Kwame Ture: Pan-Africanism — Land and Power (Excerpt)

Whether we want it or not, there are divisions among black Africans living in the Unites States, the Caribbean and on the African continent, divisions which have been imposed on us by Europeans. There are geographical divisions, countries such as Senegal and Mauritania, Mozambique and Guinea, created by Europeans as they struggled for the wealth of Africa. Then there are political divisions and economic divisions again imposed on us by Europeans.

Now they are planning to impose on us grave cultural divisions and, most of all, to divide us by naming us different things. If you are in San Francisco, for example, and you see a Japanese or a Chinese walking down the street, you do not say that there goes an American Japanese or Japanese American. You say simply that there goes a Japanese — period. Yet probably that Japanese cannot speak Japanese at all; he may be the third or fourth generation in America. But no one calls him a Japanese American. The first thing you call him is a Japanese, because a person is defined, really, at first by his physical presence, or in terms of his ancestral stock. Whether he is Chinese, Japanese or African. The same is true of Indians. Even in America, when you see a red Indian, you do not say he is an American; you say he is an Indian. The same is true for East Indians; the same for Filipinos. Wherever you see them, in any part of the world, you call them Chines or what not.

The same is not true for Africans.

Let's ask ourselves why.

 

 

If you see an African in Europe, you do not say that he is an African. If you see him America you do not say that he is an African. If you see him in America you do not call him an African. He may be Negro; he may be West Indian; he may be everything else but African. That is because Europe took its time to divide us carefully, quite carefully. And they gave us different names so that we would never, always never, refer to ourselves by the same name; which helped to ensure that there would always be differences. I you say you are West Indian, it is fairly obvious that you are something different to be set apart fron an African An American Negro and an African also obviously are not the same thing.

One of the most important things we must now begin to do is to call ourselves "African." No matter where we may be from, we are first of all and finally Africans. Africans. Africans. Africans. The same also happens to be true of North Africa. When they say "Algerians" or "Egyptians" they are talking about Africans, because Africa happens to be one solid continent. Among Africans there will and must be no divisions. They are just Africans — period.

You must also understand that there are two type of oppression, basically. One is exploitation. The other is colonization. With exploitation one is economically raped; for example, in the 1930s the labor movement was a response to economic exploitation. Rich white people, in that instance, were exploiting poor white people. But there is another type of oppression — colonization. Colonization is not just the economic raping of some, not merely taking a lot of money away. Colonization deals with destroying the person's culture, his language, his history, his identification, his total humanity. When on is colonized one is totally dehumanized. So that when the victims of colonization fight they are fighting for a proess of humanization.

This is entirely different from the fight of people who are only exploited. The people who are exploited fight just for economic security. The colonized fight beond economic security, far beyond. And so, it seems to me that as we begin the search for allies and coalitions we can only form allies and coalition based on whether those people are fighting for the same thing, fighting the same fight that we who have been colonized are fighting. In other words, people who are fighting for their humanity. This means, for example, that all nonwhite peoples who have been colonized can join hands, understanding of course that our fights remain entirely different.

The people who have been colonized by white folk, let us say in Asian, are fighting the same fight but a different fight because of culture, humanity. Their way of life s and will be entirely different from ours. But they are fighting nonetheless and fighting for a humanity of their own, albeit the same thing in a sense that we are fighting for, to affirm our humanity. We are fighting to affirm our humanity. With those nonwhite people we can begin to move to long as they understand precisely wht the fight is all about and that we may differ in some respects.

In America, folk seem to think that the revolution there — if there is such a thing, or even if there will such a thing — will all be over in five year, when actually we are talking about a generation of struggle. That is why they always have deep questions in their minds to trouble them. They fail to understand that the struggle we ae talking about inside America is only symptomatic of a worldwide struggle against Europe and its satellites. America, in fact, is nothing but Europe. The white people in America are not Americans but in fact Europeans. When we call them Americans we allow them to escape, we define them incorrectly. We should call they Europeans and understand that they never belonged in America, that they took that continent from somebody else. When you call them Americans you forget that they were Europeans, because you give them in fact the theory of native oriin, that they came out of America. Where did Americans come from? They came from America — that is, somebody you call American. But if you say that they are Europeans (which is what they are), then the question arises a to where they came from — Europe. What are Europeans doing in what is now called America?

We must understand that, because it shows how deep our struggle really, really, really is. These are things we do not even think about, because, if you see what I have been saying up to now, you also will see that in the final analysis, the strugle is going to be waged with Europeans against non-Europeans. And that means that America is European. That means that our struggle is not in five or ten years but is, in fact for a generation. Once we understand that our struggle is at least a generation, then we do not even have to worry about so many little things. We will know, then, that we are not going to see any really concrete or substantive victories in our fight for at least five or ten years. I mean to say anything really concrete enough for us to look at and say that that is what we have been able to do.

At this point, it becomes important that you have people of Afrian descent — scattered over the Western hemisphere by Europeans, scattered across the West Indias and used so long as slaves — bound together in a unified struggle for their liberation. This is not impossible inasmuch as we have people today all over the world moving forward in the quest for liberation against their oppressors.

