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2024-03-19T03:56:04Z
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Why Are We Still Disorganized? by Bro. Cliff of KUUMBAReport Online and SRDC
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/why-are-we-still-disorganized-by-bro-cliff-of-kuumbareport-online
2014-01-08T00:46:05.000Z
2014-01-08T00:46:05.000Z
Brother Cliff
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/BrotherCliff
<div><p><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:medium;">This piece was initially written as an email to two Elders who have often bemoaned the lack of unity that we as African people have demonstrated over these many generations since the <em>Ma'afa</em> (a <em>Twi</em> word meaning "great disaster", used by Pan-Afrikan historians and activists to describe the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Arab Slave Trade, the Scramble for Africa and the suffering African people have endured</span> <span style="font-size:medium;">as a result). I meant it as a helpful response to their question (which was probably rhetorical anyway) about why our people continue to act in such a self-destructive manner, refusing to hear the words of our knowledgeable Elders and instead preferring the siren song of the corporate interests who wish to keep us subjugated as compliant consumers and labor lackeys to keep the wheels of their industry moving. When my email was returned to me with the message "the recipient is only accepting mail from specific email addresses", it became clear to me that, while the message was meant to be distributed broadly so that all could hear the wisdom of their words, they did not themselves wish to hear the words of the rest of us. In other words, this was to be a one-way discussion. And, apparently (and unfortunately), the only answer they wished to see or hear was the rest of us unifying under their leadership.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="color:#000000;">I've encountered a number of wise and well-meaning activists and organizers, such as these respected Elders, who have taken this view, that they are the ones with the answers and all others should simply follow their banner. The organization I belong to, the</span> <a href="http://kuumbareport.com/organizations/srdc/"><strong>Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC),</strong></a> <span style="color:#000000;">is a <em><strong>coalition-based organization</strong></em> that realizes that such an approach will often fail to attract allies who already have ideas and organizations of their own. SRDC</span> <span style="color:#000000;">has attempted to form cooperative partnerships with other organizations whose response was simply "join under us and then we will work together." These partnerships failed to materialize because we could not subordinate our mission to someone else's, but we were willing to work side-by-side with other organizations in areas of shared interest, an offer which has often been refused. Our various organizations' utter failure to work together in such a unified and cooperative manner (despite our avowed reverence for the principles of Kwanzaa, specifically Unity--<strong><em>Umoja</em></strong>--and Collective Work and Responsibility--<strong><em>Ujima</em></strong>) actually underlines the primary reason why the words of our enemies carry so much more weight than do our own with our own people. </span></span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">I'm not saying that the Elder's complaint was without merit; quite the contrary. He is absolutely right: our grassroots communities easily and readily swallow the brainwashing and propaganda that is fed to them by the powers that be. Where I differ with the Elder is in his seeming surprise and bewilderment as to the reason why this is happening. It is not because of some magic spell that has been cast over our people. It is not because of some myth of intellectual or moral inferiority that right-wingers try to sell us. It is not even so much because of Western "tricknology", though it is a tool that is used to deliver the poisonous messages our enemies feed us. It is because, as much as anything else, of our own inability, or refusal, as self-styled "leaders", to actively model the unity and cooperation we want the masses to practice to lift our communities up. </span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">The messages with which our communities are bombarded--Look out for Number One, Individual Freedom, Personal Responsibility, I Gotta Get Mine--have profoundly influenced us, and not for the better. While it took military <em>coups d'état</em> and the imposition of military dictatorships to turn communities in Latin American countries and even villages against each other, the unraveling of the fabric of our Village was accomplished more through a <em>coup d'esprit</em>--the conquest of our spirit through a combination of drugs, deprivation, fear and propaganda. The major entertainment media (which often masquerade as news) and the corporate interests that control them were able to pull off this stunt in a way that was well-coordinated and affected our collective psyche across the board. This is largely because of the fact that <b><i>they are well organized in spite of belonging to different organizations and corporations.</i></b> While they all have their specific organizational interests (mainly profit), <em><b>they all agree on the basic narrative to feed to our people,</b></em> and thus their message is well crafted, organized and unified. They often sit on each others' Boards of Directors and, though they may be competitors in many ways, they have learned to support each other in a variety of projects. Even going back in history, we see this level of cooperation. At the Berlin Conference, supposedly-competing countries "cooperated" to divide Mother Africa up so that each of them was given control of specific, resource-rich sectors of our ancestral home, <em><b>knowing that they would all benefit at our collective expense.