Frantz Fanon’s 60th death anniversary is an occasion to explore the impact of the Martiniquais writer and psychiatrist, who has influenced many a revolutionary with his study of the psychology of the oppressed.
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.
“The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm… and our people stopped dead… it was the master… I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season… I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.” —Aimé Césaire
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of one of the greatest thinkers to have emerged from the ranks of the oppressed, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961).
Fanon’s contributions are timeless. As long as white supremacy and neocolonialism remain in the driver’s seat of human relations, Fanon’s thought will continue to arm the colonized in the Battle of Ideas.
The Radicalization of Fanon
Born and raised in what is still France’s Caribbean island colony of Martinique, Fanon was exposed to and shaped by the everyday class and race relations that characterized the island in the early 20th century. Forced to join a segregated column of Black troops, he fought in World War II. Upon continuing his studies in post-war France, he came face to face with the racism that dominates the European world. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon reflects on coming of age in a world, where, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” At the time of publication, Fanon had just turned 27.
In 1953, the Martiniquais psychiatrist was assigned to Algeria, where he treated patients who were severely traumatized by the violence French colonialism had spun into motion. He met Dr. Pierre Chaulet, a French doctor who secretly treated members of the guerrilla resistance, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who had survived torture and captivity. “Viscerally close to his patients whom he regarded as primarily victims of the system he was fighting,” Fanon immediately became a cadre of the Algerian Revolution.1
By 1956, Fanon’s consciousness no longer allowed him to oversee operations at Blida Hospital in Algeria. In an influential resignation letter that moved many on the left, he wrote:
“There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”
The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon produced a prodigious amount of intellectual work. Toward the African Revolution is a compilation of his writings on forging African and Third World unity with the Algerian Revolution at the vanguard of this process.2A Dying Colonialism explores how the Algerian people threw off their internalized inferiority complex by turning away from the colonizer’s cultural practices and embracing their own traditions.3
He dedicated his last days to dictating the final ideas of his most moving work to his wife, Josie. Six decades after it first hit the streets of Paris, The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World is as accurate and explosive as ever. The title comes from the line “Arise, ye wretched of the earth” from “The Internationale,” the Second Communist International’s official anthem, and from Haitian communist intellectual Jacques Romain’s poem, “Sales négres:”
too late it will be too late
on the cotton plantations of Louisiana
in the sugar cane fields of the Antilles
to halt the harvest of vengeance
of the negroes
the niggers
the filthy negroes
it will be too late I tell you
for even the tom-toms will have learned the language
of the Internationale
for we will have chosen our day
day of the filthy negroes
filthy Indians
filthy Hindus
filthy Indo-Chinese
filthy Arabs
filthy Malays
filthy Jews
filthy proletarians.
And here we are arisen
All the wretched of the earth
all the upholders of justice
marching to attack your barracks
your banks
like a forest of funeral torches
to be done
once
and
for
all
with this world
of negroes
niggers
filthy negroes.4
How many revolutionaries the world over became enraptured in his eloquent portrayal of the “Manichaean” differences between the neighborhoods of the rich white colonizer in Algiers and the casbah (ghettoes) of the colonized?
Here within this classic, that all revolutionaries have a duty to study, reside some of the most poignant prose on how the oppressed internalize violence and project it onto themselves:
“Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native, for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother.”
Based on his treatment of patients in the Blida Hospital, which today bears his name, Fanon’s final chapter, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” examines the “ineffaceable wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.”5
The fundamental pillar of the book, however, was Fanon’s conviction that the colonized could only shed their fear and shame through a baptism of revolutionary violence. Fanon’s former high school teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire, had a profound influence on him. Césaire’s words cited at the beginning of this article from his epic poem on slave liberation, “And the Dogs were Silent,” set the tone for the Fanonian worldview. Despite a chorus of liberal complaints from the West that Fanon was “too violent,” Fanon concluded:
“As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs, there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.”
‘You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can Never Kill the Revolution’
Though Fanon died of leukemia when he was only 36, revolutionaries the world over have picked up his fallen weapons, his ideas, and applied them to their own particular national liberation struggles. Fanon’s observations and thesis continue to mold the thinking of awakening generations in life-and-death struggles from Johannesburg to Gaza to Harlem.
