The Greek Referendum

I'm holding my breath on this mistaken referendum in Greece. But I never take my eyes off the evil-doings of Western finance in every part of the world, especially resource-rich, yet impoverished Africa.

Greece was imposed with a Danish monarchy as the Ottoman Empire began its decline. The present Greek king, who is not Greek, is, as he should be, at home in London. Exiled. Yet he still maintains fantasies of returning to his "homeland" where he is not wanted.

Prince Philip, the British queen's husband, was supposedly a Greek prince. The former queen of Spain, Sofia, wife of the also unwanted Juan Carlos, was also a Greek princess. Juan Carlos was imposed on the Spanish people by Franco, and SYRIZA's counterpart in Spain, PODEMOS, wants to exile its monarchy too. In any case, neither Philip nor Sofia have an ounce of Greek blood but come from Denmark and Germany - Germany, which used to be called the stud farm for Europe's royals [because Europe had so recklessly intermarried, spawning some bizarre characters it needed to find some fresh, white blood].

During World War II German NAZI occupation, resistance movements spring up all over Europe. Perhaps the weakest of these, but most celebrated today, was in France. Why? Because the French loved Hitler and Nazism. But since Hitler lost, the ridiculed French resistance has become legendary.

Not so in Greece. The Greek Resistance was large and deep. It was so anti-fascist, so well organized, so well disciplined, so strong, so believing in civil society and democracy, so socialist and so deeply anti-colonial that it had to be liquidated by the British and a military government imposed, along with sustaining the Danish royals.

The Greek Resistance fighters caught on to this quickly and planned to euthanize Churchill as the sick dog he was.

SYRIZA, that anti-austerity, anti-capitalist political party, must know this history. Taking real power through an election is naive enough and comes with known difficulties: namely, you are given the tools and restrictions of a capitalist state to implement non-capitalist agenda.

But to trust a second referendum tomorrow without European imperialism intervening in the most bloodthirsty way, given the history, makes me hold my breath ...

if Europe will sleep soundly knowing that young Greeks are throwing themselves off ledges to end their suffering, you must know this same Europe will PUSH Africans off the same ledges.

I got your back, Miss Simone

Cautionary Tales are a widely used device in Western art forms to take real or imaginary lives and explain [or imagine] their crash-and-burn demise as a warning to us all: beyond here be dragons. I became aware of the wide use of this device reading Gore Vidal's narratives and counter-narratives about some scholar taking down a militant or - to use Vidal's tongue-in-cheek - "the fags." Oscar Wilde comes to mind as someone scholars kept churning out cautionary tales about sex, and Vidal was ready in the wings to take the muthafucka down. And he did so quite beautifully, which is why I was always riveted to read his prose. I recommend it.

So I approach any biographical work with suspicion: what is the task of the artist or producer?

This suspicion is reflexive if the subject matter is any one of official outcasts of this pretended, wicked white settler society and its false prophet white Jesus.

I only knew some of Nina Simone's music and less of what others might have mentioned in their own works. Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Kwame Ture come immediately to mind. My general impression was here was an articulate, angry voice to articulate the human rights crimes of the United States, when the nation did not welcome neither articulation nor anger. Just compliance.

So even without being an African woman, she came to me as an outcast.

Still, I was eager and anxious to see the documentary about her life, ""What Happened, Miss Simone?" to see if it filled in the many gaps of my knowledge without giving the usual Cautionary Tale.

Gaps were filled. One of Malcolm's daughters articulates what is truly wrong with this Christian country when she says: "Participation in activism during the 60's rendered chaos in any individual's lives. People sacrificed sanity, well being, life. Nina Simone was a free spirit in an era that didn't appreciate a woman's genius. What does that do to a household and a family, not because of [lack of] income but because your soul not being able to do what you need it to do ... "

Nina. Jimmy. Josephine. WEB. Stokely. Geromino. Did these luminaries find the secret to persisting by emigrating and avoiding the academic oblivion and baby talk that other African radicals faced when they stayed here on Turtle Island too long and blended like American cheese into the tasteless casserole that is the United Snakes of America? [Thank you, Nina, for that: I will use it liberally from now on].

Nina escaped to Liberia, is described as being happy, but inexplicably ends up in Europe where she is medicated and given an ultimatum to resume her career. I wanted to hear MORE about those eight years in Liberia!

These, I guess, are the facts, whether I like them or not.

So if there is a Cautionary Tale here is it to not wander too far off the reservation? Simone is described by her contemporaries as "sacrificing" so much to the slave rebellion [aka, civil rights movement]; that she was no longer marketable; that she scared record labels and soured radio stations. I couldn't help thinking the handlers of this project see life as a linear existence, not circuitous, where one body of water meanders to feed another.

In real life, school teachers can become salsa music sensations, Ivy League pre-med students can "drift" into a stellar acting careers, and young, well-married attorneys can become one of the greatest revolutionaries of our time.

Such are the nonlinear trajectories of Celia Cruz, Katharine Hepburn, and Fidel.

