United States Still Strongarming ‘Democracy’ Onto Libya

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

In the spring of 1860, wealthy businessman Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could illegally kidnap and ship Africans from Africa to Mobile, Alabama, without being detected by federal officials. Fifty-two years earlier, the U.S. Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which ended the United States’ legal involvement in the international slave trade.

While transporting Africans to the United States for slavery was now prohibited, U.S. slave traders turned to the existing slave breeding industry, which grew after the ban on importing Africans.

But the story of the bet Meaher made, as well as the ship, “Clotilda,” he financed, and the descendants of the Africans brought to Mobile, Alabama, are the focus of a recently released Netflix documentary, “Descendant.”

Oral History

Kamau Sidiki, master diver and contributor to the Slave Wrecks Project, notes in the opening scenes of the documentary, “There were over 12,000 ships making over 40,000 voyages over 250 years of slave trade. To date, there are only five [slave] ships in maritime history in the database. Why is that?” It should be noted that Sidiki was crucial to finding and verifying the authenticity of the Brazilian slave ship, Sâo José Paquete de Africa.

Author Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” looms large in the documentary, as the focus of her novel was one of the captives aboard the “Clotilda,” Cudjo Lewis, born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. Lewis was the last living survivor of the “Clotilda” at the time Hurston wrote his account in 1931 (the book was only recently published in 2018).

It is through the words of Lewis, and the oral history of the enslaved ancestors passed down through the generations that they have kept alive the story of the lost slave ship. Oddly, it is through this oral history that the bet, the crime, and the attempt to cover it up are also conveyed and should lead viewers to wonder how much of your family’s oral history is just exaggerated family lore, or hidden history only revealed when the grandkids go to visit Grandma and Grandpa and ask them, “What happened back then?”

Videotapes from 25 years ago of the griots of Africatown, a community of the descendants three miles north of downtown Mobile, Alabama, recount not only the lore that is fact, but the terror campaign waged against them to silence them throughout generations about the crime of which their very existence is evidence. Griots are traveling poets, musicians and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.

‘One of the Africans’

The Black families of the now long-gone Africatown are the offspring of the last Africans brought to the United States. They identify themselves as “one of the Africans” with pride. They do this while recounting their connection to the formerly missing ship, the “Clotilda,” with righteous indignation at the forces that tried to silence the story and with hope that the physical connection to their ancestry would be found. It was impossible not to see the pride in these people.

The descendants of the “Clotilda” are connected to that ship and the continent it brought them from, just as they are connected to the land their ancestors are buried on, the land that they were admonished by those ancestors to never give up in this cruel new world to which they were brought.

The imprint of the family that carried out the crime marks Alabama today. Street signs and parks are named after the slave-owning Maeher family. The ancestral land of the first African stolen from their homeland, who had to buy land from their former slave owner to establish Africatown, is today surrounded on all sides by Maeher family-owned heavy industry that pollutes the air, water, and soil. The pollution has caused significant health problems for residents of Africatown.

The Larger System

In a way, “Descendant” is also a chronicle of how capitalism undergirded and evolved the slave trade. Just as capitalism kept Africans enslaved at the bottom for centuries during slavery to help develop the United States as a global economic powerhouse, it kept freedmen at the bottom for 100 more years under racist Jim Crow laws. And, today, the Black working class and poor are at the bottom.

There is no delineation between the past and the present in “Descendant,” and that is an accurate reflection of the relation of slavery and its atrocities to the present condition of the descendants of the “Clotilda,” and the rest of the descendants of Africans brought to this country to be enslaved. And the descendants reflect that throughline of history not only in keeping the history of the “Clotilda” alive, but also through their continued embrace of African culture. African dance is part of celebrations, spiritual rituals honor their ancestors, and their everyday wardrobe includes African dress and jewelry. They are African, and they are proud to be.

But “Descendant” also holds an important lesson to be aware of: When the powerful, who have suppressed the truth for centuries and have profited off of their continued oppression of others, can no longer avoid facing the truth once exposed, do not expect them to take any responsibility for their actions or offer fair compensation for the damage they have done. They will only offer empty platitudes and meaningless window dressing to the affected. Whatever tangible efforts materialize from any agreement between the aggrieved and their oppressors will always ultimately—in this capitalist system that they built their wealth of oppression upon—benefit those who have always held the power.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary;” and a Toward Freedom board member.

This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

Sixty years ago, on May 25, Ghana’s first prime minister and president, the anti-colonial revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah stood before 31 other heads of African states in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and declared, “[T]he struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence.”

“Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs…unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.”

“We must unite or perish,” Nkrumah had emphasized, recognizing that while countries across the African continent were “throwing off the yoke of colonialism,” these successes were “equally matched by an intense effort on the part of imperialism to continue the exploitation of our resources by creating divisions among us.”

Nkrumah was speaking at the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, striving, alongside other leaders, to build a Pan-Africanist vision of a continent united under a common currency, monetary zone, and central bank, and a united government and joint defense under an African High Command.

That these conditions did not materialize speaks to imperialism’s “intense effort” to suppress this vision. The coming decades would see African leaders assassinated and overthrown in coups backed by colonial powers for daring to envision a life of dignity for their people. Meanwhile, international financial institutions, dominated by these very forces, implemented brutal regimes of structural adjustment, sinking African countries further into debt and exploitation.

While the OAU eventually became the African Union (AU) and the African Liberation Day became Africa Day, May 25 still serves as a crucial day for progressive forces to connect the struggles for national liberation and Pan-Africanism of the 20th century to the present struggles against imperialism.

On this theme, Pan African Television hosted a discussion titled, “African Liberation Day: The State of the Struggle for Freedom” on May 25.