As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, the Black Panthers were Fanonists. His audio essay and tribute to Fanon discuss what the psychiatrist’s anti-colonial perspicacity meant to a 15-year-old Mumia, who has spent 40 years in prison. In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale talks about the influence of Fanon on the young Panthers and how Huey P. Newton read the book seven times.6
Malcolm X, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Nelson Mandela all traveled to independent Algeria, which emerged as an epicenter of Pan-Africanism and internationalism. Paulo Freire stated that he had to rewrite Pedagogy of the Oppressed after reading The Wretched of the Earth. Hamza Hamouchene, president of the London-based Algerian Solidarity Campaign, discusses in CounterPunch what he deems Fanon’s unique contributions to understanding nationalism, the national bourgeoisie, political education and universalism, among other themes.
It is important to highlight that Fanon was more than just a doctor and writer.
At his graveside, Vice-president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) Krim Belkacem emphasized Fanon’s diverse roles in the FLN’s total war. Beginning in 1954, Fanon worked as a writer, editor and propagandist for FLN periodicals Résistance algérienne and El Moudjahid. He also was a researcher; lecturer; a FLN representative in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Guinea and Congo; as well as a clandestine militant.
Looking at the work of Karl Marx, Steve Biko, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter and other examples of revolutionaries/intellectuals, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research wrote a tribute to Fanon because of how he embodied the praxis of a radical or organic intellectual: “The world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle.”
Fanon survived an assassination attempt, exile in Tunis and was staring down a crippling disease that he refused to talk about but that ultimately claimed his life. Aware he was dying, he pledged, “I will not cease my activities while Algeria still continues the struggle and I will go on with my task until my dying day.”7
Today, it is more necessary than ever to study Fanon to understand the psychological, emotional and spiritual damage wrought by neo-colonialism on the peoples of Africa, the Americas, Asia and what the Black Panthers referred to as the United States’ internal colonies. Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth on African and human liberation begs the same questions six decades later:
“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe [U.S.A.] where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of everyone of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.”
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.
Notes 1 Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 2 Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 3 Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. 1965. 4 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 5 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 6 Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Random House: 1970. 7 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012.
Remembering Randall Robinson: Black internationalist, anti-imperialist and friend of Haiti
Editor’s Note: The following was originally published in Black Agenda Report.
On March 24, 2023, Randall Robinson died at the age of 81. In his many obituaries, he will be remembered as a “human rights advocate, author, and law professor,” as well as “founder of TransAfrica,” and author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. Robinson became a household name after the organization he founded in 1977, TransAfrica, spearheaded public protests against South African apartheid in front of the South African embassies in the early 1980s, helping to give voice to the international anti-apartheid movement.
Once one of the largest African American human rights and social justice organizations, TransAfrica was founded on a vision where Africans and people of African descent are equal participants in the global world order. It took as a point of departure the belief that the freedom of African Americans is bound up with the “emancipation of all African people.” As such, TransAfrica’s mission was to serve as a “major research, education and organizing institution for the African-American community, offering constructive analysis concerning U.S. policy as it affects Africa and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America.”
For some of us, what we remember most about Robinson is his enduring support of Haiti and Haitian people. He supported Haiti’s reassertion of sovereignty and democracy with the 1990 election of Jean Bertrand Aristide. After Aristide’s first overthrow—after only seven months in office—by a U.S.-backed coup d’etat, Robinson waged a 27-day hunger strike to both force the reinstatement of Aristide and to protest racist U.S. policies against Haitian migrants.
Perhaps the most enduring memories of Robinson’s steadfast support for Haiti and Haitian people come with the phone call to Democracy Now, in the early hours of March 1, 2004, after U.S. marines and the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Luis Moreno, went to Aristide’s house and forced him and family members onto an unmarked plane that then flew them out of the country. Robinson said:
“[Aristide] called me on a cell phone that was slipped to him by someone… The [U.S.] soldiers came into the house… They were taken at gunpoint to the airport and put on a plane. His own security detachment was taken as well and put in a separate compartment of the plane… The president was kept with his wife with the soldiers with the shades of the plane down… The president asked me to tell the world that it is a coup, that they have been kidnapped.”