The idea that any of them betrayed their destiny or needed medicating to stay the Course would be troublesome.

Nina said and wrote what she meant, how she felt, and what she was inspired to do: and she was crushed at every turn not only by her country's elite but by people who said they were her husband and "brother."

Maybe the first thing revolutionaries must do is kill their friends. If that is too extreme, the words of Jesus rejecting his blood family might substitute as a non-violent mantra.

To do neither is to risk one's sanity.

The Cautionary Tale needs to be coaxed out of this documentary project. On her way through a music career, Eunice Wayans was destined to join Assata in leaving the Black Panthers because they weren't militant enough and taking up arms with the Black Liberation Army. If they had been caught and jailed in New Jersey, they'd have broken each other out, and fled to Cuba. Miss Simone wrote that her husband could not satisfy her sexually: this better course would have given her the orgasms she so craved.

How about a Campaign for worker ownership and self-management?

I've gone on record in NOT supporting the Campaign for the 15. I have gone on record saying I would not oppose it either. But I am clear why this is a neoliberal rouse, a Trojan Horse that accommodates the status quo and ultimately will be horrible for workers.

I have gone on record saying that workers, trades-unions, and trades-union activists should go back to the heart of their historical campaign as radicals, which was not that long ago - that being, the fulfillment of work-owned, worker-managed enterprises, period and the elimination of private ownership. This what unions stood for initially; anything else was an accommodation with industrial feudalism, and it is an accommodation to settle for a $15 wage when the worker has no more power over their lives from making the current minimum wage, which I will - again - address below.

The entire face of capitalism, globalization, our workplaces, and our communities will change radically as worker ownership and self-management is achieved.

What will the status quo achieve? As one proponent explained how the $15/hr would work in practical terms for a fast-food employee: it would entail fewer employees, he said, and more automation.

Fewer employees, more automation. This is not an innovation. Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has sought greater technologies to make more workers superfluous - meaning unemployable.

This Campaign for the 15 proponent speculated that McDonald's would replace the person who takes your order with kiosks, and your order would be transmitted to the actual employee. Start doing the arithmetic.

I have already speculated that as these gentrified, mostly white metropolises will legislate $15/hr wages, the surrounding bantustans, like East LA, would become the location for the underpaid workers.

In either scenario, the Westward march of Manifest Destiny would continue undisturbed.

But our trades-unions have lost a lot of its goals for specific historical reasons, specific historical acts, which removed all radical elements from its ranks. More over, we ourselves have gotten amnesia as to what we used to plainly call a job that intensified ones poverty, not alleviated it: do we have to go back an study the Jim Crow sharecroppers? Do we have to recall the indentured servants?

These cases are readily available, not burned by ISIS/ISIL in faraway places, yet no one in authority is willing to say that a job that cannot afford to pay what is called a "living wage" should not be allowed to exist. It is that simple. The business license of such a business, its act of incorporation should be revoked as being a public menace. This is clear to me, and it should be clear to workers.

The South African government has ordered police to step up efforts to protect foreigners

Lacking any and all background information about South Africa in particular and Africa in general, this is shocking. It also aligns with a script the West seems to follow all over the so-called developed world. In the US, Canada, and many parts of Europe - increasingly the most northern European countries, migrants come in, local whites respond with a range of anti-social behaviors, from white-racist political parties, referenda to throw out nonwhite foreigners, and, yes, bloodletting by "mobs". So these stories from South Africa, framed as they are, digest easily to the Western mind.

But it's all in what the camera frame shows you.

Since the official end of apartheid, Black South Africans have not made any advances despite the country's continued rising wealth. It is this form of State violence - institutional impoverishment and preservation of "order" - that the BBC and the Guardian UK do not cover. The ANC leadership made a deal for the sake of peace and prosperity to end its militant struggle, get apartheid dismantled, open the State to multiparty elections.

The deal allowed whites continued control of the economy and armed forces. This was ostensibly to give South Africa the best of both worlds: open democracy and no white capital flight out of the banks, a Black African electorate with a white establishment.

But this effectively meant that while elections were open to all South Africans, the economy was not. Black South Africans have the vote but continue to be treated as economic refugees in the home of their ancestors. And such is the case in all the most favored African States - favored that is by the UK, France, Spain, and the US, where the economies serve Western interests and the indigenous people of these States continue to be squeezed to death: this is why these Africans - who the BBC stupidly calls "foreigners" -  are fleeing across the Mediterranean to the north, or to South Africa to the south.

Why doesn't the BBC, the Guardian, among other Western papers, cover the extent of failed States across the continent, which are fully supported by Western governments? At most, these news organizations will mock the governments, the presidents for life, the nepotism, but they will never, ever say who this corruption serves. You will never see how these Western-armed, African-led failed-states murder democracy and trades-union activists, using weapons supplied by the UK, France, and the US. These disasters are just sort of presented as natural phenomena.

