THE HANDSTAND

FEBRUARY 2003


AFRICANS CROSSING THE SAHARA TO EUROPE

As many of us go about our normal daily activities on the continent, a silent
and pathetic valley of death is claiming the lives of our people in their wanton drive to leave the living heat and hell on our continent. I am even shedding tears as I remember the investigation I did to discover this dark side of our people's lives. Groups of African men and women (including Ghanaians) begin their journey to the unknown from Agadis in Niger by car to Alate, then hop in another vehicle to Asamaka and then end up at Jenet in the middle of nowhere near Mount Hoga which is on the northern border of Niger with Algeria. They then pay a desert guide to walk them through a desert route covering a distance of 50 km by foot till they get to Mount Hugo. They then change course and walk for another 350 km to Obari which is the the first
border town in Algeria. From this point on, there is no village or human settlement (just open desert). The distance they have to walk covers a period of 3 weeks before getting to Sabat in Libya. During the day when the sun is hot, there is no movement. Movement begins at sundown through the night till about 10:30 the following morning when the sun gets hot again. Your bottle of water in this dry scorching desert, has to last you the length of the period because there is no water. Once in Libya, they have to travel long distances at very high risk of being arrested or even killed, to get to cross the mediterranean sea into Europe. The valley of the shadow of death is the route on the desert.

During this journey on foot, many give up the ghost when they get tired, get tired or fall sick. They are left behind as the group must move on. There are so many dead bodies of Africans with their passports on their chests. Their relatives neither know where they are nor do they have a clue that they are dead. ......It is really sad. In some cases, the guide loses his bearings so they all wonder in the desert till death parts them all. There are horrific stories of strange beasts and animals attacking them. Our leaders do not seem to have a clue as to the consequencies of thier misrule.
Anonymous.

REMEMBERING AMILCAR CABRAL - THE MAN OF CULTURE

- A poem by Amílcar Cabral – Praia, Cabo Verde, 1945 -

 

 

Mother, in your perennial sleep,

You live naked and forgotten

and barren,

thrashed by the winds,

at the sound of songs without music

sung by the waters that confine us...

 

Island:

Your hills and valleys

haven’t felt the passage of time.

They remain in your dreams

- your children’s dreams –

crying out your woes

to the passing winds

and to the carefree birds flying by.

 

Island :

Red earth shaped like a hill that never ends

- rocky earth –

ragged cliffs blocking all horizons

while tying all our troubles to the winds!

A lecture given in the late 1990's on the anniversary of the assassination of the African Revolutionary AMILCAR CABRAL. He was born on 12 September 1924 and was assassinated by the Portuguese fascist regime of Caetano on 20th January 1973.


Return to the Source : Culture
and Black Redemption
by Lester Lewis


It was Fela Kuti who said, "You will never know where you are going unless you know where you are coming from." In other words, we must locate ourselves in the geography of time and space so that we know who we are; where we are; where we are coming from and where we are going. So the question here is 'where are we coming from?'

We are coming from the beginning of humanity when we lived in a veritable Garden of Eden in peace and plenty. We studied the universe, the stars, the planets and nature and developed the civil and religious systems that still govern the universe. We developed the worship of God and put God at the centre of our culture. We developed philosophy, the arts and the sciences. Our civilisation and our culture spread all over the earth. At the end of the ice ages, the formerly nomadic peoples now called Europeans, the peoples of the ice, came south, raping, pillaging and looting; destroying that which they did not know and did not understand. The peoples of the Sun paid and are still paying a heavy price for the ravages of the uncultured peoples of the ice.

Kwesi Armah writes about Two Thousand Seasons of invasion, conquest and domination. In India, the invasion from the North lasted for a period of 1500 years. In North and East Africa, our civilisation and culture had developed in the Nile valley and had reached its high point in Kemet, the land of the Blacks. It is here that we note the first foreign invasion of African territory. A group of Asiatics known in history as the Hicksos or Shepherd Kings invaded and conquered Kemet and ruled for two hundred years. Then, a Prince by the name of Tuhames or Tuthmoses led a war of liberation that led to the defeat of the Hicksos.

This gave birth to the famous 18th dynasty of Kemet which included such personages as Tuthmosis II and III, Queen Tiye, Pharaoh Hatsheput, the first female in history known to have ruled a nation; Akhnaten and his famous wife Nefertiti; the fabulous boy king Pharaoh Tut Ankh Amun and his wife Ankh Esen Amun. They left us a monument warning us to "Beware of the miserable Asiatics." During her reign, Hatshepsut said, "I have restored that which was in ruins while the Amamu ruled without knowledge of God." The generations, which came following the defeat of the Hicksos, raised Kemet to an even higher level of civilisation so that the 18th dynasty became known as one of the Golden Ages of Kemet. Similarly, with the defeat of colonialism and neo-colonialism, Africa can restore its lost power and restore its past glory.