In 2001, Robinson permanently left the United States to move to St. Kitts, the Caribbean island from which hailed wife, Hazel Ross-Robinson. He had become disillusioned with the retrograde, unjust, and incorrigible U.S. political system:
“America is a huge fraud, clad in narcissistic conceit and satisfied with itself, feeling unneeded of any self-examination nor responsibility to right past wrongs, of which it notices none.”
To mark Robinson’s passing and to remember his legacy, we reprint below a 1983 interview from Claude Lewis’s short-lived journal, The National Leader. The interview foregrounds Robinson’s deep understanding of global Black politics and the sharpness of his anti-imperialist analysis–especially concerning the role of the U.S. as the world’s hegemon. Robinson’s analysis, alongside his courage, his integrity, and his love of Black people, will be missed.
Randall Robinson: Third World Advocate
TransAfrica is a Washington-based lobby organization that often takes strong, progressive positions on African and Caribbean questions. Randall Robinson, a Harvard trained lawyer and farmer Congressional Hill staffer, is executive director of the six-year-old organization which now has 10,000 members. During an interview with Managing Editor Joe Davidson he castigated President Reagan for “the vileness of this administration’s policy toward the Black world” and the close relationship between the United States and South Africa, “the most vicious government this world has seen since Nazi Germany.”
Joe Davidson. How would you assess the level of involvement of the Black community in foreign affairs? Many people have complained over the years, or at least we have been stereotyped over the years as having interest only in domestic issues. What’s your experience?
Randall Robinson: I think it has changed fundamentally in the last 30 years. The post-civil rights movement, foreign affairs activity of the Black community has shown a dramatic increase of interest, and I think that is in large part because we’ve made some gains and we can think about some other things so that we don’t have to dwell so much on domestic concerns, but we can still monitor and express ourselves on domestic concerns and at the same time be involved in foreign policy concerns. I think it was a myth and untrue to suggest in the first place that we were not interested in foreign affairs. One looks back through the record; you can go back as far as Martin Delany, and Frederick Douglass, and Garvey, and James Weldon Johnson, and the NAACP, through the ’30s and before, to show a strong interest in foreign affairs. People like Alpheus Hunton in the ’30s and ’40s, and W.E.B. DuBois, of course, were instrumental in their foreign affairs involvement. I think there’s a more general popular involvement now on the part of the Black community and certainly on the part of Black institutions. I can’t think of a single Black national organization that at its annual convention does not take a position on a variety of issues, particularly those concerning U.S. policy toward Africa and the Caribbean.
JD: A number of people have expressed, informally, some dismay that there was not more of an outpouring of protest—on the street protest—against the Grenada invasion. Do you think that the level of protest against that was up to what you would expect or up to what you would want?
RR: I think it was up to what we would expect. There are a variety of reasons for that. It was a very complex situation and I think protest in the United States may have exceeded protest in the Caribbean itself. One has to remember that polls in Grenada – well not in Grenada but in Trinidad and In Jamaica and other places – showed that by and large Caribbean people supported the invasion. The question is “Why and why were there not more protests in the United States?” First of all, I think that one cannot diminish or underestimate the impact that the killing of Maurice Bishop had on the levels of protest that we saw expressed in the wake of the invasion. The killing of Maurice Bishop, and Jacqueline Creft, and Unison Whiteman and the others were at first met by extreme reactions of anger, including my own. Maurice, Unison and others involved were both personal friends, political colleagues, and people who were very decent, idealistic human beings who dedicated their lives to the betterment of the lot of their people in Grenada. And they were summarily executed by people who took it upon themselves to wrest power away from those in whom it was duly vested. So, the Reagan administration saw an opportunity—with the successors to Bishop stripped of support—to invade; and they took that opportunity. There were many in Trinidad and Jamaica who were interested in seeing Maurice avenged without thinking about the implications of the act of the avenger. In addition to which many were confused by the invitation on the part of the Eastern Caribbean States to have the United states join with them in the invasion. So, all of these things served to muddle public reaction in the United States. Particularly given the fact that most Americans don’t know very much about anything west of Los Angeles or east of Washington, D.C. And ignorance, coupled with affection for Maurice, the barbarity of the action of his and his cabinet ministers’ elimination all taken together made for a dampened reaction to the invasion in the United States.
