where a people have "voluntarily invited unknown per-
secutions and sanctions upon itself for another,"114 he reckoned
without the Africans. For presently, all these unrestrained
demonstrations of Arabophilia triggered an Israeli backlash: "No
longer constrained by the necessities of black African friendship",
as E.A. Nadelmann noted, "Israel (now) pursued its relationship
with South Africa with an element of vindictiveness". Contending
that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", Israel now upgraded its
mission in Pretoria to full ambassadorial status, even as it broadened
cultural and military links with the Apartheid regime.115 And how
did the Arabs reciprocate this extraordinary gesture from the
Africans?
In the face of the emergency energy crisis that followed the Arab
oil boycott, Africans asked for help and received a stingy response.
Afro-Arab relations were quickly reduced, in Arab hands, to inter
Islam-relations, or at best to small and sporadic aid flows;116 the
so-called Bank for the Economic Development of Africa turned out
to be an Arab and not African-Arab bank, with decisions on all
projects made solely by the Arabs; again, being a commercial bank
and not an interest-free-loan institution, its objectives proved to be
profit rather than aid.

113. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 736.
114. E. Feit, "Community in a Quandary. The South African Jewish Community and Apartheid,"
Race, April 1967, pp. 398-399.
115. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
116. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 742.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 61

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Reduced to supplicants, the Africans alternated between shrill
calls for substantial Arab "reciprocity of solidarity,"117 accusations
of Arab ingratitude,118 and empty threats of economic retaliation
—as when in June 1974, the East African Legislative Assembly at
its meeting in Nairobi suggested that the Nile River be diverted by
the East African States so that they could then sell its water to the
Arabs, in exchange for barrels of oil.119
And what of Arab-South African relations in the period, the acid
test, if you will, of Arab reciprocity or the lack of it?
At the emergency session of the Council of Ministers of the OAU
in Addis in November 1973, a resolution was adopted calling on the
Arabs "to extend the oil embargo to South Africa, Portugal and
Southern Rhodesia until they comply with the United Nations
General Assembly and Security Council resolution on decoloniza-
tion." Significantly, four years later, in March 1977, at the Summit
Conference of African and Arab leaders in Cairo, President Kaunda
of Zambia both complained and pleaded that "Our Arab brothers
should not be a party" to the aggressive actions of the Southern
African racists by keeping up oil supplies to them.121 The implica-
tion in Kaunda's statement — that the Arabs were still in economic
cahoots with the Boers — was soon, if obliquely, confirmed by the
South African Foreign Minister, Hilgard Muller, in a claim that
South Africa had sought systematically in "recent years" to build up
contacts with the Arabs "by means of discreet diplomacy".122 There
were, indeed, reports of substantial deals between the Arabs and
the South Africans involving the exchange of oil for gold.123
What emerges, then, is the triumph, once again, of the traditional
imbalance in the relations between Africans and Arabs. As Thomas
Land has reflected:

117. West Africa, No. 2950, December 24/31, 1973, p. 1812.
118. West Africa, No. 2946, November 26, 1973. p. 1677.
119. See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 738.
120. See C. Cervenka, “The Afro-Arab Alliance," Africa, No. 31, March 1974. p. 79.
121. See The Weekly Review (Nairobi), March 14, 1977, p. 24.
122. Cited in a confidential newsletter.
123. See, for instance, Robert Whitehill, "Apartheid's Oil," The New Republic, February 10,
1986. pp. 10-11.

62 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

In theory, in exchange for the diplomatic isolation of Israel, black
Africa was to enlist the support of the Arab north in unseating
the white-minority government of South Africa. But, in practice,
South Africa gained in the process by strengthening its ties with
an increasingly friendless Israel, while it went on trading with the
Arabs as well as the rest of the world. 124

These facts make the Africans' singling out of Israel's relationship with South Africa for special condemnation both hypocritical and irrational. Since African states retain diplomatic relations with such countries as France, West Germany, Britain, Japan and the U.S.A. — all of which are major backers of South Africa — the insistence on diplomatic ostracism of Israel cannot logically have anything to do with Israel's relations with South Africa, but only with the compulsion to please the Arabs at the expense of Africa's own best interests. It all fits neatly into the traditional mold of asym-
metrical relationship between the Africans and the Arabs across the centuries.
Cast in this analytic light, the argument that the Arabs owe the Africans no political debts since "most of the Arab world treated South Africa as a common enemy for many years"125 becomes lame. The Africans' break with Israel in 1973 had nothing to do with outrage over Israel's relations with South Africa but was calculated to oblige the Arabs; in contrast, Arab antipathy toward the Boers has little to do with a sentiment of solidarity with the Africans, but arises from such links between Israel and South Africa as the Arabs deem injurious to their cause — as is shown by their furor over the intelligence that the South Africans aided the Israeli air force during the 1973 war.126