Africa had been weakened by successive waves of foreign invasions. First the Persians, then the Greeks and Romans followed by the Arabs. Besides that, internal bickering and hundreds of years of slaving had contributed had left Africa unprepared for the catastrophes to come. Three hundred years before the Berlin Congress when the European powers divided Africa amongst themselves, The Portuguese had embarked on their project to build an African Empire stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the Indian ocean. Queen Nzingha had fought them to a standstill but when she died, the Portuguese resumed their wars of conquest. They were resisted at every stage until they were finally defeated towards the end of the twentieth century.

Living at home in Portugal under a fascist dictatorship, first of Salazar and then Caetano, Portuguese young men were sent to fight in Africa. Their task was to defend Portuguese colonialism against the wars of liberation being fought in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The architect of this modern African Liberation Movement was Amilcar Cabral. He wrote his own epitaph when he described himself as "A simple African man doing my duty in the context of my time."

Under the system of colonialism, the brightest sons of Africa were selected, educated and trained through the process of assimilation to reject African values and culture and accept European values and culture, then to become agents for the colonial project. This was the role selected for Cabral by the Portuguese. He was trained as an agronomist and sent to work to bolster Portuguese colonialism in Angola. What he did was to set up the Peoples movement for the Liberation of Angola. Back in Guinea-Bissau, he set up the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. He posed the question: "Do we beg for freedom or do we take freedom?" He answered his question in the following words: "To beg for freedom is contrary to our dignity and our sacred right to
freedom and independence."

Under the leadership of Cabral, the PAIGC launched an armed struggle for national liberation in January 1963. Cabral said, "While we were fighting, we began to create all aspects of a new life, political, administrative, economic, social and cultural in the liberated areas. The Portuguese dictator Salazaar was fond of saying thet "Africa does not exist" but as Cabral said, "Africa was the
sickness that killed Salazaar." Despite the fact that in Guinea, there were what was called Unidades Africanas, i.e. African mercenaries fighting for Portugal, in a speech to the United Nations in 1972, Cabral said "An increasing number of young Portuguese were dying ingloriously before the withering fire of freedom fighters."

It was not only in Guinea that Africans were fighting for Portuguese colonialism, they were doing so in Angola and Mozambique. Africans were fighting in the South African army against he African national Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the South West Africa Peoples Organisation of Namibia. Africans were fighting in the army of the white colonialist settler regime of Rhodesia against the Zimbabwe African national Union and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union. When Queen Nzingha was fighting the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, Africans were also fighting in the Portugues army. It must also be noted that when the British were fighting the Asante in Ghana, it was their former slaves from Jamaica organised in the West Indian Regiment who subdued the Asantes for the British.

One of the things that enemies of the African revolution do is to kill our leaders. Our enemies have killed all our charismatic leaders who are passionately and uncompromisingly Africanist in their outlook. They do not necessarily do the job themselves. They employ others to perform their nefarious tasks. From Malcolm X, and Herbert Chitepo to MMurtala Mohamed and Thomas
Sankara. In 1969, Portuguese agents assassinated Eduardo Mondlane, the first President of the Front For the Liberation of Mozambique. Amilcar Cabral gave the Eduardo Mondlane Lecture a year later, at Syracuse University in New York. You will find this lecture in Cabral's book Return to the Source, and I am giving this lecture in Memory and in Honour of Amilcar Cabral.

"History teaches us," said Cabral, "that what ever may be the material aspects of a peoples domination, this domination of a people can only be maintained by the permanent organised repression of the cultural life of the people concerned." So if you want to dominate a people, you have to suppress their culture, stop them from practicing their culture and stop any forward cultural development. As Cabral states, "When you take up arms to dominate a people, it is above all to destroy their cultural life as a people, or at least to neutralise or to paralyse their cultural life." It follows therefore, that if you are fighting for liberation, you are fighting to defend and to practice your culture. So to struggle for national liberation can be seen as an act of culture.............................................................................Cabral with Nino Viera and journalist Oleg Ygnatiev

As defined by Cabral, "Culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a peoples history." Culture is a determinant of history whether it is "by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, or groups of men within a society as well as among different societies." You see, when you are living your culture, you are developing relationships with the environment that surrounds you, you are developing relationships between yourselves as a people, and you are developing relationships with different societies and it is your particular culture that influences the types of relationships that you develop.