JD: What should be done now with Grenada? The invasion is fait accompli, it’s history, Maurice Bishop is dead; he can’t be brought back. What do you think should be done now?
RR: Well I think first, Maurice can’t be brought back, but as (former Jamaican Prime Minister) Michael Manley told me in a long discussion we had two weeks ago, “This may have produced a hundred Maurice Bishops.” Maurice Bishop did not live in vain; he left a sterling record of accomplishment and commitment to be emulated in time to come. And one has to believe that in Grenada itself, a few years from now, that Maurice Bishop having been martyred will arise as a memory and life model to be cherished by young Grenadians. I think that the first thing to do is to get the United States out and to get a self-determination of that nation’s sovereignty restored and democratic institutions restored. I don’t mean democratic institutions certainly in the way that Reagan and his people mean them, but institutions in which Grenadians themselves broadly participate in ways they see fit, meeting their own needs. So that means getting the U.S. out. That means to have the government that follows on not bullied into this policy or that policy by the mammoth to the north. The reason the U.S. invaded is what causes us concern in the first place. We know the invasion had nothing to do with the safety of American lives, but had everything to do with the Grenadian leadership not doing what they were told to do; for developing friendships as self-determination prerogatives allow nations to develop, with Cuba and with the Soviet Union but also with Europe and with the Western Bloc. Grenada was truly non-aligned. One must fight to preserve for future Grenadian government the same prerogatives of self-determination and sovereignty. It is up to them and them alone to determine what kind of political and economic system that they want to have and what kinds of relationships they want to develop with countries in the region and outside of the region, Eastern or Western Bloc countries. And failing that, what we have is a de facto restoration of colonialism in Grenada. We in the United States who are concerned about these things must make certain that the United States is not allowed to de facto re-colonize that country.
JD: You hosted Maurice Bishop in this country in May. There was a big dinner for him, your annual dinner at which he spoke. During that visit, he also met with members of the Reagan administration. It had been suggested by some that he was attempting to move closer to the United States. Is that true?
RR: He was attempting to develop a rapprochement with the United States in the same fashion that Cuba and any number of other nations in the hemisphere have attempted to do. “Move closer,” suggests that he wanted an alliance with the United States different from their friendships with other countries. They wanted normalized relations, they wanted trade, they wanted a diminution of the hostility that existed between the two countries. His trip here was an olive branch and he was rebuffed. He came and asked for a meeting with President Reagan (and was) refused, asked for a meeting with Secretary (of State George) Shultz and was refused, and was offered a meeting with the American ambassador to the OAS, Mittendorf – of course that was a rather gratuitous and harsh slap in the face to have a head of state meet with the American ambassador to the OAS – and in the last analysis he was given a meeting with William Clark, the National Security Council advisor and was rebuffed in that meeting. So that the Maurice Bishop that the Reagan administration now describes as “the martyred of the New Jewel Movement” was put in a position of weakness by the same administration that refused to normalize relations with him. Maurice did not want a lopsided foreign policy that saw him locked into relationships with eastern countries without relationships of the same sort with western nations. Certainly the Europeans responded in a sensible fashion, because the airport there and their development program have been assisted by the British and the other European economic community countries. Only the United States, the big bully of the hemisphere, treated Grenada in this fashion.
JD: Let’s move across the ocean to southern Africa. The Commonwealth nations, including two members of the contact group—the western contact group, Canada and Britain—recently said that the United States is at fault for there being no settlement to the Namibian question. This is something that you have said for a long time. “The issue of the Cubans in Angola is a phoney issue,” you’ve said and others. But now because the Commonwealth and because members of the contact group are coming out and saying that too, do you think it will change Reagan administration policy on Namibia?