Islam and Africa-Arab relations

From the beginning, Pan-Africanism demonstrated a concern to
cater to the spiritual needs of its racial constituency. It was recog-
nized that every enduring race and people have had their own

124. Thomas Land, "Black Africa and Israel," The New York Times, February 11. 1980. p. A19.
125. See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 738-739.
126. See E. A. Nadelmann.op. cil., p. 204.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 63
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concept of Deity, with a supreme being made in their own image;
and have nourished an autochthonous religion which gave them
strength and pointed them toward positive achievement. As Garvey
reasoned, no race or people made any impact on the world which
allowed themselves to become enslaved to a religion which
derogated and diminished them. Succinctly put, again in the words
of Garvey, "it is only the inferior race which worships an alien
God."127
The Africans of antiquity, the first to institutionalize religion on
Earth, fashioned the Eternal Spirit in their own image. Likewise,
the traditional religion of pre-colonial Africa, based as it was on the
intermediacy of dead ancestors, also fulfilled the condition of in-
digenousness. That the Asante, for instance, cultivated and prac-
tised it, explains in good part the remarkable durability of their
political order in the 18th and 19th centuries.128 In the same vein,
Pan-Africanism at its dawn sought to create its own religious in-
frastructure in the form of the African Orthodox Church which
Garvey founded in 1920, proclaiming: "Our God must be seen
through the spectacles of Ethiopia; our God must make us strong
. . . not slaves to another race and another people."129 Instead of
pictures of white Christs and Madonnas which have become key
elements of European imperialist culture in the last couple of
centuries, the African Orthodox Church featured pictures of Black
Christs and Black Madonnas; instead of the inculcation of meekness
and docility into the African congregation — the specialty of "alien"
religions — the African Orthodox Church sermonized that "The God
we worship and adore is a God of war as well as a God of peace."130
Despite such efforts, black people as a whole remain immersed
in alien religions and continue to pay heavily in psychological dis-

127. John Henrik Clarke ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa. New York: Random House,
1974. pp. 381-382.
128. See K. A. Busia, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti, London: Frank Cass, 1968; W. Tordoff, Ashanti Under the Prempehs: 1888-1939, London:OUP,1965.
129. A. Jacques Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Vol. I. New York: Atheneum, 1977, p.44.
130. Ibid.. p. 43.

64 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994
PAN-AFR1CANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

orientation and servility. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo’s current
tribulations bear witness to this phenomenon in so far as the African's relationship to white Christianity is concerned. He has asserted that the African's subordination to non-African overlords in spiritual matters is a reflection of the "inferiority complex which haunts Africa"; and he has cried out that “To convince me that I can only be a full Christian when I shall be well brought-up in European civilization and culture is to force me to change my nature."131
Significantly, the Archbishop's efforts to remodel the Catholic Church in Zambia in a manner more suited to Africa's spiritual realities stirred the ire of the Papacy, leading to his being summoned to Rome to be disciplined.
The relationship of Africans to Islam bears similar marks of disorientation and servility. Islam, the religious infrastructure of Pan-Arabism, has, from the first, been a means of Arab penetration into non-Arab societies. The fervent commitment of Arabs to the practice of Islam, and the weaknesses of Pan-Africanism, have meant that the familiar imbalance in African-Arab relations emerges in the field of religion as well. As far back as 1917, British policy makers in East Africa noted "a tendency on the part of the natives, to call themselves members of the Mohammedan nation."132 The gain of Islam in molding masses of Africans into Arabophiles have been no less spectacular in recent years, thanks to such additional impetuses as Nasser's 1961 pledge, as part of the UAR's drive to
win influence in Africa, "to exploit Cairo's considerable resources in Muslim teaching and culture."133 As E.A. Nadelmann has written:

The influence of Islam in the continent, where one of every four
or five Africans is a Muslim has created a sense of identification
and religious brotherhood with the Arabs to the North. Islamic
Africans have often encouraged closer ties between the Arab and
African states . . . comprising as they do the majority of the
population in the Arab League states of Sudan, Somalia and
131. See Alan Cowell, "Christians Are Torn in the Land of Dr. Livingstone," the New York Times, December 28, 1982, p. A2.
132. Cited in A. R. M. Babu, African Socialism or Socialist Africa?, London: Zed Press, 1981, p. 120.
133. Cited in 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 135.
Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 65
OPOKU AGYEMAN