</b></em> This spirit of cooperation would ultimately serve them well in the two World Wars, when first Otto Von Bismarck, then Adolf Hitler and the Axis Powers, decided to attempt to conquer all of Europe for themselves. The countries of Europe, including the United States and Russia in World War II, not only cooperated militarily, they also worked together to develop and implement the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Thus, our historical oppressors from the United States and Europe have been practicing "Ujima" (Collective Work and Responsibility) and "Umoja" (Unity) for hundreds of years before we even mouthed the words. </span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;"><b><i>We as African people do no such thing. </i></b> With the exception of the occasional slave revolt, civil-rights march or presidential election, we seem unable to truly come together and cooperate on anything without our own self-interested aims derailing our efforts. (The African Union is trying to provide an example of cooperation among member states, but that project, much like the Organization of African Unity which it replaced, is being challenged as well, from inside and from outside the organization.) Our different organizations are still involved in the "me-first" game and no other strategy is acceptable. To us, unity seems possible only through conquest and the absorption of other groups' members. If people do not join <b><i>our</i></b> organization and follow <b><i>our</i></b> specific organizational agenda, we assume that they do not wish to work with us and that they are against Pan-African Unity. </span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:medium;">This, our refusal to even work in cooperation with each other while our enemies have been doing so for generations, is the main reason why our message goes unheeded by the masses of our people. We are so busy competing with, contradicting and fighting ourselves that our messages of liberation and uplift sound jumbled and self-contradictory; why should anyone listen to us talking about unity when we all fight amongst ourselves? The corporations, while they do compete with each other for the biggest share of the profits, <em><strong>are at least selling us, by and large, the same thing,</strong></em> and have agreed to use their common media outlets<br /></span><span style="font-size:medium;"><b><i>to send us the same basic message</i></b> of what we should call ourselves and what dreams we should seek to attain. Our ironically self-described Pan-Afrikan organizations, however, disagree on what we should call ourselves, what our relationship should be to Africa and what is best for us as a people, and they all seem to insist that <b><i>they alone</i></b> are the path to our psychological, economic and political freedom and that all others must join them <b><i>and them alone.</i></b></span></span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">The fact is that our different organizations are <b><i>not</i></b> going to join each other. You may have no interest in "joining" my organization, the <strong>Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus</strong> or <strong>SRDC</strong> (not that I'm insisting that you do) because you want to continue to build <strong><em>your</em></strong> organization, and I don't have the time or energy to join other organizations because I'm quite busy with more than enough unpaid work helping to build SRDC. </span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">However, this need not be a major problem or an impediment to our organizing efforts. While we in SRDC are still focused on building our organization and establishing a means to bring the voice of the Grassroots Communities of the African Diaspora to the World Stage (be that through the African Union, World Social Forum or other vehicles), we also recognize that, while our different organizations are not ready to join each other, they can, and <b><i>must,</i></b> find a way to <b><i>work together cooperatively</i></b> for the education, mobilization and general uplift of African people, as the corporations of our adversaries do in their effort to strengthen their control over us. </span><br /> <span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;"> </span><br /> <span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">I have been reaching out, on behalf of SRDC, to other organizations that have shown an interest in working cooperatively. I've concentrated my efforts in the area near where I live, and as a result I've gotten a few interested responses from some of the Continental African organizations in the Washington DC area, even though many of them would tell you that their perspective on who the African Diaspora is (that the Diaspora is primarily Continental Africans who emigrated from the Mother Continent to the West) are often quite different from that of SRDC and of African Descendants in general (that the Diaspora includes <strong><i>all</i></strong> people of African descent who live outside the African Continent). Still, if there is a way for Continental Africans and African Descendants to engage in constructive planning so that we can eventually develop a narrative of Diaspora Unity instead of the individualistic <strong><em>dis</em></strong>unity and thoughtless consumerism that our adversaries teach us, I hope to be a part of that planning process. I don't expect these organizations to <b><i>join</i></b> SRDC, but my hope is that they will agree to work <b><i>alongside </i></b>us to reach out to, organize and galvanize the African Diaspora so that the aims of <b><i>all</i></b> our organizations can be attained. </span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">If this sounds like an acceptable arrangement, I am prepared to hear from you so that we can make plans to move all of our people forward. Just leave a comment here, or send an email to <a href="mailto:cliff@kuubareport.com"><span style="color:#000000;">cliff@kuubareport.com</span></a>.</span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">Peace and Power,</span><br /> <span style="color:#000000;font-size:medium;">Bro. Cliff</span></p></div>
We Who Like It Hot Call It ‘Black August’ - A month our oppressors have nothing to celebrate.
