James Baldwin was correct when he said to be a Black man in the US is to be in a constant state of rage. But this anger intensifies into something worse when Africa, a spiritual symbol for not enough Blacks in the US, becomes a tangible homeland of countries and peoples. Because as soon as you consider Mali or Angola or Nigeria the home of your kin as the German-American considers Germany his, you are confronted with facts:
On the one hand, you are confronted with the reality that your so-called "family" name, Jones, Howard, Denny, Williams, is not the end of the story, which was more of a cruel lie because to trace, say, Denny, back to Ireland in search of a family reunion would meet with a mystified, chilly reception.
You realize the meaning of a comment made by a Black Mexican friend of mine, who had just been cruelly harassed by the police in his own country, just outside Mexico City, where my passport got me a pass. But his own Mexican ID was not believed, and when it was he was instructed to open his mouth and show his palms like he was a farm animal being inspected. When we got back into his car to continue our drive he said "We are only known in our own homeland."
We are only known in our own homeland.
On the other hand, when your connection to that immense continent becomes personal, you realize how the US and the Western imperialist powers have declared open season on African peoples and an open market for US corporations. You encounter countries that are in realty open-air concentration camps, where people are moved or murdered by Western-made weapons, so as to gain access to gas or minerals or petroleum. You find, as I am with that tiny country of my African ancestry, Equatorial Guinea and Bioko Island, in particular that thugs are installed in power by Western might to subdue the people and give cheap access to natural wealth for Western capital. What had become a tangible home to leave behind the white-settler nation-state of the US becomes a prison's death row, where African men's life expectancy is a mere 50 years! So you are faced with the choice of the cornered animal.
Incidentally, it says something to me that too many Christian Black preachers in the US, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and Urban League do not make the case of Africa an issue, a central issue. They are clearly bankrupt of meaningful ideas and unworthy of our attention. I think about the Irish community of Boston which helped fund the cause of the IRA and Ireland's long overdue independence from the United Kingdom. Of course, I think of many Jews in the US who hold and financially support the cause of Israel, whether they have been there or not.
But the so-called Black leadership in the US is, on the whole, with few exceptions, is a house of tap-dancing, master-pleasing, thesis-writing, Negroes.
In contrast, Cuba, a poor country assaulted by the US, has made African liberation a central cause and has been instrumental in upending apartheid in South Africa, helping to defend colonial attacks from such European countries as Portugal, and of course, famously, exporting teachers and doctors to African countries. Cuba also accepts African students into its medical school to return to their home countries to practice.
That even this is being overwhelmed by Western powers does not diminish the efforts of this tiny, Caribbean island, but it should cast a scrutinizing eye on so-called Black organizations and who pays them and whose ideologies they propagandize.
So the corner the animal finds himself drives home two realities, one that the revolution must happen and it is the central happening; and, two, it must be a revolution that intersects all our communities around the world, of all colors and races, regardless of so-called nationality, which we know brings marginal and diminishing benefits depending on the desires of capitalism. It cannot be a US revolution, nor can it be a Cameroonian revolution. It is a revolution that must begin to deal rhetorical and literal blows against the structure of the mechanisms that oppress us: we must dismantle the beliefs in white racism, its rewards, and the myths of the successes of capitalism.
Capitalism spawned the phenomenon of the industry of slave trading, unheard of in history, even the Roman Empire, and it still seeks to maintain this caste system of racism on the globe. It is the father and spiritual source of Naziism and Jim Crow, not to forget the genocide of the First Nations of the American continent. It cannot be tamed or reformed. It must be abolished.
Black men are not only hunted and shot on the streets of the US but also all over the world, even the homelands of their ancestors.
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