Mauritania, as well as in Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Niger
and Chad; about half the population in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and
Ethiopia; and substantial minorities in Tanzania, Kenya,
Cameroon, Upper Volta, the Central African Republic, Sierra
Leone, Ghana and Benin. Africa contributes close to 50% of the
membership of the Islamic Conferences . . . and its avowedly
Muslim countries make up 40% of the total membership of the OAU.134

Nor does Islam's influence stop at disposing millions of Africans
favourably toward the Arabs and their anti-African purposes; more
directly and devastatingly, Islam remains a source of enfeebling
separatism in various African societies. As Ali Mazrui has noted,
the spread of Islam through East and West Africa has served "to
reinforce separatist tendencies. In Nigeria in the last decade before
independence, Muslim Northerners — fearful of the political
militancy of Christian Southerners — talked seriously of secession.
The word 'Pakistanism' entered the vocabulary of West African
politics."135 Since then Islam-induced disturbances have regularly
erupted in that West African country.
Similarly, the Eritreans, "primarily Muslim," have been in rebel-
lion against a long-standing Christian theocracy in Ethiopia. It is all
very much a "Muslim bid to pull Eritrea out of Ethiopia . . ."136
Noticeably the Arabs, at the Eighth Conference of Islamic Foreign
Ministers in Tripoli in May 1977, insisted that Eritrea is essentially
a religious issue, and one that they reserve the right to resolve in
their favour.137 The secessionist movement in Chad, instigated by
Libya's Gaddafi, is, like that in Eritrea, "a rebellion by defensive
Muslims against a supposedly Christian threat or hegemony."138
Indeed, on the strength of the fact that Eritrea is Muslim, the Arabs
insist on claiming it as part of the Arab world. By the same token,
as a map published in 1959 by the Arab League indicated, parts of

134. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit. p. 210. See Also Lansine Kaba, "Islam's Advance in Tropical
Africa,” Africa Report, March-April I976, p. 39.
135. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 737.
136. Ibid.
137. Confidential Newsletter, June 10, 1977.
Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 737-738.
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PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Niger and the whole of Chad, Senegal and Mali are designated as
Arab.139
Kenya, too, has been the prey of the separatism wrought by Islam.
The reaction of the Daily Nation to the call of the National Union
of Kenya Muslims (NUKM) for Muslims in the country to actively
rally to the support of the Arabs during the October 1973 War sums
up the matter:

The position of the National Union of Kenya Muslims is divisive
because it puts a wedge between the Muslims and all the non-
Muslims in this land. While the NUKM obviously feel they can
declare and join a war, the constitution of this country states
clearly that these powers are vested only in the person of the
Head of State. Where do their loyalties lie? To the Arab Muslims
or the Kenyan Head of State?140

It is to be remembered that one of the conditions attached to the
meagre aid that the Arabs have given to the Africans has been the
promotion of Islam in any recipient country. Thus, for example,
President Bongo of Gabon was compelled to change his name from
Albert-Bernard to Omar in October 1973. Astonishingly, and con-
trary to the weight of historic evidence, Bongo let it be known that
his reason for converting was "because Islam makes no distinction
between men."141 In Uganda, this promotion took the form of a
systematic persecution of Christians who constitute the overwhelm-
ing majority in the land. Visiting Uganda in 1974, Gaddafi
demanded of Amin that he Islamise the country "at any price."142
Amin himself would later admit that his decision to turn Fridays into
days of prayer and rest was a price the country had to pay for
continued Arab cash, especially Libyan. Overall, there was little
surprise that, at the Islamic Summit Conference held in Lahore,
Pakistan, in February 1974, Uganda was admitted as a Muslim state,
even though, according to the 1959 census, little more than 5 percent

139. See The Arab World, No. 101, 1959.
140. Daily Nation (Nairobi), October 17,1973.
141. West Africa, No. 2943, November 5,1973, p. 1556.
142. The Weekly Review (Nairobi), September 26, 1977, p. 7; August 11, 1978. pp. 11, 14.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 67
OPOKU AGYEMAN