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/we-who-like-it-hot-call-it
2011-08-03T13:37:49.000Z
2011-08-03T13:37:49.000Z
TheBlackList
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/TheBlackList
<div><p align="center"> </p>
<p align="center"><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3828528253,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-full" width="750" src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828528253,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="3828528253?profile=original" /></a></p>
<p align="center"><b>We Who Like It Hot Call It ‘Black August’ (Revised version)</b></p>
<p align="center"><b>By <i>‘bro. zayid’*</i></b></p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p>It is the month when our oppressors have nothing to celebrate.</p>
<p>It is the month where the nature of our oppression and the boldest expressions of our resistance to that oppression have been made most plain.</p>
<p>We who like it hot call it <b><i>‘Black August’</i></b>…</p>
<p>As a concept of resistance, Black August has its beginnings in the mid 70’s with the prison justice movement. It was inspired by the courageous legacy of Black Panther prison organizer George Jackson, who was assassinated on August 21, 1971, one of the hallmark dates for the concept.</p>
<p>Originally, the concept concerned itself with and confined itself to those hallmark dates repression and resistance for this month within the confines of these bloodsucking united states exclusively.</p>
<p>We revisit this concept here in a more comprehensive Pan-Afrikan manner to explore and to propose it having a broader Pan-Afrikan application.</p>
<p>Beginning on the matter of our national oppression, the first buying and selling of our ancestors, the first time we were “put on the open market” in what is now the united states, using the language of those of you who strangely want to bed down with capitalism, knowing full well that your ancestors were capitalism’s first prime capital, took place on August 20, 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia.</p>
<p>In most recent times, and for the first time in decades since the bombing of the Congo in 1964 under the so-called liberal rule of Lyndon Baines Johnson, u.s. forces, demonstrating unchallenged New World Order military supremacy, bombed our Afrika when they bombed the Sudan, the land of the earth’s oldest civilizations, under the most bogus of pretenses, ‘CounterTerrorism,’ on August 20, 1998.</p>
<p>Ironic coincidence you think? This beast was trying to bomb us outta our land, outta our minds and outta our hearts!… on the anniversary that they made us slaves!...</p>
<p>Self-critically we should also acknowledge the recent betrayal of Pan-Afrikan potential in Central Afrika too. Just as were gearing up here for the heroic Million Youth March, the u.s. covertly sponsored an attack on the recently liberated Congo on August 2, 1998, using Rwanda and Uganda as proxy forces. To the honor of our ancestors, however, that betrayal has been checked and contained in a Pan-Afrikan manner by a courageous union of forces from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia…</p>
<p>An important recently declassified FBI memo detailing the scope and the national coordination of a sinister covert operation, which would ultimately destroy the Black Liberation Movement known as COINTELPRO, or ‘the CounterIntelligence Program,’ was set in full, ‘noholdsbarred,’motion against the Black nation on August 25, 1967.</p>
<p>Many conscious of our history know that COINTELPRO was not only illegal, immoral and absolutely off da hook in its making a mockery of democratic rights. But have we truly assessed ‘how’ successful it was in disabling the Black Liberation Movement? Have we truly assessed how that crippling of our movement left our community wide open for the unprecedented violent social disintegration we currently face, set off most insidiously by a heroin epidemic in the early 70’s and the hoodsplitting crack explosion blowing up in our faces in the awful 80s and the nasty 90s? The epic Million Man March was the beginning of an answer, we hoped,…an answer for our times , but it wasn’t enough. And with Black Panther/BLA political prisoners Albert ‘Nuh’ Washington, Teddy ‘Jah’ Heath and Bashir Hameed recently dying in captivity after being locked down for decades virtually unknown to the community they sacrificed their lives trying to defend and with that same community in more disarray now than it was when they were captured in the early 70’s, we think not.</p>
<p>By the way, the first of two vicious attacks against those defiant, dreadlock-wearing pioneers of environmentalism, known to the world simply as MOVE, also took place in Black August. It was on August 9, 1978 that 500 of Philly’s finest laid siege to the MOVE home compound in Powelton Village in an attempted massacre. When it was over, the world saw Delbert Afrika being brutally beaten on national television while peaceably surrendering. He was beaten with a savagery that anticipated the videotaped beating of Rodney King. James Rapp, a Philadelphia police officer was killed from what we now call ‘friendly fire.’ Bro. Delbert and his surviving comrades are now in their 33rd year of prison facing sentences that go up 100 years for Rapp’s death!…One of their comrades, Merle Afrika, died in prison in 1999.</p>