The one exception to this, I think was reported without any context, when the ANC government of South Africa was shown to be massacring striking coal miners. I do not think it was clarified who owned and profited from these mines and lost profits from the strike - that being the white establishment of the apartheid era.

The ANC government of South Africa has become no better, and just as bad, as any failed State on the continent: and this is exactly the success that the West wants. The people are the threat and if their movements cannot be liquidated, then liquidate the people.

This is the model favored by the West, not popular, grassroots, indigenous movements.

The BBC, the Guardian, and others have not done much coverage of the radicalized movements splintering off from the ANC, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, formerly of the ANC Youth Brigade, from which he was expelled. Malema and the EFF aren't out hunting "foreigners" for bloodsport so the Western news doesn't cover this next stage of South African democratic progressions. Guaranteed were the EFF out shooting other Africans, you would know who Malema was.

So there is a violence on the screen, and it is horrific. But kept out of the camera's angle are the real weapons of death, systems of plunder, and starvation that target the African peoples. It is like a Roman circus, but all you get to see are the slaves in the arena feeding off each other, but you do not see the armed guards circling the arena and the morsels thrown at them by the Roman citizenry. This has been sanitized for your continued ignorance.

This is why I found the BBC line that the South African government was directing police to protect "foreigners" not very funny. The foreigners it is actually protecting are not the ones from Zimbabwe or Malawi. It is a class of thieves.

The camera won't show you who the real foreigners are. Robert Mugabe got it right when he told white squatters on stolen land to "Go back to England."

Cuba, the Summit, and Africans

I'm going through a few media sites covering the Summit of the Americas in Panama. I usually don't bother, but this is the first time the Organization of American States [OAS] has allowed Cuba's participation - meaning, this is the first time the US has allowed it [more on that presently]. Many Latin American countries - to their credit - told the US they would boycott this Summit were Cuba excluded. In 1960, these same countries had expelled Cuba for having a revolution.

In December 2014, Pres. Obama announced re-establishing relations with Cuba, broken after its 1959 revolution. Never a country to take the high road, in the same breath practically, the White House said some stupid things about Venezuela being a threat to the US, and that dissident, anti-Castro groups should also be allowed at the OAS Summit.

To my knowledge, Obama did not invite Occupy Wall Street, the Nation of Islam, BlackLivesMatter, The Huey Newton Gun Club, or the KKK to attend the Summit.

Other creepy things have happened since Obama's December surprise. The US has included a known terrorist in its Summit line-up, a man who was involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, trained by the CIA as a killer and anti-Castro subversive, and is credited as the person who pulled the trigger against Che Guevara's head in Bolivia.

Like I said, the US is never one to take the high road.

In many news conferences and interviews, Cuban representatives are demanding the removal of this offensive man. They are reminding us of the US propensity to harbor its own terrorists, like in Miami, who have murdered Cuban civilians, blew up Cuban passenger planes, bombed hotels, etc.

Also, while Obama called for dissident groups to be present at the Summit, various civil society organizations from Cuba, like the Worker's Union, the CTC, have been refused accreditation by the Summit coordinators [read: USA]. Cuban officials have also been interviewed about how blocking these organization a vital aspect of Cuba's development is being left out of panel discussions.

The word "discrimination" was used several times. I agree. Cuban workers should have a voice at the Summit and not only those corporate labor unions.

But what struck me after watching too many clips is this: WHERE IS THE AFRICAN? On my first [and second] trips to Cuba I was struck immediately how African the country is, and yet so far I see no Cuban official of the African diaspora represented in interviews or news conferences, none condemning Che's assassin, none speaking about evolving relations with the US, or noting the "discrimination" behind blocking civil groups from Cuba at the Summit, or none noting overall the Summit is still in the hands of the United States. No Africans from Cuba ... None. Not even in the background!

Over one hundred years ago, before the US entered the Cuban landscape and imposed Jim Crow on the island, the white elite were like other white elites of Latin America: they feared their African majorities and did not want to be known, or, worse, become, another Haiti. Europeans of all classes were invited in en masse in an attempt to counterbalance the Africanness of the Cuban landscape. This white-washing was official policy all over African Latin America.

White men, like Fidel's own father, a poor soldier from Gallicia, Spain, were given as some sort of reparation huge tracts of land: a reparation denied Africans in Cuba who had worked that land for many generations as slaves. From this wealthy start, Fidel was born, while African Cubans remained the lowest part of society.

The Revolution did benefit Africans in Cuba most of all, and in almost every area they showed progress - education, life expectancy, housing. The Revolution did not take two generations of panel discussions and church meetings to undo Jim Crow as the US did: It was immediate. Fidel said he would not betray the revolution's promise. He acknowledged in speeches that Cuba was an "African and Latin" country.

But just as swiftly as the revolution has lost ground since the disappearance of the USSR, Africans in Cuba have fallen further and further behind. As the economy suffocated, white professional Cubans were given lucrative service jobs in the hotels, with access to dollars. I rarely saw an African in a hotel.

