Any surface review of social media platforms will find a plethora of videos of African people from the U.S., Caribbean, and of course Africa, arguing that Africans are defined strictly by the colonial borders where we were born and raised and that beyond that, we have no historical and cultural connections to one another. Accompanying this narrative with equal consistency are voices from Africans within the U.S. claiming that those of us born within the U.S. have zero historical and biological ties to Africa.
Even a cursory glance at the analysis projected within all of these talking points reveals the massive holes in these arguments to any and everyone who has spent even a little time studying the history of our people. For the anti-Africa voices, their entire framework is built upon the fragile belief that we should reject Africa because of random perspectives and voices from Africans born in Africa who know as little about our collective history as the Africans expressing this from the diaspora (outside of Africa). For the Africa against the diaspora (primarily against Africans in the U.S.) voices, their flimsy position is rooted largely in long ago disproven white supremacy tropes that Africans in the U.S. are lazy and criminally inclined. And unfortunately, these weak perspectives are not as alarming in comparison to the strange claims that we have no connection to Africa. These claims take anecdotal evidence like people’s physical appearances, and a complete lack of understanding of history i.e. “where are the slave ships?” to create this fantasy identity while completely ignoring clear linguistic, cultural, and even physiological connections between Africans in the U.S. and Africa. For example, ill refutable evidence of our linguistic connection like the fact the word mama, obviously widely used by Africans in the U.S., is actually the word for mother in Swahili. Or, the many ceremonies, and mannerisms we share such as African women in Venezuela beating sticks into water at varying degrees to create music which is a practice originated from the Baka Forest people in Central Africa through a ceremony called Liquindi. Then, there is sickle cell anemia which a large percentage of Africans in the U.S. house the trait if not the actual disease. This illness unquestionably results from the out of control mutation of blood cells that only impacts African people because of the historical relationship of those mutated blood cells serving as the body’s natural defense against malaria, a disease common throughout Africa and nonexistent in the U.S.
Most of us have heard and participated in conversations about these unfortunate perspectives, but very little of this discourse is centered around discussing where the origins of all this disunity come from. The suggestion here is that we consider that much of this dysfunction is most likely being injected into our communities from organized forces who have direct interest in keeping African people divided and disorganized.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have spent much of their 126 and 76 respective years history engaged in work designed to sabotage efforts at African unity and liberation. Starting with the Department of Justice (its name prior to being renamed the FBI) and J. Edgar Hoover’s work to sabotage the cross continental relationship between Liberia’s President King and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s. Then to the CIA’ s sabotage of Congolese independence and coordinated murder of Patrice Lumumba, and its illegal overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana, and both intelligence agencies role in breaking up the relationship between Malcolm X’s work with Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, socialist Cuba, etc., the claims of U.S. imperialist intelligence actively eliminating African liberation efforts is ill refutable.
Just as Hoover’s and Justice Department’s work against the Garvey movement clearly illustrated 100 years ago, U.S. intelligence has always understood, even if we didn’t, the importance of sabotaging any serious efforts to link up African people across the Atlantic ocean. Why? Because that unity is the most potent weapon aimed at thwarting the capitalist world’s dependence on cheap African material and human resources. Resources that fueled and sustain capitalist dominance over the world’s political and economic interests. No matter where you are while reading this, whether it’s the architectural designs, the vehicles, the electronics, or the food you eat, Africa’s exploitation is everywhere around you.
And, since we haven’t been able to verify for sure where the origins and financing for most of these very well polished anti-African unity videos/takes are coming from, our history has taught us that we have to put everything on the table, especially the interests of the forces who benefit the most from our disorganization. Fortunately, there is much we can do to circumvent this sabotage against us.