of the population of Uganda was Muslim.143 In all, it has hardly
mattered to these Arabs that the 1958 CIAS in Accra, in which all
the independent Arab States based in Africa participated, passed a
resolution attacking religious separatism as an evil practice which
militates against African liberation and unity. But then, as we have
noted, it is one of the cardinal goals of Pan-Arabism to forestall the
materialization of black African unity.
The emphasis on the Arab language as the only vehicle for the
comprehension of the Koran has added to the Arab advantage in
Afro-Arab relations. Adherence to the Islamic faith is, almost
everywhere, virtually inescapable from knowledge and thought in
Arabic. There is an inevitable connection between the faith and the
language because, as O. Aguda has noted, "a translation of the
Koran into any other language is regarded by orthodox Islamists as
an 'interpretation' and not an authentic doctrine."'144 In conse-
quence, the remarkable spread of Islam in Africa has been accom-
panied by the equally remarkable spread of the Arab-influenced
languages of Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in the West. Swahili
has been adopted as a national language by Tanzania, Kenya and
Uganda, at the same time that it is in widespread use in such places
as Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Of course, being imprisoned in the
language of Arabia is no less a phenomenon in cultural colonization
than being incarcerated in the language of Britain or France.
It is remarkable how much blindness and irrationality on the part
of Africans it has taken to facilitate the Islamisation campaign of the
Arabs, considering the abysmally low conception of black humanity
that exists in the Arab mind and in Islamic traditions. As against the
wishful thinking of black opinion leaders such as Edward Blyden
and Malcolm X, that the Arabs and Islam are free from the infection
of prejudice against black people, B. Lewis, for instance, has estab-
lished, in a well-researched study, the reality of an association in
Arabia of blackness, ugliness and inferior station — of "a very close
connotation of inferiority attached to darker and more specifically

143. See Ali Mazrui, "Religious Strangers in Uganda: From Emin Pasha to Amin Dada," African
Affairs, Vol. 76. No. 302, January 1977, p. 21.
144. O. Aguda. op. cit., p. 180.

68 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

black skins. "145 The Prophet Muhammad himself was known to refer
to Africans as "the distorted of God's creatures."146 Thus, a good
black slave who lives a life of virtue and piety "will be rewarded by
turning white at the moment of death".147 Indeed, the Koran itself
connects sin, evil, devilry and damnation with blackness, while
whiteness has the opposite associations.148 Revealingly, the Egyp-
tian government's furor over the Paramount Pictures' film, Sadat,
which led to the drastic decision not to allow any film from that
studio ever to be shown in Egypt, was simply to do with the fact that
a full-blooded Black American, Louis Gasset, Jr., had acted the role
of Sadat.
At its most basic, the Muslim belief that black people are con-
demned to a fate of slavery by divine ordinance is at the root of the
Arabs' irrevocable commitment to the enslavement of Africans.
Thus, despite the fact that Muslim law unequivocally forbids the
enslavement of Muslims of whatever race, evidence shows that the
law was generally not enforced to protect Muslim captives from
Africa. The record shows that African Muslims in the Arab world
"were regarded as inferior and subjected to a whole series of fiscal,
social, political, military and other disabilities."149 Nor has time
changed these realities. Louis Farrakhan, a black American Mus-
lim, following a 1980 tour of Arabia, came away vociferously attack-
ing "the hypocrisies of classical Islam, especially in regard to race,"
adding:

I see Muslims taking advantage of Blacks in Arabia and Africa. I will not jump over the black Christian to find brotherhood with an Arab Muslim . . . The ghettoes in the Holy city where the Sudanese and other black African Muslim live are some of the worst I have seen anywhere ... I see racism in the Muslim world...150

145. B. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 9,14.
146. See ibid., pp. 91-92.
147. Ibid., p. 5.
148. See ibid.. p. 101.
149. Ibid., p. 23.
150. Louis Farrakhan. Speech at "Welcome Home Brother Farrakhan" rally, cited in L. H. Mamiya, "Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Final Call: Schism in the Muslim Movement," Mimeo, 1980, p. 7.

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 69
OPOKU AGYEMAN

Set against these facts, Libya's self-righteous assertions of Islamic
beneficence to Africa attain a surreal quality:

Christianity equals imperialism, Islam equals freedom and the age of the masses . . . Colonialism has exploited the Christian religion for its own interests especially in Africa... Islam did not come to Africa through colonialism but as a humanistic religion for the liberation of man.151

Significantly, this rhetoric was tailored for the consumption of African delegations attending a conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Tripoli. Only the assumption of African infantile incapacity to think, to know the realities and to construct an edifice of self-interests out of it — only the assumption, articulated by Gaddafi, that the Black race occupies "a very backward social situation"152 —could have emboldened the Libyans to the declaration of such palpable untruths.

