The annual anti-imperialism march in Washington, D.C., on African Liberation Day was a rallying point for various groups and organizations. On May 27, 1972, an estimated 60,000 people gathered for the first march in cities across the United States, the Caribbean and Canada / Rasasi Zachariah Dais
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from the Black Alliance for Peace’s AFRICOM Watch Bulletin.
African Liberation Day (ALD), celebrated on May 25, has its origins in the long struggle of African people to liberate themselves from European domination and white supremacy. It is a time in which we emphasize our oneness as a people with a common past, common set of problems and a common future.
The capture of millions of African people, who were enslaved and introduced into the Western Hemisphere as property and commodities, is the backdrop upon which we commemorate ALD. The colonial-capitalist system imposes a divide between the millions of Africans kidnapped to the Americas during the Transatlantic slave trade and those left on the African continent.
ALD is a vehicle to continue to highlight the problems, challenges and the future of African people everywhere. The challenges facing Africa and African people worldwide require that we remain dedicated to the cause of Africa’s liberation. We can continue to showcase that dedication by actively participating in ALD activities held throughout the world.
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
Gamal Nkrumah is a Ghanaian journalist, a Pan-Africanist and an editor of Al Ahram Weekly newspaper. He is the eldest son of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Could you speak about the history of African Liberation Day?
Gamal Nkrumah: May 25th is celebrated as African Liberation Day. The day marks the foundation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963. The formation of the OAU was a key moment in a centuries-long struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.
For more than 500 years, African people have been dehumanized and degraded, with their bodies and labor commodified to enrich a ruling elite. From slave labor on cotton and sugar plantations to the extraction of gold and diamonds from the earth, the development of Europe and the Americas happened through the rapid exploitation of African people.
Through the collective experiences of deprivation, African people in the diaspora and continent developed a resistance movement. There were many milestones in this process: the formation of independent, maroon communities by former slaves and Afro-Caribbean people, the first Pan-African congress held in 1900, the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, 1945.
Over the decades, political consciousness grew around the necessity to wage a revolutionary, Pan-African struggle against colonial and imperial rule in the 20th century. The revolutionary anti-colonial movements culminated in the mid-century with the independence of several African nations from European powers and the formation of the Organization of African Unity.
AWB: How does ALD relate to the struggles of African people today?
Gamal Nkrumah: African Liberation Day, as it came to be known, was born from the fierce fight for a new society. As Kwame Nkrumah said, “The African Revolution, while still concentrating its main effort on the destruction of imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, aims at the same time to bring about a radical transformation of society. The choice has already been made by the workers and peasants of Africa. They have chosen liberation and unification… for the political unification of Africa and socialism are synonymous. One cannot be achieved without the other.”
Today, capitalism continues to brutally ravage and exploit Africa and its people. The West, through their militaries as well as the IMF and World Bank, have consistently imposed a neocolonial agenda on the continent, and the Organization of African Unity, now known as the African Union, is a puppet of capital and elite interests.
African people on May 25 celebrate the victories of revolutionary Pan-Africanism. African Liberation Day recalls the long history of struggles against class exploitation, colonialism and imperialism.
Revolutionary Africans know that attaining full emancipation demands a revolution from below, in the interests of people over profit. The only antidote to this colonial-capitalist system that continues to impoverish African people is an organized force in Africa ready to pursue Pan-Africanism under scientific socialism.
Women in Western Sahara, officially the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic / credit: Saharauiak / Wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in People’s Dispatch.
Dismissing a now-deleted tweet by Kenyan President William Ruto about rescinding recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the Kenyan foreign ministry clarified on September 16 that it would continue to maintain diplomatic relations with SADR and support its right to self-determination.
Also known as Western Sahara, SADR is a founding member of the African Union (AU) and the continent’s last colony, fighting a war for liberation from Morocco. The Moroccan occupation of most of SADR’s territory since 1975 has been receiving increasing Western support, despite a consensus in international law that Morocco has no legitimate territorial claims over SADR, whose right to self-determination is well-recognized.
But Kenya has emerged as an important ally, championing SADR’s cause over the last decade. Ruto’s decision to change this foreign policy, only a day after his swearing-in ceremony, which was also attended by SADR President Brahim Ghali, was reversed as a result of public backlash and dissonance within the foreign ministry, sources and reports indicate.
“Kenya’s position [on SADR] is fully aligned with… the AU Charter which calls for the unquestionable and inalienable right of a people to self-determination,” read the foreign ministry communique dated September 16, addressing all of Kenya’s missions and directorates.
This communique, which was made public on Monday, September 19, reiterated, “UN Security Council Resolution 690 (1991)… calls for the self-determination of Western Sahara through a free and fair referendum administered by the UN and the AU. Kenya supports implementation of this UN security Council Resolution to the letter.”
Implicitly criticizing the new president’s hasty announcement, the communique signed by principal secretary Ambassador Macharia Kamau added, “It should be equally noted that Kenya does not conduct its foreign policy on Twitter or any other social media platforms, rather through official government documents and frameworks.”