First, we have to acknowledge that like any and all of the efforts capitalist intelligence has made against our unity, their efforts are always only going to be as effective as our willingness to compromise and sell out our people for their interests. Hoover’s work against Garvey was only successful because of Liberian President King’s willingness to cave to pressure as well as the self serving persons within the UNIA who were used against Garvey in a mail fraud scheme. The disruption of Lumumba’s government in the Congo required Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seto), originally a close friend to Lumumba and member of Lumumba’s National Congolese Movement, to become the CIA’s main man, first in the Congo, and eventually throughout all of Africa.
So, these sellouts making these anti-unity videos are guilty and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us because the class struggle is real. There is no such thing as racial unity without a class analysis. There have always been Africans who would not hesitate to sell the masses out to the colonizers in Africa and the slave masters at home in Africa and across the Atlantic to the plantations here in the Western world. And, those sellouts continue to reproduce creating the current variety who disingenuously claim colonial borders as our identity while making Africans born outside of the U.S. our primary enemies when as my mother always said “none of us have a pot to piss in!”
This is also true for the Africans from and on the continent who, embracing the class struggle of exclusion of the masses of Africans, see aligning themselves with the enemies of Africa and the African masses as their meal ticket just as their diaspora sellout kin share the same backward perspective on how to potentially build wealth by exploiting our situation instead of eliminating our collective oppression.
Nonetheless, the statement is true by an African revolutionary in the 1960s when asked about the assassination of Malcolm X and whether the Nation of Islam committed the act when he said “they may have fired the guns, but they didn’t buy the bullets!” Deep in the interior, down underneath the surface, somewhere that we may not discover for another several years, the forces of intel for the capitalist system have their hands in this. As they always have from their efforts to advance the narrative of the Black Belt South (carving out territories in the Southern U.S. for Africans), originally created by the Communist International to sway Africans away from the Garvey movement and its focus on Africa, U.S.,intelligence built upon that narrative to continue to separate us from Africa, to their confirmed work to sabotage Pan-Africanist connections for decades afterward. Those intelligence agencies understand clearly that true African unity, across artificial colonial borders, is the key to disrupting their stranglehold on African self determination and the total liberation of Africa under scientific socialism. It would be naïve for us to ignore that and not consider their role in all this confusion. Kwame Ture told us – “any analysis of our people without including the work of our enemies is an incomplete analysis!”
Even a cursory glance at the analysis projected within all of these talking points reveals the massive holes in these arguments to any and everyone who has spent even a little time studying the history of our people. For the anti-Africa voices, their entire framework is built upon the fragile belief that we should reject Africa because of random perspectives and voices from Africans born in Africa who know as little about our collective history as the Africans expressing this from the diaspora (outside of Africa). For the Africa against the diaspora (primarily against Africans in the U.S.) voices, their flimsy position is rooted largely in long ago disproven white supremacy tropes that Africans in the U.S. are lazy and criminally inclined. And unfortunately, these weak perspectives are not as alarming in comparison to the strange claims that we have no connection to Africa. These claims take anecdotal evidence like people’s physical appearances, and a complete lack of understanding of history i.e. “where are the slave ships?” to create this fantasy identity while completely ignoring clear linguistic, cultural, and even physiological connections between Africans in the U.S. and Africa. For example, ill refutable evidence of our linguistic connection like the fact the word mama, obviously widely used by Africans in the U.S., is actually the word for mother in Swahili. Or, the many ceremonies, and mannerisms we share such as African women in Venezuela beating sticks into water at varying degrees to create music which is a practice originated from the Baka Forest people in Central Africa through a ceremony called Liquindi. Then, there is sickle cell anemia which a large percentage of Africans in the U.S. house the trait if not the actual disease. This illness unquestionably results from the out of control mutation of blood cells that only impacts African people because of the historical relationship of those mutated blood cells serving as the body’s natural defense against malaria, a disease common throughout Africa and nonexistent in the U.S.