Conclusion

The horrendous tale of African-Arab relations that began with
the Islamic whirlwind and erupted into the Arab slave trade is hardly
buried in antiquity. On the contrary, over the years, it has been
recharged and re-enacted to a point where it remains a fixture in
contemporary politics, albeit under the guise of an "alliance".
We have sought to establish that, in spite of the "alliance", the
imbalance has persisted. Arab aggression and penetration has con-
tinued, taking such detrimental forms as the UAR's and Morocco's
intervention against genuine decolonization in Zaire; Saudi
Arabian and Libyan neocolonialist machinations in Djibouti;
Libya's invasion of Chad and, to this day, its occupation of Chad's
rich uranium fields; and Libyan-Palestinian adventurism in Amin's
Uganda.

151. Dr. Ali Treike, Foreign Minister of Libya's address at the Eighth Conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Tripoli, May, 1977.
152. Muammar Al Gaddafi, The Green Book: The Solution of the Problem of Democracy, Tripoli.
undated, p. 45.

70 Black Renaissance 1(1), January 1994
PAN-AFRICANISM VS PAN-ARABISM

Arab enslavement of Africans is hardly a thing of the past; it
persists to this day with a vengeance in such places as Mauritania,
while the scourge of colonization and forcible Arabisation of
Africans survives in such places as the Sudan. Arab racism, whose
wellspring is the Koran itself, acquires a conspicuous new manifes-
tation in, for instance, the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. On
top of all this, the assumed quid pro quo of the "alliance" has worked
one-sidedly to the Arabs' advantage: the very institutional expres-
sion of the "coalition" since 1963, the OAU, has become a virtual
captive of the Arabs in the service of Arab interests. Despite the
organization's injunction against the fomenting of religious
separatism, the path of Arab imperialism has been oiled and
smoothed by the weapon of Islam whose spoils include the conver-
sion of untold millions of Africans into Arabophiles, as well as the
dissipation of the dream of black unity through the fostering of
religious divisiveness among African populations.
The antithesis between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism emer-
ges clearly in present and past relations between the two races. As
far as the future is concerned, should Pan-Africanism, now dormant
and languishing, become rejuvenated by some future generation of
African leaders bent on restoring the dignity of the African people,
there is no question that this would trigger a massive reaction, not
only by the Boers, but also by Arabs who would reason that an Africa
able to deal with the territorial encroachments and the racist
brutality of the Boers would logically also deal with the territorial
usurpations and the historic and continuing crimes of the Arabs.
Herein lies the essential opposition between the two movements.
It is to be noted that this African-Arab antagonism is not in any
way diminished by class considerations. When all is said and done,
there is no question that the "socialist" parties in the Arab world
have promoted Arab imperialism in Africa. Sadat's "socialist" Egypt
fought alongside the USA and France against the African patriots
in Zaire in 1977 and 1978. Not to be outdone, the Moroccan
Communist Party and the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires
(USFP) of the same country supported the Moroccan government's
involvement in the same anti-African adventurism in Zaire. Nor has

Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994 71
OPOKU AGYEMAN

the expansionist ambition of Gaddafi been at all affected by Libya's
claim to being an "Arab People's Socialist Jamahahiriya."
Over the years, without question, the Arabs have been more
committed to the practice of Pan-Arabism than the Africans have
been to the practice of Pan-Africanism. While it is true that the
Arabs have often been torn by disputations, it is the case that, even
in disarray, individual Arab states have made strenuous efforts
toward the attainment of the objectives of Pan-Arabism. With the
Africans, the story has been different. The fact of the matter is that,
since the demise of Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, in the sense of any
practical application, has fallen into desuetude. Under normal cir-
cumstances, a memory of the agonies of African history, and a
mature awareness of the ignoble contemporary realities of Africans,
should be enough to keep the movement alive, and give it urgent
relevance and application.
Such "normal circumstances" refer to an average human capacity
for discernment, calculation and identification of one's vital inter-
ests in the universe. Unfortunately, such a capacity is in very short
supply in the African world. The African presumption, in the face
of the contrary realities, of a "solidarity," "alliance," and "brother-
hood" with the Arabs, is an instance of the African eccentricity which
makes it impossible for Africans to be Afrocentric in thought and
action. As Chinweizu, has elaborated:

Having lost a clear and detailed sense of our identity, we have
naturally also lost our ability to create a point of view of the world
strictly our own. With our scrambled sense of reality we have
forgotten how to see things in terms of our separate and concrete
interests. . . . Worse still we behave as if it were some sort of
betrayal to discover and insist on our own point of viewing the
world.153




153. Chinweizu, op. cit., p. 495.

72 Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994

End

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