Recovering the History of Collective Liberation

The general secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), Kwesi Pratt Jnr. added, “The national liberation struggle is not over…even if that struggle was over… what about the ownership and exploitation of our resources for the sole purpose of enriching the bank accounts of the multinational corporations in the colonial metropolis?”

“The radical nature of this celebration [of African Liberation Day] is saying that we as African people came together to end exploitation…end colonialism…to continue to strive for stopping neocolonialism from taking its root on the African continent. That struggle is still ongoing,” said Kambale Musavuli, a leading activist and an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa.

“In some parts of the African continent, people still do not have independence…The people of Western Sahara are still under colonialism by Morocco. We have to make sure that they are liberated.”

African Liberation Day also recognizes that people across Africa threw off the yoke of imperialism through collective struggles. Dr. Vashna Jagarnath, a labor activist and director of Pan Africa Today, commented. “We all know the struggles we face 60 years later, we have been recolonized in different ways, through the debt crisis, through foreign policy, through military bases being allowed to be built on our continent and determining to us who it is we can have relationships with, that determine our local policy…”

“Our continent is in a crisis. So we need to recall our history of us liberating ourselves.”

The Addis Ababa meeting of 1963 had been decades in the making, preceded by the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, UK, in 1945 and the All-African People’s Conference in Ghana in 1958. However, these initiatives were also built on hundreds of years of struggle by the African people for freedom, “a part of the long march” from the days of the transatlantic slave trade, Pratt stressed.

This long history of liberation struggles and their collectivist orientation is not widely known by young people across Africa today, Musavuli said, calling this an “erasure of history.”

In reality, collectivism had closely informed the period of the struggle for independence for the DRC, and this took various forms—including the support provided by other African countries like the Central African Republic to the DRC. We must remember the fact that Pan-African activist T. Ras Makonnen had helped to get Patrice Lumumba to Ghana in 1958 and how the Mau Mau had gone from village to village in the country and screened films in 1960, Musavuli highlighted.

“The independence of Congo was not a national affair, it was a continental affair…We cannot talk about June 30 as Congolese independence, it was a Pan Africanist independence,” he said, reiterating the need for unity and a “Pan Africanism of the people.”

Internationalist Oppression, Internationalist Resistance

Speaking to the historic erasure of these links in the context of South African exceptionalism, Jagarnath said, “You are taught about the South African economy as if it is divorced from the rest of Africa, as if South Africa, which is a resource-rich country, is rich on its own, as if it was not migrant labor workers from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi working in our mines, without getting any compensation, to enrich the elites of our country.”

Even today, “for the South African capitalists who are exploiting and benefiting from Ghana… Why must they worry about the liberation of Ghanaians? They don’t need to tell Africans the role of Ghana in the history of our liberation… That is a dangerous story that will affect their profits.”

At a time when African Liberation Day is barely celebrated on the continent, including in Nkrumah’s own country of Ghana, Jagarnath noted that the reason was because the “political project had changed”.

“We as people give up our power to those in power and we let them dictate to us, and they change, and the changes that come into place are economic and political…they do not want us to be liberatory because if we have liberatory policies…if we remember the liberatory aspects of our history we will try to liberate ourselves from them, and this is not convenient because they are now making deals with each other to continue to exploit this continent.”

“So we have two sets of exploitation: the classical imperial exploitation that still comes from the imperial nations, but we also have our internal systems.”

It is this very nature of exploitation that determines that the form of struggle must be internationalist: “The struggle for national liberation in Africa has always been an internationalist effort,” Pratt said. He elaborated that this was due to the fact that the very division of Africa had been an internationalist effort, namely the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, when colonial powers partitioned the African continent among themselves for the purposes of extraction and exploitation.

“Our enemies are united, and we have no chance of succeeding against that united force if we [ourselves] refuse to unite,” he said. There is a rich history of this internationalist unity, not just within the continent. Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara set up a camp in Ghana to train fighters who were engaged in parts of Eastern Africa and South Africa. The internationalist unity was also reflected in Cuba’s armed support in the fight against apartheid and the consolidation of the independence of Angola and Namibia, Pratt added.

We can also see this in the connected struggles for Black liberation in the United States and the liberation against imperialist oppressors on the African continent, stated panelist Makayla Marie, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States.

Internationalism remains a necessity today, the panel discussion emphasized, “You cannot support the independence of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic without supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people for national independence against apartheid colonial occupation,” Pratt added.

“What we are fighting is the scourge of capitalism in its worst forms, at this imperialist stage, and we need to unite as African people…as socialists…as revolutionaries to achieve victory, which is inevitable.”

This was also underscored by Musavuli in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where “it is not just imperialists but also other African countries, who are exploiting the country … They are only able to do it because they see the DRC as separate. They do not see us united in the struggle.”

These issues inevitably lead to a key issue that the panelists addressed—that of a general crisis of political legitimacy of current governments and of the use of divisive politics which worked to obscure the common reality “that we are all oppressed by the same oppressor,” as Marie said.

“People, be it in the U.S. or the African continent, have a difficulty right now choosing their leaders, and they must unite and challenge the forces that be,” Musavuli stated. This necessitates the need for mass-based and mass-led collective struggles for a “true independence,” the panelists reiterated.

“These Western countries after colonizing us, enslaving us, and stealing our resources, are now coming back to us and telling us that if we want to develop, we have to be like them and follow the capitalist path to development. That path started from slavery, passed through classical colonialism, and has today arrived at neocolonialism,” Pratt said.

“We have arrived at a situation in history where the only viable option available to us is the self-reliant path to development, the ownership of our resources for our own development… and that option inevitably leads us to the path of socialism.”

“Socialism is the only path to liberation from exploitation, from oppression, from poverty.”