Following a meeting with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, Ruto had tweeted on September 14, “At State House in Nairobi, received a congratulatory message from His Majesty King Mohammed VI. Kenya rescinds its recognition of the SADR and initiates steps to wind down the entity’s presence in the country.”
While the tweet was soon deleted, Morocco’s foreign ministry released an official statement on its website the same day, announcing: “Following the message of His Majesty King Mohammed VI to the new President of the Republic of Kenya, Mr. William Ruto, the Republic of Kenya has decided to withdraw the recognition of the so-called ‘SADR’ and to initiate the steps to close its representation in Nairobi.”
The statement further claimed that Morocco and Kenya had signed a joint statement agreeing that “in deference to the principle of territorial integrity and non-interference, the Republic of Kenya [had extended] total support to the serious and credible autonomy plan proposed by the Kingdom of Morocco” as the only possible solution to the Sahara issue.
The Kenyan foreign ministry’s communique two days later in effect clarified that the tweet by the president had been arbitrary and had no bearing on the country’s foreign policy. This was a setback to Morocco, which had declared a diplomatic victory over SADR prematurely, before any official announcement by the Kenyan government.
Asked to explain the sudden change in stance and dissonance within the government, Kenya’s Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua told KTN News on Monday, “This was an administration in transition—[having been] only one day in office… We had many visitors, there [were] so many delegations, and communications had to be made.” He said this without specifying which countries’ delegations or visitors had sought for such a communication to be made.
Gachagua stressed that the most important thing was that “a clarification had been made,” and that the country’s position was “that of the United Nations and that of the African Union.”
United States and Israel Allegedly Lobbying Kenya
Even before the election was held in August this year, the United States and the United Kingdom, which were allegedly supporting Ruto’s candidacy, had sought from him a reversal of Kenya’s policy on SADR during his foreign trips, alleged Booker Ngesa Omole, National Vice Chairperson of the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK).
The UN, the AU, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the International Court of Justice all maintain that Morocco has no legitimate territorial claims over SADR. Nevertheless, in late 2020, then-U.S. President Donald Trump had announced his decision to open a consulate in occupied Western Sahara, in effect recognizing it as Moroccan sovereign territory.
After Ruto was declared the president-elect, a presidential delegation from the United States earlier this month and the subsequent Israeli delegation led by its minister of intelligence, had both allegedly brought up Kenya’s policy vis-à-vis SADR in the meetings with Ruto, Omole claimed.
Morocco, which is the second largest exporter of fertilizer in the world, had in the meantime seen a further opening in Ruto’s election promise of providing cheap fertilizers, he explained. With an apparent assurance from Morocco about “providing fertilizers at subsidized prices, Ruto went on national television to announce that he will provide subsidies to all farmers on fertilizers within two weeks time. A day later, he announced he was rescinding SADR’s recognition,” Omole said.
The bulk of the phosphate used in Moroccan fertilizers is extracted from the occupied Western Sahara. “The Moroccan regime uses the resources stolen from Western Sahara to bribe foreign officials to obtain recognition for its illegal occupation of our homeland,” Kamal Fadel, SADR’s Representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch.
“Those who receive the stolen goods from Western Sahara are complicit in the war crime of pillage and their involvement is a tacit support to an illegal occupation—one with continuing notorious human rights abuses occurring during a time of armed conflict,” he added.
Pointing out that within an hour of Ruto’s announcement, “Kenyans had jumped on his tweet, attacking him for surrendering sovereign foreign policy to Moroccan bribes,” Omole explained that there is a strong sentiment against what is perceived as a return to old foreign policy.
‘Kenyan Population Supports the Sahrawi People’
“Except for the last 10 years, Kenya has not had a progressive foreign policy. It was always a wait-and-see opportunistic policy, aligning with whichever position brings in most alms from foreign countries. So our relations with Western Sahara had always been strained,” Omole told Peoples Dispatch.
In 2006, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki had placed diplomatic relations with SADR on “a temporary freeze” only months after first receiving diplomatic credentials from its ambassador. “But the Kenyan masses are always ahead of their governments. There was an uproar here, led by the Kenya Western Sahara Friendship Society (KWSFS),” said Omole, who has been a member of the KWSFS for 20 years.
“This organization has been fostering people-to-people friendship between the two countries. A few times, we have also hosted families from the refugee camps [of the displaced Sahrawis in Algeria]. Kenyan people lobbied the government to condemn Morocco’s occupation,” he explained. Under popular pressure, “Kibaki had to initiate the process to re-establish diplomatic relations with SADR.”
While this was unfolding, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, who at the time were contesting the 2013 election together as presidential and vice-presidential candidates, were put on trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC). They were tried for charges of crimes against humanity for political violence in the aftermath of the 2007 presidential election. The charges were subsequently dropped.
However, Kenyatta did not take the alleged U.S. and U.K. support for this trial well, Omole claimed. “After he won the election, he went about changing Kenya’s foreign policy against the interests of the West. He pursued alternative trade relations with the East, instead of continuing to rely on the West. He refused to follow Israel’s line and supported Palestine. He opened the SADR’s embassy in Nairobi, and, for the first time, Kenya appointed an ambassador to SADR. For the first time, a Kenyan ambassador presented his credentials to the president of the SADR.”