RR: No, I don’t think anything will change Reagan administration policy. The only way to change Reagan administration policy is to get a new tenant at the White House, and we’ve got to dedicate ourselves to making sure that’s done next year. First of all, one has to make clear that the Reagan administration never had the independence of Namibia at the top of its agenda. That was simply a sort of smoke screen behind which the Reagan administration was cultivating a closer relationship with the Republic of South Africa. South Africa in Reagan eyes, of course, is the guardian of Western interests in that part of the world. And so the United States is much more concerned about the containment of what it calls “the spread of communism” in southern Africa than it was about the interests and freedom of the people of Namibia. They’ve been subordinated. And if there were, two months ago, any chance of persuading the people of Angola that they could do without Cuban assistance I think the invasion of Grenada completely dashed any faith they might have in U.S. good faith. The Angolans have asked for a long time should they send the Cubans home. The Cubans, who together with their own forces, are all that stand between them and a South African toppling of their government. They’ve asked who would help them with their security concerns, who would protect them from South African troops; and the United States has now answered by demonstrating that it has no more concern for the sovereignty of a small developing nation than do the South Africans. So how is the Angolan government in Luanda to put any faith in any assurances that come out of Washington after this nation has violated the OAS charter, the United Nations charter, international law, and its own domestic law in invading Grenada in the way that it did?
JD: Chester Crocker, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, sees constructive evolutionary change in southern Africa. At the same time, the policy of constructive engagement has brought about an increase in cross-border raids, an increase in forced relocations and a general crackdown on the opponents of apartheid including recently a number of whites who have been supportive of the aims of the African National Congress. The relationship between the Reagan administration and South Africa appears to be firming up apartheid. Is there anything that can be done other than getting the Reagan administration out to change that?
RR: Mr. Crocker is not stupid. He sees South Africa with the same eyes that you do. South Africans are very pleased with the responses of this administration to its activities and clearly the administration in Pretoria has moved to the right both in its relations with its neighbors as well as in its domestic policy since the Reagan administration has been in power.
Again, let’s restate the basic premise here that the United States has no intention under the Reagan leadership of changing the configuration of power in southern Africa. It does not want to dramatically reshape the sort of power structure of South Africa. It likes it perfectly fine, likes white supremacy perfectly all right. Because it is that white leadership that is so virulently anti-Communist and so much in tune with Reagan geopolitical visions of how the world ought to be ordered.
I think one can do some things to temper this kind of right wing zealousness on the part of the Reagan administration before a turn in government, but that requires at the same time an enormous effort on the part of Americans to demonstrate their displeasure with this kind of alliance that these people have formed with the South Africans. At the same time there are a good many things, Joe, that we are doing with the Congress that the Reagan administration would be hard put to turn back. One, there’s the bill offered by Rep. William Gray of Philadelphia to prohibit any new American investment in South Africa. That is a part of the Export Administration Act. Now, that passed in the House. There is no counterpart language in the Senate Export Administration Bill. But we go to conference in January, on the bill; and to keep the language in we have to persuade the Senate conferees, particularly a Republican or two, that this language is important to us. Now once we get this passed, it would be very difficult for the Reagan administration or President Reagan to veto the Export Administration Act.
One of the key people that we have to sway on this, on the conference committee is going to be Senator (John) Heinz of Pennsylvania. So we have to concentrate our lobbying on Senator Heinz and the others who are going to be on that conference committee to let them know how important this legislation is to the Black leadership and sensitive white leadership in this country. In addition, there’s the Solarz Bill that does one thing I’m not particularly interested in and opposed, but two things I very much support. It would codify, make mandatory the Sullivan Principles. Now, Rev. Leon Sullivan and I have worked very closely together on a number of things. We just happen to disagree on the strength and importance and usefulness of the Sullivan Principles. But he supports the Gray Bill and has been shoulder-to-shoulder with us on prohibition of new investment. In addition to which the Solarz Bill would prohibit the sale of Krugerrands, South African gold pieces, in the United States and would further prohibit American bank loans to the South African government. So those are two important elements of that legislation. This is also a part of the Export Administration Act and in conference we have to retain this.