But I got harshly schooled one day when a hotel manager, two police, came to fish me out of the hotel pool in Santiago de Cuba. They thought I was Cuban, had trespassed onto the hotel, and had the cojones to go for a swim. I ranted on about apartheid in Cuba, that I could not enter or leave my hotel without being stopped, etc. Using the word "apartheid" seemed to genuinely hurt these Cubans.

Unlike the United States, this poor Caribbean country had since the mid 1960's sent teachers, technicians, and military personnel to help build resistance, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid movements in Africa; to start schools, provide guidance, wage war, sacrifice their lives.

South Africa's apartheid regime, whatever its imperfections today, could not have ended without the intervention of Cuban troops defeating the US-backed racist regime.

What other African-Caribbean country has attempted to do half as much on the continent? None. And they have nominal Africans heading their governments. They are present at the Summit, wearing the costumes of European businessmen, a subtle reminder where their allegiances lay. They have done nothing to address the crimes done to destabilize the African continent; these House Negroes are too busy making Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium their "Mother Country." These heads of state and government are actually no better than the best clowns, peacemakers, and tap-dancers leading our deeply colonized people throughout the diaspora, especially in the US.

Still, I strive to reconcile these two Cubas, if they are in fact distinct, which has made tremendous sacrifice for African liberation but has limits to how this is affected at home. Because it would seem to me that any country, let alone a poor one, who would be so committed to African social justice and sovereignty, would look different domestically.

A Summit of whose America?

The IMF in Africa vs the IMF in Greece

The IMF destroyed fragile nation-states all over Africa in the 80's, and neither they nor Western media heard their complaints.

No one cared that vibrant local economies were decimated by structural adjustment programs [SAP] and austerity measures to drive these countries into the arms of Western finance as neo-slave economies, with low wages, diminished infrastructure like health care, roads, or public development. These programs created huge swathes of refugees. These refugees still roam the earth, poor and landless, looking for a wage and a morsel. These IMF policies are why today there is no domestic mechanism in Africa to face something like Ebola from ravaging the population.

I'll take this indictment further: because of these IMF policies, there was no civil government to face the onslaught of predatory Western pirates who wanted to come in and continue to exploit these African States: the IMF loathes civil government, especially when it comes to peoples who don't know their place, as colonies; and colonies only serve one purpose - to feed and enrich the empires.

A condition of funding a country, the IMF routinely demands the dismantling of democratic institutions, such as public services.

So, because there was no civil government, Western neo-slave drivers could come in and ravage rainforests and landscapes the Africans knew not to touch. Not only were the forests depleted for mining, but a certain species of bat lost its habitat and flew, like another refugee, into populated areas: this bat, like the monkeys before, carried a certain microbe incompatible with humans. HIV, Ebola, and the gods-only-know what else is being unleashed just so Western capital can dig up some minerals, or natural gas, or whatever is of such worth to them that humans beings and their civil society must be eradicated to get to it.

Please read that again.

There was no 24-hour death watch on the news as this happened, no coverage of the democracy movements in these African countries who were pleading for air while the IMF noose was being tightened around their necks, no sexed-up feature of the leadership of the insurgent political parties or civil society movements. No, such things seem reserved for Greece.

But we all knew what the IMF was doing back in the 80's. The imperialist's own social scientists documented the "successes" of these measures in their journals and made ample coursework of it for undergraduates in the leading research universities.

So when the IMF chief claims ignorance how their policies have badly affected Greece, I am genuinely truly puzzled. I smell an imperialist. Since there is ample documented evidence what their policies do and their hatred for civil government as a frontal threat to Western financial interests, where is this mea culpa coming from?

Could it mean SAP and austerity are not intended for European audiences? I doubt it. Europeans will kill their own for profit as readily as they have killed Africans if it means turning a dollar into gold.

Speaking of blood and treasure, a lot went in to unifying Europe as an economic entity. Bismark started it in imperial Germany. Hitler accelerated the plan. And even when Hitler's body was still warm in the cellar, Europe regrouped after a disastrous war to solidify the dream of a "Common Market".

Maybe, just maybe Europe can do without Greece, but it cannot do with the precedence of an upstart member breaking free on its own. Spain and Ireland are sure to follow. The UK, too, for different, more nationalistic reasons.

Collectively, the former Christendom has despite its shrinking population offered a force to maintain its colonial relations. In case you missed that lesson, the colonial relationship is Europe, nothing more or less. It is not Nordic industriousness or German ingenuity or the island of shopkeepers or the French bourgeoisie. Europe was built by mercenaries, pirating what loot, bodies, and treasure they could from the other parts of the world.

This is why Africa may go to Hell as long as its resources are kept intact, but Greece warrants special attention. And this is why the IMF chief has come out with crocodile tears about what went wrong ... in Greece.

Stuck between a Rock and a Bantustan

Aloha from the US-occupied nation of Hawaii. I think language is important, not only as a writer but also as a person who strives to have a grip on reality. So, like I think it's important to call Africans on the continent or in the diaspora Africans, and First Nations peoples First Nations peoples, it is important to tell you where I actually live, so as to give you some notion what we are dealing with - well, what Hawaiians are dealing with in their own occupied land, and what I deal with as someone who witnesses this atrocity.