In the regional and international forums of the AU and the UN, Kenya actively supported the cause of the SADR. “The progressive foreign policy has continued since,” and during this period Kenyan people’s relations and solidarity with the Sahrawi people has deepened, Omole said.
There is a high degree of “awareness among the Kenyan people about the Sahrawi people’s struggle for liberation. It seems our new president was out of touch with the reality that the Kenyan population supports the Sahrawi people, regardless of the divisions that will be sown by governments,” he observed.
U.S. and Burundi soldiers dismantle a SIPR NIPR Access Point Terminal (SNAP) at the Burundi National Defense Headquarters on May 19, 2021 / credit: Staff Sgt. Melissa Sterling
Editor’s Note: This was excerpted from the Black Alliance for Peace’s AFRICOM Watch Bulletin.
The imperialist powers are bent on exploiting the labor and looting the mineral wealth of as many poor, underdeveloped countries as they possibly can.
Britain, France, Israel, Germany and the United States conduct joint military action against Africans—acts such as the invasion of Grenada, a country of 110,000 African people, and the invasion and destruction of Libya. The imperialists are further intensifying their use of military “proxies” within Africa against other parts of Africa, not to defend the interests of Africa, but to further the interests of capitalist-imperialism.
No small or isolated group of Africans can defeat imperialism, no matter how good their intentions. Only the working, struggling African masses can do it. But to do so, we must be organized and bound together by a common goal and guided by correct ideas. In other words, the masses must be correctly organized!
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
Dr. Gerald Horne is the author of over 30 books, among them most recently would be the Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering and the Political Economy of Boxing and The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism and Capitalism, in the Long Sixteenth Century. He currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moors Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He is considered by many to be the gold standard for radical historians and the go-to scholar for alternatives to neoliberal political and historical narratives. We spoke with him about a wide variety of issues around our work concerning Africa.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Counterterrorism was the espoused pretext for the development and installation of US AFRICOM onto the African continent which now exist in 53 or the 54 countries. Can you talk about how terrorism is used today compared to how Communism once was, and has it indeed surpassed communism as the go-to pretext for US imperial interventionism projects?
Gerald Horne: A central problem with “terrorism” as a lever for imperial intervention in Africa is the dearth of self-criticism. That is, during the Cold War, Washington collaborated with religious zealots and fanatics, not least in Afghanistan, not least with the rulers of certain Gulf monarchies, in order to weaken various socialist projects. Now like a perpetual motion machine, imperialism has now decided—at least on the surface—to target this phenomenon. I say “on the surface” because there is still collaboration with, e.g. Saudi Arabia and the vulturous regimes who signed the so-called “Abraham Accords” in September 2020 in order to weaken Palestinian resistance. Of course, today this phenomenon is now wreaking havoc in northern Mozambique.
AWB: You have done a great deal of comprehensive work on liberation struggles on the African continent. Unfortunately, your analysis is not the center of US curriculums. What steps can be taken the change that reality?
GH: I think that work should be done in league with the Zinn Project, which seeks to inject progressivism in educational curricula. This would also include the two major unions–the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. This would also include fierce fightback against current legislative efforts to circumscribe “Critical Race Theory”, which detractors could hardly describe or define, if pressed.
AWB: Israel has been making strides in establishing partnerships with several African countries despite its continued maintenance of an apartheid state and oppression of the indigenous Palestinian population. To what degree do you attribute this pattern of African countries turning a blind eye to Israeli human rights violations so short of a time after the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa?
GH: With the erosion of the socialist bloc, post 1991, African nations–and indeed the entire global left–has faced difficulty in standing up to U.S. imperialism and its proxy: Israel. On the other hand, this is nothing new, for even pre-1991 nations e.g. Morocco stood alongside imperialism. (Parenthetically, in my 16th century book I pointed out that a gigantic step forward for the acceleration of the African Slave Trade took place in 1591 when Rabat collaborated with London in destabilizing the Songhay Empire; today, Rabat continues to suppress the liberation of “Western Sahara”.) The struggle continues…
AWB: What will it take for Black evangelicals, be they in Africa or the Diaspora, to rethink their unconditional support for Israel?
GH: In order to force the “Black Evangelicals” to move, we will have to heighten our own struggle and then they will find the ground beneath their feet moving. There are already signs of rifts between BE and Israel and I do not envision this trend dissipating any time soon.
AWB: Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture are among the Pan Africanists who tied African American progress to the liberation of Africa. How can we grow the number of Black folks in America to this line of thinking?
GH: We must continue what we have been doing–with more. We must organize more picket lines and study groups. We must make more media appearances. We must launch more documentary projects. We must establish a presence at the African Union in Addis Ababa and CARICOM too. We must picket the OAS headquarters in Washington, DC, especially re: the crisis in Colombia. We must **organize**.
AWB: Thank you for your time and revolutionary analysis!
Before Malcolm X went to Africa, he was a Black nationalist and member of the Nation of Islam. By the time he left, he had become a Pan-Africanist, fighting an anti-imperialist struggle. African Stream tells the story of Malcolm X’s political transformation that led to his assassination a few months after his return.