We can’t have two of the elements chipped away with just the Sullivan Principles left standing. Again, Senator Heinz and others will be important in this context. Lastly, of course there is the IMF (International Monetary Fund) bill that we are going to see as a part of it anti-apartheid language. Not the language that we wanted which would mean no support possible for any American vote for an IMF loan to South Africa. But we do have language now that calls for a demonstration from the administration that South Africans have taken action to significantly reduce apartheid before getting such a loan and calling upon the South Africans to go into the private capital market before going to the IMF in the first place, and then requiring the Treasury—the Secretary of the Treasury—21 days in advance of any intent to vote for a loan for South Africa to come to the Congress and to demonstrate that these conditions have been met. Now, President Reagan will have to sign the IMF bill.
So what I’m suggesting, Joe, is that there are some things that we’ve been able to do through the Congress as parts of bills that the administration wants that net some real progress for us. But in terms of expecting anything more from this administration, of an anti-apartheid fashion; no, we’d be dreaming to expect that. These people very much favor what’s going on in South Africa.
“Randall Robinson: Third World Advocate,” The National Leader: The Weekly Newspaper Linking the Black Community Nationwide 2 no. 32 (December 15, 1983)
Lake and volcano in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda / credit: Wikipedia/Neil Palmer
Rwanda is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and is ranked second in Africa as the easiest place to do business. In addition, this landlocked country boasts the world’s record for female representation in parliament. And it’s the only African country that manufactures “Made in Africa” smartphones.
These milestones make for impressive reading in the Western world, so accustomed to morbid news from the most corrupt region of the world.
This has also led major global brands including the world’s biggest car manufacturer, the world’s biggest nuclear company by foreign orders, a major U.S. multinational telecommunications company plus a retinue of other global corporations to set up shop in a country the size of the U.S. state of Maryland.
In the paternalistic eyes and hearts of foreign development partners in Africa, Rwanda is obsequiously referred to as the “Singapore of Africa,” a moniker that gives the impression that all is hunky-dory in this “land of a thousand hills.”
Rwanda’s economic and social accomplishments—while impressive—mask the underbelly of one of the world’s cruelest states, led by Paul Kagame.
Here, freedom of expression is muzzled. Extrajudicial killings are institutionalized. Show trials are routinely encouraged. Forced disappearances are embraced, while private businesses are forcibly seized by a regime that operates like the Nazi Gestapo.
Despite evidence of Kagame ordering his political opponents to be murdered, arrested, jailed, kidnapped, assassinated and tortured, the international community has continued to turn the other way. Why is that the case in Rwanda, but not in countries like Ethiopia, where U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called for a ceasefire to allow for humanitarian aid to flow into the Tigray region?
Rwandan President Paul Kagame / credit: cmonionline
The President and the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) have built and fine-tuned over the decades a totalitarian police state in which criticism of the government, or any semblance of dissent, is criminalized and often results in death for those who dare to speak out, said Jeffrey Smith, founding director of Vanguard Africa. He told TF in an email exchange, “There is no independent media, nor independent human rights groups or a political opposition that are allowed the minimum space to operate. The ruling RPF, in essence, has been wholly conflated with the state,” says Smith.
The 1994 genocide killed about 800,000 people drawn mainly from the minority Tutsi community, including moderate Hutus, while the rest of the world silently looked on. But Rwanda has since experienced an economic recovery that has been inextricably linked to Kagame, who officially took power in 2000.
In a controversial 2015 constitutional referendum, Rwandans voted overwhelmingly to allow Kagame, 63, to stand again for office beyond the end of his second term, which ended in 2017. He won elections held the same year with nearly 99 percent of the vote. In theory, he could run twice again, keeping him in power until 2034. His current term ends in 2024.
So why does the Western world play blind and deaf to the excess exhibited by Kagame? In other words, why the complicity in crimes and misdeeds in Rwanda ever since the end of the genocide?
“Rwanda has performed exceedingly well on the economic front. It’s seen as a success story in a continent that is dotted with malfunctioning states,” Lewis Mudge, the Central Africa Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) told TF in a telephone interview. “The international donor community loves a good story and Rwanda serves as an example.”