Hawaii is beautiful. I see the stars every night outside the window of my cabin. This beauty, however, since this is an occupied colony, is marketed to tourists and to mainlanders with access to capital. Tourists dollars and mainland capital is used to build and run resorts and buy cheap land on which housing is constructed. Fuck the Hawaiians, who have no access to capital and are losing access to their land.

Unlike Africans in the diaspora, Hawaiians are newly colonized and newly polluted with Anglo-Saxon obsessions and their gutter monotheistic religion. This means two things: to the careful eye, the spirit of Margaret Mead can still see the beauty of the Hawaiian body and its connection to the earth and its energies. Though still barely visible, this beauty has been whipped out of Africans for a good 500 years, then reinforced by bad Negro parents emulating white plantation politics.

But this also means the Anglo-Saxon obsession with shame culture is rotting the spirit of that connection Hawaiians had with the earth. So of course their incidence of illness should increase. Of course their social connections should be undermined.

It sucks the spirit to try to thrive in such a place, which is like a person, who is unable to embrace you because it is losing the capacity to embrace itself.

My limited experience with travel and life have already taught me those places with the least and newest "contact" with Europe, its Anglo-Saxon peasant trash, and its maniacal ways are actually populated with the most beautiful and well-developed people.

So as Hawaii corrodes under US occupation, like the little bird I am I look for a new perch to land on. A few well-meaning, clueless people have suggested going back to California, or Missouri, even Florida. This only depressed me. For one, I feel no desire to go anywhere on the mainland.

But also, the only places afforded me on that almost thoroughly corrupted landscape are bantustans where I am really meant to struggle and die.

According to Wikipedia, a bantustan is "a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid." In a broader sense, the term has come to refer to any such enclave set aside by the state for its least desired populations.

So, for example, the term bantustan was used in reference to the ridiculous partition of Palestinians during the Clinton "peace" negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli white-settler government. The Palestinian territory, according to the maps which were scarcely printed in the US press, showed the ethnic Palestine as several non-contiguous spaces spread across Israel.

Bantustans are not intended to be self-sufficient entities but what we in North America might refer to an "Indian Reservations."

Japanese POW's might reference internment camps.

Black ghettos are bantustans. The fact they are Black African and poor ghettos is by design. Most Africans understand this; but not enough since we are still handing our children over to the plantation and wondering why we too are getting sicker. Almost no white person will accept the fact of the bantustan, since this white settlement is the greatest thing to befall the planet since Jesus personified himself in a Roman cleric.

But like Ted Kaczinski I no longer care about the views of white people and the world ... until it impedes upon mine: that is when the reclusive Unibomber emerged as superhero.

I have my eye on Africa, but I also know that if I want my spirit to breathe it will only do so in a place least touched by the hand of Jesus and the progeny of his disciples. Life will not come from acquiring more skills or pursuing more degrees: that is a fool's game and enough fools are playing it.

Elections for the Europeans and Terror for the Colonials

The histories of the Greek rebellion lead by SYRIZA and the upcoming one in Spain led by PODEMOS are still being written, the ink is still wet. And European media is recording the events with awe, romanticism for these brash radicals; or dumbfoundedness that the European Union - Hitler's dream after all - could be so threatened.

The narrative continues to run that while the banks along with the EU finance ministers who serve them, stand firm in their austere principles, the bourgeois left, the radicals, the people cheer on this electoral victory against hegemonic Germany imposing loan-shark policy on broken economies. It is an insurgent democracy, and banks do not like this.

If only other brash insurgencies in other countries played out so cleanly!

The other countries I am thinking of are in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. And in their narratives they were not permitted to even get so far as hold an election of  bourgeois leftists before disappearances and assassinations became the norm ended their dreams of better societies.

Roughly two paths towards colonial independence after World War II emerged:

One, was through peaceful negotiation where the imperial power granted the colony nominal independence. A handover was staged, where usually a royal personage was dispatched to had over the keys and watch the imperial flag lowered and a new one hoisted.

The second path was militant, armed revolution.

Behind the peaceful path lay a lot of machinations. The colony was essentially indebted to pay reparations to the imperial power. Since this obligation flew in the face of  internal development, the newly independent colony had to have the worst kind of government - the client class, corrupt presidents and kleptocratic cabinets that looked like the locals but served the white empire.

Elections were essentially nullified, and no meaningful talk of democracy and free elections ever again came out of London, Paris, or Washington. The times where it happened, such as in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide's LAVALAS victory, the US immediately undermined and overturned the people's will for that of international capital.

For obvious reasons, the path of armed revolution, has been given a warped treatment by the West and its doyenne intellectuals. Part of this distortion of the facts is recreating the leaders of these armed resistance movements larger than life - that is, exaggerating their role vis-a-vis the mass struggles of the people - and then making these leaders into the worst kinds of human beings that ever walked the face of the earth.