"Culture reflects the material and spiritual reality of society, of man the individual and of man the social being, faced with conflicts which set him against nature and the exigencies of life." Africa had developed a communal economic and social system so that the needs of all the people were met but
colonialism disrupted the historical development of the productive forces. As Cabral put it, "The level of development of the productive forces and the system of social utilisation, i.e. how the system of production is owned, determine the mode of production." In other words, who owns benefits."

Culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is the product of this history. It has as its material base, the level of production and the mode of production. It is the reflection of the organic nature of society. So by denying our historical development as a people, the slavers, colonial invaders and conquerors, whether as Arabs or Europeans, have halted our cultural development. Consequently, in the second African liberation, there must be an increase in the expression of culture, to affirm our cultural personality as a people as a means of negating the oppressor culture. That is why Cabral said that "The seed of opposition to foreign domination lies in culture." As Chinweizu has stated, Africa will only begin to develop when Africans free themselves from European culture and get back into their own culture. Similarly, Cabral said that a people who free themselves from foreign domination would be culturally free only if they "return to the upward paths of their culture." "This must be nourished by the by the living reality of its environment and it must negate both harmful influences and subjection to foreign culture."

It is society as a whole which is the bearer and creator of culture. Consequently, in the second African liberation, the struggle must embody the mass character. It must embody the popular character of mass culture. While culture has a mass character, it is not uniform, it is not equally developed in all levels of society. While its economic interests dictate the attitude of each social group, it is also profoundly influenced by its culture. That is why, throughout the African world, there are influential groups in society which collaborate in the oppression of the masses. Further, I would say that the elites, who have been assimilated into European culture, have assimilated the oppressive mentality of Europeans. These assimilated Africans consider themselves to be culturally superior to their own people. They ignore and look down upon the people's cultural values. John Henrik Clark pointed out that when you can get a people to laugh at their own God, to consider their culture and their religion inferior and the culture and religion of Europeans as superior, then you have a person who is mentally colonised. This is the most vile, evil and wicked form of oppression. Slavery was bad, but I consider that a black man in prison in Britain is in a far worse condition. They are working on his mind and they drug him up to control him. That is why so many black men come out of prison mentally broken.

Those who recognise the problem also recognise the solution. Ngugi Wa Thiongo wrote a book entitled Decolonising The Mind. Chinweizu wrote two books, Decolonising the African Mind and Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature. In considering the education system under which black children are educated in Britain, Amon Saba Sakana wrote Toward the Decolonisation of the
British Education System. Frantz Fanon has something to say about this as we shall see later but Cabral says that what we need is a reconversion or re-Africanisation.

When we are defeated by betrayals and technical superiority in armaments, cultural resistance is not destroyed. Indeed, culture becomes the only form of resistance. Cabral put it this way. "Although repressed, persecuted, betrayed by some social groups who were in league with the colonialists, African culture survived all the storms, taking refuge in the village, the forests and in the
spirit of the generations who were victims of colonialism." In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon says, "African historical memory is a dynamic stimulus which relates the present to the past and in so doing provides a continuum which stretches into the future." So no one can deny the richness of African cultural values whether you go from Carthagena to Giza to Zimbabwe; From Meroe to Benin to Ife; from the Sahara to Timbuktu to where ever you choose on the continent, the reality of African culture stares you in the face, whether as works of art or in oral or written traditions, in cosmological conceptions, whether as music and dance or as religions and belief or as the dynamic balance of economic and social structures created by African man. In confirming the African origin of civilisation as argued by Volney and Diop, Cabral asserts that "The hands of African man placed the stones of the foundation of the world."

The Assimilated African

In looking at the assimilated individual, we see that he becomes a stranger tohis own culture because he has become part of European culture. He has becomepart of the body of European culture because he has exchanged European culturefor his own. On the continent, we have seen this in the actions of leaders suchas Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Paul Biye in Cameroon, Abou Diof in Senegaland latterly John Kufuor in Ghana. Here in Britain, we had one assimilated intellectual. Paul Gilroy, waging a war against Afrocentrism. In two books, Small Acts and The Black Atlantic, Gilroy set out to demonise the Afrocentric movement. He argued that "there is a voguish Afro-centric terror campaign going on." This he terms "Africology" and says it is "anti-modern." Any time you hear the term anti-modern, you must understand that it is not European. In Kemet Afrocentricity and Knowledge, Molefe Kete Asante defines Africology as "the
Afrocenrtric study of phenomena, events, ideas and personalities related to Africa. Gilroy said that we are engaged in some kind of intellectual terror campaign to enforce an imaginary, homogenous and unchanging identity of peoples of African descent. While Gilroy may be confused about his identity, Afrocentrists are not. In the very first sentence of his introduction to his Cultural Unity of Black Africa, the Domains of patriarchy and matriarchy in Classical Antiquity, Diop writes: "I have tried to bring out the profound cultural unity still alive beneath the deceptive appearance of cultural
heterogenity." So while on the surface it appears that our culture is composed of unrelated parts, Diop has shown that there is a profound cultural unity. Being alienated from his culture, Gilroy cannot see this. It is no wonder that he is striving to be European and black.