Because I understand so clearly the foregoing fators, the ancestral roots of the problem, I have concluded that the solution has to be Pan-Africanism. Everybody — DuBois, Padmore or whoever — always comes back at last to Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism is not just some nonsensical black nationalism. Even white philosophers understand this fact. For example, Plato in The Republic talks abut the theory of Antaeus.* The parable of Antaeus, says Plato, shows that the philosopher king has come up out of the earth, that the pople grew out of the earth. They were asking "Where are we?" Plato says that you must always answer that question: "Where are we from?" In his book he says that the people come out of the earth, have grown up there, so that they always fight for that earth, and for the ideas that come out of that earth. And they always will. So black people (us) come out of that earth, and we always will; and so black people (us) must stop running around in circles. We have to have our theory of Antaeus — where we are from. If black people in the States say "Where are we from?" they must wind up at Africa. One must know one's beginning, who one is, before one knows where one is going.

People who regard Pan-Africanism negatively, who think that it is a racist theory, ought to read George Padmore's book, Communism or Pan-Africanism. Padmore is clear on this. Writing around the 1930s, and one of the advisers to Dr. Nkrumah, Padmore was crystal clear on the point that we must talk about Pan-Africanism.

There are many African organizations which accept as their ideology Marxism-Leninism. Many of these young organizations received their stimulus from the concept of Black Power, which emphasized the powerlessness of Africans. The All-African People's Revolutionary Party knows that the correct ideology for Africans the worl over is Nkrumahism. Nkrumahism does not and cannot negate the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism; it merely incorporates these truths.

President Sekou Toure reminds us that Marx did not invent scientific socialism. Marx was an observer. He observed certain phenomena in relation to man and economic forces in general and to labor and capital in particular. Having observed the validity of certain theories based on historical materialism, he stated principles which act as a clear guide to the inevitable destruction of capitalism and its attendant evils, and for the reconstruction of a society free from exploitation of man by man. Many people who call themselves revolutionary accept these principles as universal truths. So do I. As we stated earlier, Marx, like Newton, observed and recorded but did not invent. Any student of science can independently observe the same laws of gravitation without prior knowledge of Newton. We thank Marx, Lenin and Newton for correctly classifying knowledge, thus making our own research easier.

In Osagyefo's classical philosophical work, Consciencism, we can see that the theories of Marx and Lenin have their roots in communalism. Thus, as an African, I should study Nkrumahis, which knows communalism contains the very foundation of Marism-Leninism. It contains my history, African history, as it must be presented in order to "become a pointer at the ideology which should guide and direct African reonstruction." Nkrumahism has already studied the the theories of Marxism-Leninism, accepting their universal guidelines and scientific methos. and Nkrumahism returns to Africa, returns to communalism, be Nkrumahism knows that if Mother Africa had been left untrampled by alient forces she would have been the first to achieve communism naturally, without bloodshed.

An yet, I view the struggle in the States as part and parcel of the entire world struggle, particularly the black world struggle. That is to say, I cannot see the struggle in the States as any different from the struggle anywhere else where men are fighting against a comon oppressor. Our fight is clearly a fight agains both capitalisn and racism. one does not get rid of capitalism without fighting against racism.

I cannot agree with the ideology that says that capitalism and racism are two different entities unto themselves. I would have you struggle against both. To get rid of capitalism — I repeat — is not necessarily to get rid of racism. As a matter of fact, I think that black people ought to know this better than anyone else. I think that in terms of reality and history and my own ideology, all of the movement that we have been building up in terms of black nationalism, from the sit-ins for coffee to "black power," runs striht to Pan-Africanism. We always come back to that.

It is clear now, that the only position for black men is Pan-Africanism. We need a land base. We need a base. In the final analysis, all revolutions are based on land. The best place it seems to me, and the quickest place that we can obtain land is Africa. I am not denying that we might seek land in the United States. That is a possiblity, but I do not see it clearly in my mind at this time. We need land and we need land immediately, and we must go to the quickest place for it.

We need a base that can be used for black liberation, a land that we can say belongs to us. We do not need to talk to much about it. That will harm the struggle. When one needs a base one needs also to perpare for armed struggle. To seize any of the countries in Africa today that are dominated by white people who have physically oppresed us is to confront and armed struggle, a prolonged struggle.

But once we have seize a base we will be on our way. We will then have to demonstrate our willingness to fight for our people wherever they are oppressed. I believe that people basically defend their own kind as America did during the Spanish Civil War. In the Middle East they did it even in 1967 with Israel. People who didn't have any rights in that country were flying in from all over the world to fight. There's nothin wrong with our doing the self-same thing. It can be done and, most important, we are trying to secure a political ideology as we seek a state. We are beginning to understand our movements and to see how we can move pollically, so that we begin to talk clearly and critically now about Pan-Africanism. It is a discussion that must begin.

There are many people wo live in Europe and America who support lands which do not belong to them. Concretely. They wage so large a propaganda campaign that on cannot say anything about their country without being automatically labled "anti . . ." to the point where one is even afraid to move for fear of falling into that label. If we obtain a bigger base than they have we can do a better job than they do, because we have more rights to be in Africa than they have to be where they are.

Malcolm X said that one fights for revolution but that in the final analysis revolution is based on land. He was absolutely correct. You have to have land in order to produce, in order to feed, shelter and clothe your people. People fight the revolution not solely for ideas; they fight also for a better way of life, and they incorporate new ideas introduced to them that promise a better way of life. People do not just fight for ideas, unless they are sure that they can see a better way of life coming out of those ideas.

Thus, unleass one can feed and clothe and shelter people who want to fight for these better ieas, there is nothin for them to fight for. In order to have a revolution one must have a clear and viable alternative for the masses, one they can understand and follow, one that can move them to struggle.

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*Antaeus was a giant wrestler who was invincible as long as he was touching his mother, the earth.