Ho Chi Minh, before he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, was a young ideologue in Paris who wanted a liberal democracy in Indochina in place of the brutal, occupying French.

The French refused to leave Indochina, and when their economy could no longer sustain a long, guerrilla war against the Viet Cong, the US as the rising imperial power stepped in.

He was rejected by the Americans and Europeans at the Versailles Peace Talks after World War I.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the early 1920's as an intellectual movement against the borders imposed and fake kings installed after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

They were immediately marginalized by the fake sheiks.The Brotherhood is still marginalized by the fake sheiks, potentates, and false presidents propped up by the US, the French, and the British.

Fidel Castro was a young, crusading lawyer, married to the Bacardi Rum heiress, living hand to mouth and running for a seat in the Cuban senate with a nationalist political party.

On the eve of the 1952 election what looked like a landslide election for Fidel and the Orthodoxo Party was  cancelled by a US-backed military junta. The US sent weapons to that same army to crush resistance to this coups.

The common denominator of these incidents was a Western imperial power backed, financed, armed, and demanded a particular course that was diametrically opposed to the one set out by the mass movements and revolutionaries.

Remember this when you think of the Greece narrative today.Greece gets elections. Greece gets a seat at the table to go head to head with the other European powers

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong resistance, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fidel and the Cuban revolution are just three examples of how the West treats its inferiors; and you might like to put these cases in "history." But they are not only the history of all of the former colonies, they are also the present of these falsely free nations, run by client classes, armed by French, British, and US weapons manufactures to suppress insurgencies of any kind - be they trades-unions, legalizing political parties, access to voting, land reforms, preserving sacred, indigenous spaces.

The imperial logic vis-a-vis the colonies is that nothing must be done in any area to spark a democratic blaze.

Except, it seems, Greece today; Spain tomorrow. Ireland soon after. They are allowed elections.

Greece is allowed an election of bourgeois leftists, some of whom were formerly hardcore Marxists, we are told; but in a Europe built literally on the backs of the colonies I cannot imagine what being a Marxist in Europe means.

The colonial world is not allowed to take a breath, let alone hold an election! Fidel once admonished the US for "hanging us by our necks" then "criticizing us for not breathing."

I know that the late, assassinated Guyanese Marxist scholar-activist, Walter Rodney, found the British Marxists he revered from afar, as simpletons, lacking inertia, and verbose. I do not know if he found them as dashing as they media today like to portray the new Greek government.

The contrast is stark.

During the 80's much of the former colonies were plunged further into chaos and misery by Western powers with the same austerity measures and structural adjustment programs being unleashed on Greece. The colonies were never given the opportunity to hold an election. No PODEMOS or SYRIZA were allowed by the Europeans in the former colonies, now "free". Their suffering colonial economies were squeezed even harder, people died, medical and social infrastructure could not be built, and these European Marxists wrote dissertations.

So my joy at SYRIZA's victory is short-lived and tempered with the reality that Equatorial Guinea, Afghanistan, The Congo, Egypt, and US states, such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia, among many others[!] do not have free elections, and there is hardly democracy in the Dakotas, where some of the poorest First Nations live among white-settler millionaires.

What are we to do? It is clear that we must be equally militant, equally armed, and equally revolutionary as Ho Chi Minh, the Brotherhood, and Fidel, among many others. The West will not let its colonials break free without a fight, or, as the FBI most feared day and night, a militant messiah cannot be allowed to emerge: this remains canon law to the Western empires.

Greece can have its election of young, male upstart radicals; African cannot. Georgia, whose gerrymandered congressional districts dilute African and First Nation power, cannot. Greece, I propose, can because like the rest of Europe it is a junior co-conspirator, but a co-conspirator nonetheless. The finance ministers of the EU know where the chips fall and how the bread is really collected. Greece would no more exist than its more dominant partner in crime, Germany, without the rape and pillage of the colonial world. That is the nature of their union; that was the impetus to Hitler bringing Europe together, by any means necessary.

Whatever these people agree to, Africa will be screwed.

On the Role of our International Institutions

In light of Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe's recent election to the African Union presidency and his call for Africa to withdraw from the International Court, it's important to reflect soberly on the function of the ICC and other international bodies as to their role and worthiness.

The ICC, like the UN and the World Bank were founded to bring unity on the planet, end wars between nations, bring justice where it is due, and alleviate poverty.

Digest this.

Then remember that the ICC has been used as a tool to indict leaders of the former colonies [good or bad ones, and even some of the ones the West installed but got out of line].

The UN has been used to destabilize former colonial governments, to investigate former colonial governments, to sanction former colonial governments, to sanction wars against former colonial governments. I cannot think of ONE government of the former empires that has suffered sanction or investigation or UN troops occupying it, not even the UK when the World Bank had to bail it out [I'll get to that next].