The United States and the United Kingdom, like other Western governments, did not intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Nonetheless, both U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair later emerged as moralists and humanitarian interventionists, claiming human rights as one of the guiding principles for U.S. and British leadership in the world. This argument has since been used to bomb Yugoslavia, and invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
However, a U.S. diplomat quoted in the New York Times in an article aptly titled, “The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman,” explained the reason the West disregarded the atrocities happening in Rwanda. “You put your money in, and you get results out. We needed a success story, and he was it.”
French President Emmanuel Macron / credit: The White House
In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to Rwanda, formerly a French colony, in a gesture largely aimed at fixing a glacial relationship that had broken down as a result of the latter having backed the former extremist government in Rwanda, including supporting and training its military, which committed genocide.
In addition, France is determined to win back its influence in former French colonies in Africa, including in Rwanda. Some have begun cooperating with other powers, among them China and Turkey, said Arrey E. Ntui, a researcher with the International Crises Group (ICG).
“The French Government is currently not that popular in Africa as a result of its past exploitative history with African states,” said Ntui. “The current leadership in Africa is assertive and takes no prisoners. This calls for France to tread carefully because there are emerging nations that are willing to partner with Africa without a condescending attitude. So it would have been foolhardy, for example, for Macron to censure his Rwandan counterpart on account of real or imagined human rights abuses happening in Rwanda.”
Since his inauguration in May 2017, Macron has visited 18 African countries out of 62 states he has so far visited, a sign that he is determined to claw back the influence France once had when it counted 20 countries as its colonies within the African continent.
But should the world expect an insurgency anytime soon in Rwanda?
Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, a former presidential contestant who has been jailed for 15 years for daring to challenge Kagame told TF the Kagame government took power after a war and genocide.
“I would say that all these crimes committed in our country have traumatized Rwandans,” Umuhoza said. “Moreover, there is no room for dissenting voices in Rwanda. If one criticizes the government they are immediately labeled as the enemy of the state. Under such circumstances, people live in constant fear of expressing themselves. But this silence worries me a lot because it can lead to implosion in Rwanda one day.”
U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends Report published every five years says the world is “at a critical juncture in human history” and warns that a number of countries are at high risk of becoming failed states by 2030—Rwanda being one of them.
Charles Wachira is a foreign correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya, and is formerly an East Africa correspondent with Bloomberg. He covers issues including human rights, business, politics and international relations.
Hundreds of activists took to the streets on March 4, uplifting the anti-imperialist women’s movement / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of mostly women gathered at Catholic University’s Maloney Hall during the first weekend of March to convene the first U.S.-based conference of a worldwide grassroots women’s network called the International Women’s Alliance, as well as help strengthen its fledgling U.S. chapter.
The conference kicked off early Saturday morning with speeches by Washington, D.C., “situationers,” Jacqueline Luqman and Madhvi Bahl.
Luqman, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace as well as IWA member organization Pan-African Community Action, gave an overview of how the U.S. government has oppressed Africans, starting from the late 1800s, when former slaves migrated from the U.S. South to Washington, D.C.. The U.S. Congress must approve all legislation passed by the district council and it controls the district’s budget. The U.S. President appoints the district’s judges, while it has no voting representation in Congress.
“It is because we are still a majority Black city, just barely. Forty percent Black with a 30 percent white population that is growing rapidly, due to continued rapacious gentrification,” Luqman told the crowd, which responded throughout her 18-minute presentation with hoots, hollers and applause. Luqman, also Toward Freedom‘s Board Secretary, left the mic to a standing ovation. Her talk can be found 28 minutes into this livestream playback.
Meanwhile, Bahl of the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network described how migrants’ human rights are being violated as they are used in a political tug of war.
Filipino activists shared about the experience of Filipina women in the U.S. and abroad, underscoring the importance of internationalism / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
IWA Chairperson Azra Talat Sayeed represents Roots of Equity, a Pakistan-based group that organizes peasants, women and religious minorities in Pakistan. She described the poverty in her country, which she connected to U.S. interference. In Pakistan, 44 percent of children under the age of five are experiencing stunted growth due to lack of food.
“My country is bleeding,” Sayeed said. “It’s a massacre.”
Later, Monisha Rios, a U.S. military veteran and psychologist who lives in Puerto Rico, described the impact of U.S. militarization on women around the world and the effect of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.