He stated, "I make no apology for the fact that my own thinking arises from a desire to be recognised as both black and English in addition to everything else that I am." He doesn't say who should constitute the recognition committee. He has nothing positive to say about Africa and Africans. In Operationalising Afrocentrism, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe poses the question of "whether the negation of anything positive about Africa and Africans is a necessary and sufficient demonstration for the recognition committee to decide in his favour." As we have previously seen from Albert Memi's Portrait of a Colonial, the colonial who has assimilated European culture is always frustrated. No matter how much the assimilated African thinks and acts like a European, no matter how much he publicly despises and rejects his own culture, he is never accepted as one of them. Hence Paul Gilroy's problem.

In begging to be recognised as European, black and English, Gilroy is demonstrating his frustration at being rejected as one of them after all that he has done. After all, Gilroy claimed that "African culture is superstitious, it is a heathen culture." He referred to heathen Africa and African barbarism.
Commenting on the Black Atlantic, Ekwe-Ekwe views this as "clearly a pathetic effort by a feeble-minded, irremediably traumatised and deculturised numbskull to pillorise the great heritage of African humanity." Further, Ekwe-Ekwe views Afrocentrism as representing "the peoples of African descent victory in historiographical reconstruction, an example of the irrepressible creativity of a peoples grand design for redemption and emancipation." This he says, "is a liberatory heritage of history weaving."

Fanon's view

For Frantz Fanon, "culture is first, the expression of a nation, the expression of its taboos, and its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed." Born in Martinique in the Caribbean, Fanon was a high class intellectual activist in the struggles for African liberation. He worked with people like Nkrumah, George Padmore, Sekou Toure, Felix Moumier, Lumumba and Cabral and my teacher Ndeh Ntumazah. Besides The Wretched of the Earth, his other works include Black Skins-White masks, A dying Colonialism and Towards the African Revolution. In The Wretched of the earth, he quotes Sekou Toure who said that "To take part in the African revolution, it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion the revolution with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves."

Fanon called on each generation "to discover its mission in life and either fulfil it or betray it." He points out that preceding generations have both resisted the work of erosion carried out by colonialism and also helped the maturing of the struggles of today. In other words, each generation takes the struggle to a higher level. However, it can be argued that the acceptance of neo-colonialism amounts to regression and a more individuous form of domination. For Fanon, "Men of culture demand a national culture, and, the affirmation of that culture represents a special battlefield. Of Aliene Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop said that "He fought and died on the battlefield of African culture." So, "men of history take their stand in the field of culture." Fanon points out that "the claim to a national culture rehabilitates the nation and serves as justification for the hope of a future national culture." You will note that in the newly created African Union, National or Pan African culture did not figure in the deliberations.

Colonialism set out to empty the African's brain of all form and content. It looks at our culture and distorts, disfigures and attempts to destroy it. In looking at the African woman, European colonialism did not see a cultured, educated, dignified, refined and trained person, a gentle mother who protects her child from a hostile environment. They claim to have seen a savage woman who restrained her offspring from committing suicide and from giving free reign to the child's evil instincts. They did not distinguish between a Kenyan, a Ghanaian, a Nigerian or a South African. They saw all of us as Africans and the African continent as being a haunt of savages, a continent riddled with superstitions, irrational beliefs founded on fear and ignorance, riddled with fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of god, a continent of cannibals. Now you can see where Paul Gilroy got his ideas about Africa.

So when the African intellectual proclaims the existence of a national culture, he is not doing so in the name of Benin or Zimbabwe, Botsawna or Niger, he affirms an African culture that is Pan African in scope and orientation. You will recall that in Cultural Unity, when Diop came to analyse the cultures of the peoples of the ice and the peoples of the sun, he started from the material base of society. Ngugi gives an example of how certain cultural practices developed. "Rites to bless the magic power of tools grew out of the practice of clearing forests, planting crops, tending and ripening, so that out of one seed buried in the ground came many seeds." Thus, "out of death, life sprouted through this mediation of the human hand and the tools it held." Fertility rites developed "out of the mysteries of cows and goats and to celebrate life oozing from earth or from beneath the thighs of humans and animals." There were rituals and ceremonies to mark the great family occasions, birth, circumcision, marriages and the burial of the dead. "All these experiences were acted out and led to the development of drama. In pre-colonial Africa, drama was part and parcel of the rhythm of daily and seasonal life of the community."