<p>Lest we forget, it was on August 9, 1997 that Abner Louima was sodomized with a plunger up his rectum in a supreme expression of police brutality by New York City police.</p>
<p>Starting on August 29, 2005, we faced one of the greatest ordeals and calamities of this time. On that day, as the bewildering winds of Hurricane Katrina came barreling down on New Orleans, the world’s 1<sup>st</sup> Black cultural capital, the u.s.government decided to abandon the people of that great chocolate city because the majority of its victims were black and poor! A genocidal spectacle that garnered international criticism and outrage abroad, but here at home, the national media order just accelerated what the late Charshee McIntyre called ‘the criminalizing of the race!’</p>
<p>It must be noted here though for the historical record, that just days later, while many among our people felt helpless about trying to do something directly, the New Black Panther Party, under the leadership of Attorney at War Malik Zulu Shabazz, dared to launch ‘Operation Rescue’! Defying curfews, roadblocks and government mandates, these brave men, armed with their God and their gun, rolled into New Orleans, went into the devastated 9<sup>th</sup> ward in particular and come out with several hundred of our people!</p>
<p>So be very clear here…Black August is also a time of the most heroic resistance to the hottest hell we’ve faced!</p>
<p>On August 11, 1965, a pivotal, timemarking rebellion took place foreshadowing many more to come. It was the Watts section of Los Angeles that exploded. Black youth, tired of police brutality, boldly stepped off from their perceived limits of nonviolence and went off!… Although casualties in this uprising were high, after six days of supreme hellraizin, almost 1000 buildings were destroyed and most of those destroyed were whiteowned businesses. Out of the blood and ashes of this rebellion emerged the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense! It is one of the hallmark dates of this concept in its origins.</p>
<p>The other of course is August 7, 1970!...On this day, an incredibly fearless young warrior chose not to wait on the white man’s courts for justice. He took it upon himself to liberate his comrades! On this day, the immortal Jonathan Jackson, field marshal George Jackson’s courageous little brother, walked into a Marin County Courthouse locked and loaded and announced that he was now in charge and he would be leaving with his comrades who were on trial! He also announced that the presiding judge would be coming also to secure their exit! He was 17 years old! 17! It foreshadowed the reemergence of the Underground Railroad in the insurgent collective persona of the Black Liberation Army! You wanna know why you have to be searched when you go into a courtroom, you have pay homage to Jonathan for that!</p>
<p>On August 14, 1791, a fearless queen-sized Afrikan warrior queen named Cecille called together all the field slaves of the French sugar plantation island of Haiti ( originally spelled ‘Ayiti ), to convene the launching of the most successful of all slave revolts…The Haitian Revolution!</p>
<p>On August 21, 1831, Rev. Nat Turner launched his own prophetic answer to the Haitian Revolution when he led a force of armed field slaves in amerikkka’s most famous slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia. Before his capture, dozens of the overseer and slave owner class were vanquished by those willing to pay the ultimate price for freedom!</p>
<p>This is not at all to diss or to minimize nonviolent direct action; For on August 9, 1956, 20,000 Afrikan women fearlessly took to the streets of Pretoria, South Afrika and defied the vicious ‘Passbook Act of 1956, which made aliens of Afrikans in their own land during the obscene racist reign of Apartheid. It is from this defiant act that we get the phrase “You have struck a rock.”</p>
<p><i>“Now you have attacked the women! You have struck a rock! You have dislodged a boulder! You will be crushed!”</i> rings the phrase from this heroic expression of Afrikan women defying the bloody teeth of Apartheid.</p>
<p>The March On Washington of August 28, 1963 must also be acknowledged for Black August in spite of its obvious co-opted limitations. Not because it was a high point for the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement; We must acknowledge it here because we understand that the state saw that it was too successful for <i>their</i> interests and marked ‘The Drum Major For Justice’ for death! Declassified government documents are very clear. COINTELPRO operations escalated against our movement after that march and escalated against him in particular! Let the ‘Dreamers’ and the ‘Dream Redeemers’ speak to that!…</p>
