The Black Power Pan-Africanist Perspective

By Chinweizu

The Black race will be exterminated

if it does not build a black superpower in Africa

by the end of this century.

Pan-Africanism and a Black Superpower —The 21st century agenda

Paper submitted to the CBAAC conference on Pan-Africanism, Abuja, September 21-24, 2010.

Introduction

Neo-Garveyism is a movement of the Black race, by members of the black race, for the welfare and enhanced status of the black race. Its paramount project is to build what Garvey described as “a strong and powerful Negro nation in Africa,” which is to say a Negro nation in Africa that is “strong enough to lend protection to the members of the race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.”

Neo-Garveyism or Black Power Pan-Africanism is, in essence, Nyerere’s Sub-Sahara Pan-Africanism plus Garvey’s Black superpower project as its paramount project.

The seminal question that history poses to Black Africans today is this:

What must we do to finally win the centuries-old Black-White race war and then accomplish a renaissance of genuine African civilization? Only black power can win the race war for us; only black power can give us the secure space on which to build any kind of society we find to our liking and in our interest. If poverty is to be abolished in Black Africa, and if racist contempt for Blacks is to be ended on earth, Black Africa needs, by 2100, to rebuild itself with two paramount objectives:

[1] To have a Black superpower that could deter or defeat any enemies that attempt to take its land or to subjugate its population or subordinate its culture or, in any other way, challenge its vital interests.

[2] To create societies where the good things of life are produced and made available to one and all.

Prime benefits of having a Black superpower:

1: Gain self-respect as a member of a powerful race; lose the inferiority

complexes and insecurities that undermine the confidence and life performance of black people.

2: Experience the quiet confidence that comes with knowing you can defend yourself and your loved ones against all comers. Others sense this confidence without any immediate proof. If they know there are people in your race with that capacity, they automatically wonder if you are one of them, and give you the benefit of the doubt. Their caution is warranted, for your weakness can then not be taken for granted, as it presently is, and will continue to be for as long as your black skin is indisputably a badge of chronic powerlessness.

3: Satisfaction of knowing that whatever your country does or doesn’t have in terms of ‘development’, it is primarily a result of your own choices, and not that others forced the choices upon you.

4: For men, the satisfaction of knowing that other men cannot come into your country and have their way with your women (wives and daughters, and increasingly, sons) because of the stark differential in power - yours vs. theirs. Women tend to gravitate to those with the power.

5: Satisfaction of knowing that anyone you train in your country will probably use that training in and for your country; and that if they do go abroad, there is a good chance they will bring back what they learn to enhance the country.

6: Dramatic reduction in mutual distrust that results from every person feeling that any opportunity may be his only one; therefore he must use all possible means -- illegal, unethical, etc. -- to take advantage of the situation, at the expense of others. A country with opportunities that frequently present themselves, reduces the desperation that forces people to screw each other at every turn.

7: Better, sound sleep for the citizens -- the number of churches ‘disturbing the peace’ should also see a drastic reduction, since the primary source of the all-night raucousness is desperation in the face of African realities. Note that lack of sleep causes delirium/craziness. And we surely show signs of that.

Pan-Africanism’s evolving agenda:

Since Pan-Africanism first emerged as a formal movement, its agenda has evolved with changing circumstances and challenges. In 1897, as the heavy blanket of white power settled on the whole Black race, the first ever Pan-African Association said that its constitutional mandate was to enable Africans and their global descendants, to achieve

"their true civil and political rights, to ameliorate the condition of our oppressed brethren in the continents of Africa, America, and other parts of the world, by promoting efforts to secure effective legislation, to encourage our people in educational, industrial and commercial enterprises, to foster friendly relations between the Caucasian and African races, to organize a bureau, a depository, for collections of authorized writings and statistics relating to our people everywhere, and to raise a fund to be used solely for forwarding these purposes." --quoted in Prah, The African Nation, (Cape Town: CASAS, 2006), p.10

In 1919, there appeared the DuBois Integrationist Pan-Africanism, which held four Congresses between 1919 and1929. Its agenda was to integrate elite black individuals--the “talented tenth”-- into the higher levels of the structures of white power and white society in the world. This objective may be said to have been finally attained, at least symbolically, with the successes of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and with the rise of blacks to such positions as justices of the US Supreme Court, the US Secretary of State, the Secretary General of the British Commonwealth, the Secretary General of the UN, and to cap it all, with Barak Obama’s election as president of the USA.

Between 1914 and 1925, two other tasks were discerned and added to the agenda by Marcus Garvey.

1] To help create black governments, presidents, ambassadors, armies, navies, etc. and

2] To build a black superpower in Africa.

These two tasks made a great leap forward in Pan-Africanism’s aspirations. Why did Garvey add these two projects to the agenda? Between 1910 and 1914, Garvey traveled to investigate, at first hand, the condition of Blacks in the Caribbean and Central American countries, as well as in Europe. In his own words, while in London in 1914, after he had traveled through almost half of Europe, Garvey asked:

“Where is the black man’s Government?” “Where is his King and his kingdom?” “Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” I could not find them, and then I declared, “I will help to make them.” [Philosophy & Opinions, II:126] And he set out to help to make them by dramatizing the possibility of Black power in a world dominated everywhere by white power. His vehicle for doing so was the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) which he founded in 1914, in Jamaica.