Then a panel discussion featured women on the front lines of the working-class movement in the United States.
Edith Saldano of Starbucks Workers United spoke of workplace harassment that led to her radicalization. “Y’all are going to cry with me today,” the Santa Cruz, California-based worker said as her face grew red. She said it is normal for customers to physically attack workers. Saldano described one incident where someone threw a banana at a barista.
The Starbucks worker identified three issues that threaten employed women: Harassment, unstable working conditions (including schedules) and workplace injuries.
“It’s consistently putting working women in survival mode.”
Saldano said already about 100 workers who have been organizing unions in Starbucks coffee shops have been fired and subsequently blacklisted from working at other company stores.
“How do we give the working class a solution?” Saldano asked.
The panel discussion also featured Christina Brown, the sister of 39-year-old Poushawn Brown, a Virginia-based Amazon employee who had no medical training, but was switched to a role that involved testing workers for COVID-19 on a daily basis. However, Christina said her sister was not provided with the proper protective gear nor with hazard pay. A few months after she began testing workers, Poushawn returned home on January 7, 2021, not feeling well. The shock came the next morning.
“She did not wake up,” Christina told conference attendees.
Now, Christina raises her sister’s 14-year-old daughter and is engaged in a legal battle with Amazon.
“I’m up against a trillion-dollar company all by myself. It’s just me doing it. I can’t stop.”
Panel moderator Monica Moorehead, who helped found the IWA, remarked on the recent U.S. federal government’s move to eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food to poor households. The majority of recipients are people of color.
“This is a slow genocide,” Moorehead remarked.
Katie Comfort of International Women’s Alliance spoke on March 4 in front of the White House, calling on organizations to join IWA and the anti-imperialist women’s movement / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
The International Women’s Alliance also introduced a proposed campaign, “Meet Women’s Needs; Stop Corporate Greed!” This campaign is designed to address the failings of the U.S. government to meet the needs of women and their families, and demand change. This comes in addition to previously launched ongoing campaigns, “War and Militarism” and “Women Over Profit.”
The alliance kicked off in 2010 in Montreal in response to the International League of People’s Struggle’s 2008 call for a women’s conference to be held. 2010 was the centennial year International Toiling Women’s Day.
Demands to meet women’s needs over corporate profit were amplified throughout the March 4 mobilization / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
Later on during the first day of the conference, hundreds of women and their supporters started rallying at the Philippine embassy in Washington, D.C.
There, Vivian Flanagan from Terrapin Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (TerpCHRP) at the University of Maryland College Park, spoke to the impacts of war on women. They focused on one weapons manufacturer found on their campus, Lockheed Martin, and shared how its former executive vice-president, Linda Gooden, is on the Board of Regents that oversees all of Maryland’s public universities.
“Let Linda’s ‘professional success’ at the expense of trafficked, exploited and martyred women affected by Lockheed Martin’s war machine be a reminder of the treachery of liberal feminism,” she said.
After marching to the World Bank, organizations from Palestinian Youth Movement, Katarungan DC, CODEPINK, and spoke about the World Bank’s role in suppressing poor countries through foreign aid that perpetuates indebtedness. Raymond Diaz from Katarungan DC shared about their parents’ migration experience.
“Much like many children of poor immigrants, my Mexican parents left everything they knew when NAFTA came in, driving thousands of laborers out of their homeland and becoming a part of the working class in this country.”
When the march arrived at the White House, speakers from United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Anti-Imperialist Action at University of Maryland Baltimore County, International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS), African National Women’s Organization, Resist U.S. Led War, and IWA emphasized the call for international solidarity.
At the White House, Katie Comfort of IWA called for the unity of women and urged for the need to organize.
“Women are uniting around the world against U.S. imperialism and [women in the] the U.S. [have] to be a part of that movement. The International Women’s Alliance takes seriously the call to build IWA Americas not just here in the U.S., but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, to unite women around the world, to understand our common enemy is the U.S., the U.S. state, the U.S. military, who kills and rapes our women. So, we are here today to say the movement has to start now. We are not just here this weekend to speak out about it one time, but to keep speaking out about it until this House belongs to the People. We are here to declare Women over Profit.”