<p>We must also acknowledge why the date was chosen for that march. On August 28, 1955, a young man from Chicago visiting his family in Mississippi, was made missing and viciously lynched. His face and body was so savagely ravaged by his killers that his mother decreed to have her son’s funeral with the casket open so the whole world could see what lynching looks like! That young man was Emmitt Till. It was our people’s last straw under the terrorism of Jim Crow!</p>
<p>On the eve of the March on Washington, the sun set on one of the immortal pioneers of PanAfrikanism. WEB DuBois died in Ghana at age 97 in service to Ghanaian independence and PanAfrikanism in Black August on August 27, 1963.</p>
<p>Back to our legacy of resisting our oppression by any means necessary. On August 13, 1906, Black soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, tired of being violated by the lynch mobs for ‘wearing the uniform,’ decided to use their arms to “stop them.”</p>
<p>On that same day twenty years later, a man was born who would lead the most enduring revolution against u.s. imperialism to date. That man is Fidel Castro. That revolution of course is the heroic Cuban Revolution. No nation, anywhere in the world, has done more for Afrika, for the PanAfrikan idea, than the Cuban Revolution under the leadership of the ageless Fidel!</p>
<p><b><i>(In a note of powerful irony, this year, on Fidel’s birthday, PanAfrikanism will be the order of the day, as thousands will take to the streets of Harlem for a march condemning the bombing of Libya and the continued outrageous sanctions against Zimbabwe! (See annexed flyer.) The rally, initiated by the December 12<sup>th</sup> Movement, will feature Minister Louis Farrakhan, PanAfrikan scholars Molefi Asante, Leonard Jeffries and James Small, Nicaragua’s former foreign minister and former president of the UN general assembly, Fr. Miguel D’Oscobo, our own Malik Zulu Shabazz, and many more! Participants will assemble on 110<sup>th</sup> Street and Malcolm X Blvd at 10am.)</i></b></p>
<p>On August 26, 1966, one of the most underappreciated recent peoples victories on the Afrikan continent was launched in earnest when SWAPO launched the armed struggle to rid Namibia of the dual scourge of Apartheid and colonialism!</p>
<p>We already mentioned George Jackson’s legacy and assassination. We must also acknowledge that he was also an original revolutionary thinker who also penned two classic seminal revolutionary works, <i><u>The Soledad Brothers</u></i> and <i><u>Blood In My Eye</u></i>.</p>
<p>For those of us who want to see Black August used in its fullest terms, the ceremonial and ideological center of Black August is, of course, the birth of Marcus Garvey on August 17, 1887 in Jamaica. On that same date in 1920, in a packed Madison Square Garden, Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association gave us our own flag!…A flag for all of us no matter where we be on this earth!…The Universal Afrikan Liberation Flag!…The Red, the Black, the Green!…</p>
<p>And you wonder why the state of Pennsylvania sought to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal on August 17, 1995?…Is it a coincidence that they used the birth date of the Black nation’s first modern political prisoner to attempt to stage this freedom fighter’s lynching?…We think not.</p>
<p>On August 16, 1959, underappreciated Garveyite Carlos Cooks convened a special Afrikan Peoples Conference in Harlem, which formally called on our people to drop the term ‘negro’ and to instead use either ‘Black’ or ‘Afrikan’ to refer to the race. How so many of at this late date are unable to see ourselves as being nothing more than ‘niggaz’ is a serious expression of how far we’ve been setback.</p>
<p>Several nations of the PanAfrikan world stepped forward in this month. Trinidad, Burkino Faso, Chad, Gabon and Cote ‘d’Voir, each stepped out on their own in Black August.</p>
<p>Edward Wilmot Blyden, an important forerunner of critical Black nationalist thought who literally was the bridge between 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> century Afrikan nationalism, was born in Black August on August 3, 1832 in Virgin Islands.</p>
<p>Dr. Mutulu Shakur, wrongly incarcerated since 1986, was born on August 8, 1950.</p>
<p>148 years after Gabriel Prosser was going to scorch plantations before being betrayed, Black Panther organizing legend and martyr Fred Hampton was born on August 30, 1948.</p>
<p>Black Belt swingers Charlie Parker, Count Basie and Lester Young, giants of a music which brought us international respect, were all born in Black August.</p>
<p>May all of our Augusts be fiery hot and holy with resistance!</p>
<p>Keep marching!</p>
<p>Black Power and Free The Land!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><i>©2010 all rights reserved</i></p>
<p><i>‘bro. zayid’ kazi angaza kikongo muhammad</i></p>
<p><i>*‘bro.zayid’ is the nat’l min. of culture of the new black panther party… </i></p>
<p> </p></div>