Then, in the early 1920s, after diagnosing the global prospect of the Blacks, Garvey prescribed the fundamental remedy for their problems when he said:

[T]he Negro peoples of the world should concentrate upon the object of building up for themselves a great nation in Africa, . . . [of] creating for ourselves [there] a political superstate . . . a government, a nation of our own, 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. . . . [Philosophy & Opinions, I:68; II:16; I:52]

In 1945, the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester defined its task as achieving self-government for the colonized countries of the Black World. They demanded the immediate right to self-determination. They even issued a “Challenge to the colonial powers,” saying “we are determined to be free” and demanding “for Black Africa autonomy and independence.” This task, the equivalent of the first of Garvey’s two tasks, was to preoccupy Pan-Africanism until it was accomplished in 1994.

Then in 1958, at the Accra Conference of Independent African States, Nkrumah and Padmore added yet another task: African unity—the political integration of the ex-colonial countries of the African continent into what Padmore called the African Union or a United States of Africa. In Padmore’s own words:

“[Pan-Africanism’s] vision stretches beyond the limited frontiers of the nation-state. Its perceptive (sic) embraces the federation of regional self-governing countries and their ultimate amalgamation into a United States of Africa. In such a Commonwealth, all men, regardless of tribe, race, colour or creed, shall be free and equal. And all the national units comprising the regional federations shall be autonomous in all matters regional, yet united in all matters of common interest to the African Union. This is our vision of the Africa of tomorrow — the goal of Pan-Africanism."

--quoted in Kwesi Prah, The African Nation, ( Cape Town: CASAS, 2006), p.20.

Looking back, we can see that whereas the Garvey and 5th PAC project of creating Black governments was achieved world wide in the second half of the 20th century, beginning with Nkrumah’s Ghana in 1957 and concluding with Mandela’s South Africa in 1994, the second Garvey project has not even been attempted till this day. As for the Nkrumah-Padmore project of a US of Africa, half a century on, it has not been achieved and is unlikely ever to be achieved. And even Nkrumah himself gave up on it by 1968 when he wrote:

“As it is now constituted, the OAU is not likely to be able to achieve the political unification of Africa.”

–Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, (1968), [Revolutionary Path: 475]

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we need to take stock of our situation and discern the tasks for this new century, for as Fanon famously taught us: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” So, let us oldsters help the generation born in this century to discover their appropriate mission.

Pan-Africanism began as a movement to liberate the Black race from slavery, colonialism and racism. Today, despite a century of important successes, colonialism is still with us, though in disguised forms, and racism is still with us, and Blacks are still enslaved in the Arab dominated parts of Black Africa. And any non-Africans can still take our land and carry off our people to work for them. But Pan-Africanism lies exhausted and confused. So, what is to be done? First of all, we need to do a serious and honest stock taking.

A hundred and ten years after the first Pan-African Conference, and fifty years from 1960, the landmark year in which 17 Black African countries attained self-government, is a good time to assess how far we have come. How far have we advanced on the road to total liberation? How much of our hopes and aspirations have been realized, and how much disappointed? How much more do we need to do to achieve our total liberation?

Stock taking and reality check:

"It is impossible to struggle effectively for the independence of a people . . . unless we really know our reality and unless we start out from that reality to wage our struggle."

--Amilcar Cabral, Unity & Struggle, p. 44

Unfortunately, our perception of our reality is clouded by many illusions.

Some of the popular illusions that need to be dispelled for us to see our reality are:

1. that self-government is independence;

2. that colonialism is over;

3. that African unity is the solution to our problems;

4. that we are developing nations;

5. that development is Europeanization;

6. that the reparation we need is in the form of money;

1. that we are not in a race war; that race war is only a future possibility which Blacks must avoid by any means necessary; and indeed that we, as Black Africans, have no enemies in the world;

2. that African countries are debt ridden and economic basket cases.

A little reality check should dispel these great illusions.

1] Self-government: Contrary to the orthodox illusion, self-government is not independence. Our self-government was introduced within the unchanged administrative, political, economic and cultural structures that colonialism had implanted in our territory, and with no fundamental changes in how we are incorporated into the enveloping imperialist structures. Our so-called independence achieved simply a takeover by local blacks of colonial administrations within the structures of imperialism, but that is not independence from imperialism.

We must realize that a nominally independent, self-governing black-majority territory embedded in the structures of white power and controlled by white power is simply a Bantustan. Every so-called independent Black country on earth today is simply a Bantustan. If we are honest with ourselves we must admit that all our ‘independent’ countries are simply Bantustans of imperialism, of the G-8; just like Kwazulu, Ciskei, etc. were Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa.

The ‘Independence Day’ we celebrate is really Bantustan Day. Like the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, we are not economically independent: the ‘world market’ of the imperialists dictates what we sell and what we buy and at what price; their IMF (Imperialist Ministry of Finance) and World Bank/IBRD (Imperialist Bank for Robbery and Depredation) and their economic ‘advisers’ dictate our economic and social policies; their corporations dominate our production and commerce, and subordinate our economic activities to serve the imperialists...MORE

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