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
havent
felt the passage of time.
They
remain in your dreams
- your
childrens 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. Thats
how he signs his love poems: Quando Cupido
acerta no alvo (When Cupid Hits the Bulls-eye),
Devaneios (Daydreams), Arte de Minerva (Minervas
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. Amílcars
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.
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