Neither the UN nor its predecessor, the League of Nations, did nothing to stop the extraction of reparations put upon Haiti for France, nor for any other subsequent reparations put upon African countries when they became liberated.

The World Bank has been used to impose SAP [structural adjustment programs], which is bank's way of saying "give me your shit for nothing, and feed and house your African, First Nation*, and Brown children with hopes." When the UK economy went under in the 70's [google: winter of discontent], no such terms were put on it by the World Bank or IMF when money was lent. The UK wasn't made to end its free health care or unemployment benefits. But Africans were made to do so. In fact, African countries were forbidden from implementing many social programs and to use that money to pay back "debts" to the empires. This was done without irony: these poor, underdeveloped countries were forced to pay money to enrich the Western, developed countries, and the very agency set up to prevent poverty orchestrated it.

So the judgment is clear. Crystal, crystal clear, and we must be just as clear. It is not digestible.

These are Nazis in our homes, these are terrorist forces intent on extracting what they want and making fertilizer into any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Let me throw Ebola in for a minute, because it is related: Ebola and HIV emerged at around the same time with obviously different consequences, but we know Ebola comes from bat feces; bats who had been living for millennia in some jungle where Africans must have known to leave them alone. Whatever the empires found in that ground became more important, because as the jungle has been decimated to get to the ground, those bats fled like refugees into populated areas, spreading that deadly virus. So once again, Western greed is in fact behind Ebola, and I cannot prove it but I think behind HIV as well. I think there are probably many unknown microbes in the jungles and rainforests of this planet, and when industrial capitalism destroys those jungles, those microbes will be released unto all of us.




* First Nations, not Indians or American Indians or Native Americans, nor Latino or Hispanic. First Nations covers the whole gamut of the Americas.

Africans, not Afro-American, African-American, Afro-Mexican, Afro-Peruvian, nor Afro-Caribbean. AFRICAN. We all come from the same place and suffer the same indices and social exclusions, don't get LOST in your passport.

Skip Gates runs from Africa

Just finished watching the slimy Skip Gates (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and his venture, "Black in Latin America." I suppose some information is better than none - like why he limited his production to some countries, not others, or not all, where Africans were stolen to build, literally, the wealth of the so-called New World - but as George Bernard Shaw is not famously fully quoted "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing BUT SOME MINDS CAN ONLY HANDLE A LITTLE."

Skip gives us a little because, unlike the Boston Police Dept, I know who he is.

Like any servant of the corporate class, this Harvard endowed professor has a very light touch when it comes to crimes committed by former imperial masters in the creation and maintenance and endurance of the African underclass. He romanticizes Spain's and France's relation to their Africans versus the English white settlers supposedly more brutal, and I recollect no mention of the still-cited Monroe Doctrine justifying USA interests and interventions (and murder) in the Western hemisphere.

Gates leans heavily towards speaking mostly with academics and only depicting images of Black poverty (social exclusion). Academics are good squirrels at amassing nuts and dusting off relics; they rarely indict their masters for current crimes, barely ancient ones. And the persistent of an African or First Nation underclass should be a prima facie indictment of any political system, never to be romanced.

African peoples exemplify in their shared low-caste status that the West is devoid of a religious morality, only a Wall Street one, which is full of brazen lies about how things trickle down to the "least of us": having been to Mexico and seen the racism against African-Mexicans there I wondered if Gates connected the dots between, say, South-Central and Yanga.

I was eager to see his treatment of Cuba, but girded my loins when he set his gauge outright on this alone: whether the Revolution had ended racism. I found this high minded and hypocritical because he sets no such gauge for the Dominican Republic, Mexico, or Peru, whose African populations might fare as worse. As a professional endowed by corporate foundations, he must discredit Cuba's revolution as a renegade from the Wall Street sphere of influence.

Until a National Geographic explorer funded by the Ford Foundation ventures into the marshes of 21st century Great Britain to see if sexism has been eliminated I cry foul.   

Those of us robbed of the knowledge of the African diaspora will come away from this series a bit more knowledgeable: but Gates is no Ali Mazrui. Mazrui was the Kenyan-born historian who gave us the 1980's series, "The Africans: a Triple Heritage," which was aired once, stirred controversy for his criticism of the West, and never, ever seen again. PBS doesn't even sell the DVD.

We are left to feed off the trash of Skip Gates.

Gates is not one to show the West as a macro institution united in subverting Africa and its children. Being Brazilian or Peruvian, Mexican, Dominican, or even Cuban nationality is an irrelevance. In the final analysis, if these nation-states keep you, your kin, and your African homelands in constitutional misery it is hardly worthwhile to compare which refugee camp suffers hunger less, does it?

Gates fails to show any of this. A "Top Chef" judge would lament that missing "sauce" that would give the dish an "elevation" and "tie it all together."

PBS's Dark Compromise with Osun Osogbo

I just watched the PBS Sacred Journey's "Osun-Osogbo" episode and need to carefully gather my thoughts before I attempt to decimate the production.