Most of us have heard and participated in conversations about these unfortunate perspectives, but very little of this discourse is centered around discussing where the origins of all this disunity come from. The suggestion here is that we consider that much of this dysfunction is most likely being injected into our communities from organized forces who have direct interest in keeping African people divided and disorganized.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have spent much of their 126 and 76 respective years history engaged in work designed to sabotage efforts at African unity and liberation. Starting with the Department of Justice (its name prior to being renamed the FBI) and J. Edgar Hoover’s work to sabotage the cross continental relationship between Liberia’s President King and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s. Then to the CIA’ s sabotage of Congolese independence and coordinated murder of Patrice Lumumba, and its illegal overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana, and both intelligence agencies role in breaking up the relationship between Malcolm X’s work with Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, socialist Cuba, etc., the claims of U.S. imperialist intelligence actively eliminating African liberation efforts is ill refutable.
Just as Hoover’s and Justice Department’s work against the Garvey movement clearly illustrated 100 years ago, U.S. intelligence has always understood, even if we didn’t, the importance of sabotaging any serious efforts to link up African people across the Atlantic ocean. Why? Because that unity is the most potent weapon aimed at thwarting the capitalist world’s dependence on cheap African material and human resources. Resources that fueled and sustain capitalist dominance over the world’s political and economic interests. No matter where you are while reading this, whether it’s the architectural designs, the vehicles, the electronics, or the food you eat, Africa’s exploitation is everywhere around you.
And, since we haven’t been able to verify for sure where the origins and financing for most of these very well polished anti-African unity videos/takes are coming from, our history has taught us that we have to put everything on the table, especially the interests of the forces who benefit the most from our disorganization. Fortunately, there is much we can do to circumvent this sabotage against us.
First, we have to acknowledge that like any and all of the efforts capitalist intelligence has made against our unity, their efforts are always only going to be as effective as our willingness to compromise and sell out our people for their interests. Hoover’s work against Garvey was only successful because of Liberian President King’s willingness to cave to pressure as well as the self serving persons within the UNIA who were used against Garvey in a mail fraud scheme. The disruption of Lumumba’s government in the Congo required Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seto), originally a close friend to Lumumba and member of Lumumba’s National Congolese Movement, to become the CIA’s main man, first in the Congo, and eventually throughout all of Africa.
So, these sellouts making these anti-unity videos are guilty and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us because the class struggle is real. There is no such thing as racial unity without a class analysis. There have always been Africans who would not hesitate to sell the masses out to the colonizers in Africa and the slave masters at home in Africa and across the Atlantic to the plantations here in the Western world. And, those sellouts continue to reproduce creating the current variety who disingenuously claim colonial borders as our identity while making Africans born outside of the U.S. our primary enemies when as my mother always said “none of us have a pot to piss in!”
This is also true for the Africans from and on the continent who, embracing the class struggle of exclusion of the masses of Africans, see aligning themselves with the enemies of Africa and the African masses as their meal ticket just as their diaspora sellout kin share the same backward perspective on how to potentially build wealth by exploiting our situation instead of eliminating our collective oppression.
Nonetheless, the statement is true by an African revolutionary in the 1960s when asked about the assassination of Malcolm X and whether the Nation of Islam committed the act when he said “they may have fired the guns, but they didn’t buy the bullets!” Deep in the interior, down underneath the surface, somewhere that we may not discover for another several years, the forces of intel for the capitalist system have their hands in this. As they always have from their efforts to advance the narrative of the Black Belt South (carving out territories in the Southern U.S. for Africans), originally created by the Communist International to sway Africans away from the Garvey movement and its focus on Africa, U.S.,intelligence built upon that narrative to continue to separate us from Africa, to their confirmed work to sabotage Pan-Africanist connections for decades afterward. Those intelligence agencies understand clearly that true African unity, across artificial colonial borders, is the key to disrupting their stranglehold on African self determination and the total liberation of Africa under scientific socialism. It would be naïve for us to ignore that and not consider their role in all this confusion. Kwame Ture told us – “any analysis of our people without including the work of our enemies is an incomplete analysis!”
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