We have demonstrated that an African history and an African culture exist. Consequently, in the new African renaissance, how we present our history is important. For Kwame Nkrumah, "our history needs to be written as the history of our society, not as the story of European adventures. African society must be treated as enjoying its own integrity; its history must be a mirror of that society, and, the European contact must find its place in this history purely as an African experience, even if a crucial one, that is to say, the European contact needs to be assessed and judged from the point of view of the principles which give life to African society and from the point of view of the harmony and progress of this society."

For Fanon, those who write for the people ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure the hope and give it forms, he must take part in the action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle. So, to fight for national culture is in the first place a fight for liberation. This becomes a crucial task in the second African liberation and it is this, which will make the development of a national culture possible.

A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which a people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. Culture has to take its place at the heart of the struggle for liberation. It is not enough to talk about raising consciousness, what is important is the type of future we envisage, the kind of social relations we plan to set up and how we prepare for the future of humanity. For Fanon, "it is this that counts, everything else is mystification. It is around the peoples struggles that culture takes on substance, not around songs, poems or folklore." So, the most fervent and efficient means of defending African culture is "the most elementary, the most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism."

Inn summary, national liberation is a determinant of culture and develops within and through struggle. We have to develop a popular culture. We have to develop positive cultural values. We have to develop a national or Pan African culture. We have to develop technical, technological and scientific culture to aid the development of the productive forces. It is in the struggle for liberation that we show our African essence and it is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens it to the door of creativity.

So says Amilcar Cabral and so says Fanon and I can not say any better. Our culture is the source of our development. If we want to be free and to start developing again as a people, we must return to the source of our culture. This puts God at the centre with the instructions of practicing truth, justice and right; living in balance and harmony with God and nature; providing food, clothe, shelter and water to all so that no one is in want of the basic necessities of life.

African culture will bloom again and we can present the rest of the world with a paradigm of how humans can live in peace and harmony.

Lester Lewis

WHEN IT ALL HAPPENED....

1924 : Amílcar Cabral is born on September 12, in Bafatá, Guinea. 1943:  Finishes secondary schooling in Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente.
1945 : Is awarded a scholarship and begins his studies at the Agronomy Institute, in Lisbon.
1952 :Returns to Bissau under contract with the Agricultural and Forestry Services of Portuguese Guinea.
1955 : The Governor demands that he leave the colony;  Cabral goes to work in Angola; he joins the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). – 1956:  The African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde and Guinea (PAIGC) is founded in Bissau.
1960 :The PAIGC establishes a delegation in Conakry, capital of the Republic of Guinea; China gives support to the training of members of the PAIGC.
1963 :Open warfare breaks out on January 23, with an attack on the military installations at Tite, in southern Guinea-Bissau; the PAIGC sets up a northern battlefront in July.
1970 :Pope Paul VI grants an audience on July 1 to Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto and Marcelino dos Santos.  On November 22, the Governor of Guinea-Bissau decides to establish a “commando” operation to which he gives the name of “Mar Verde” (Green Sea), whose goal is to capture or eliminate the leaders of the PAIGC located in Conakry: it fails.
1973 :
Amílcar Cabral is assassinated in Conakry on January 20
.

Amílcar, at 17 and attends high school in Mindelo.  He does not yet feel confident enough to help his father in his crusade in favor of Cape Verde.  But, through his father, he has been made quite aware, since an early age, of all the problems that affect his country.

Amílcar has an assumed name.  He is Larbac.  That’s how he signs his love poems:  Quando Cupido acerta no alvo (When Cupid Hits the Bull’s-eye), Devaneios (Daydreams), Arte de Minerva (Minerva’s Art), among others.  The themes indicate classical influences.  His inspiration comes from the poets he studies in school:  Gonçalves Crespo, Guerra Junqueiro, Casimiro de Abreu.  Amílcar’s lyricism (Larbac is Cabral spelled backwards) is not noted for its originality.  It does, however, reveal a romantic sensitivity that is present in his adolescent prose writings, his short stories, annotations and commentaries, where we can already detect a strong awareness of what is happening and a desire to participate in the life of his island world.  A while later, in Lisbon, these feelings will become even stronger.