Careful examination of African and diaspora culture is a hard thing for the West. Since the global North is dependent almost entirely on the global South, is sustained by it, and continues to this hour to be fueled by it, old habits are not only hard to break for white-supremacist culture but also discouraged. The niggers must always be kept in their place in order for the master to keep his.

This makes empathy challenging. It has produced a hundred years of mostly bad cinema where the global South in general and Africa in particular are demeaned in Technicolor. And this institutionalized chasm will confound even the most well-meaning documentary film maker, who cannot let too much daylight in on the scam.

If I am ever dissected by biographers, they would not start my African recovery with reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or a special friendship with a certain Moroccan, as they should, but perhaps being initiated an oloricha to Ochun, the supposed subject of this PBS feature.

I say supposed, because almost immediately "Osun-Osogbo" inadvertently brings up critical topics that Malcolm X critiqued and planted in my head, and which multiply like rabbits throughout the production of this documentary until, towards the end, I have other things on my mind than the oricha herself. And I began to wonder if by some conspiracy of silence Bruce Feiler cut things out or was it the sheer, willful ignorance one finds in so many liberal whites, ass-kissers, and Negro house pets that he just didn't see what was in front of him.

And so, the best part of "Osun-Osogbo" was what was left in the periphery, like how Feiler treats of the state of oricha worship. He glosses over the invasion of missionaries and what this is doing to African culture all over the sub-Saharan part of the continent.

Islam pre-dates the early Christian invasions of Africa we know because the Christian Portuguese slavers kidnapped Muslim Africans. Christianity came later with the Europeans, for the most part, along with and a part of the 19th century "scramble" for Africa.

Yet both these monotheist religions have become Frankenstein monsters of their former monstrous selves since the end of the Cold War; they have become more venomous and radicalized among global South peoples and I daresay unrecognizable to their 19th century counterparts.

The documentary barely shows how monotheism and indigenous culture are not only competing for office space but the monotheists, armed and funded by Western sanctimony, are also forcing through political policies which are anti-women, anti-gay, and, most importantly, anti-indigenous. In short, the West and monotheism are waging a culture war of extermination, which the indigenous cultures are losing.

I recognized this tension in the documentary and found the attempts to "save" the sacred shrine and the indigenous ways problematic and unchallenged. Does Feiler? Bringing in Western artists to do make-overs and making the shrine into a global theme park signal an impossible battle.

If the UN ever makes the Vatican a "World Heritage Site" we will know that Roman Catholicism has ended and a museum opened in its place.

Speaking of museums, enter the anthropologists. The worst parts of the documentary are how Feiler relies much on academics, and academics of a certain Western caliber, for testimony and experience.

Academics are an incestuous lot. They write for the foundations and for each other, not their subjects. To imply as the documentary does the preservation of this culture in the diaspora via PhD candidates is utterly false. Their arrival signals the spiritual transference of the culture from Ile-Ife to Harvard Square, where the Ford Foundation will decide the future of the religion.

The late Cuban journalist and writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, mused a lot about the survival of African culture in the diaspora. He observed the Jazz genre and African religions were preserved and nurtured not by the whites, the nobles, and the social climbers but rather by the lowest and most marginalized in colonial society. The curators and generators of the old ways were the enslaved Africans and their oppressed progeny, prostitutes, and social rejects. Those are the experts that official narratives ignore because their status cannot be discussed let alone displayed as evidence of Western crimes against humanity.

Cabrera Infante mocked the recent phenomenon of academics and New Class aspirants appropriating these forms and making them acceptable and then electing themselves as the "experts" to mainstream audiences. So do I.

Then, writer Richard Rodriguez has similarly mused on the uniquely US phenomenon of this same cultural appropriation by high-class wanna-be's to think they can go on a week-long "pilgrimage" and experiential vacations to, say, Ireland, Mexico, or Nigeria, buy a shamrock, pancho, or kinte cloth, and somehow transform into Irish, Mexican, or African, and implicitly less American, and come back to the global North laboring for research grants and defending their dissertations, with a new identity.

One of the gaggle of academics "Osun-Osogbo" says that wearing the cloths she buys in the African marketplace will identify her in the US as having a connection with her roots! This is pure Disney. Brace yourself, Pocohontas!

Since oricha worship has barely thrived in the US, even among the Black community, I would have liked Feiler to accompany some Cuban or Brazilian elder olorichas to the Osun Festival, those who live in Matanzas or the Diez de Octubre barrio of Havana, Port-au-Prince, or the favelas of Bahia, those who have been inter-generationally nurtured by this religion. But this would have robbed the US market of its white hero, who in this instance are these light-skinned, Ivy League doctoral students who are padding their CV's to gain one of the dwindling tenure-tracked endowed professorships. And the Black American audience -to the extent there would be one - would be so mis-educated as not see their cousins in the Afro-Cubans, Haitians, and Afro-Brazilian worshipers.

The poorer counterparts of these scholars - as has been seen when Cuban olorichas have gone to Nigeria to find similarities, or Nigerians have gone to Brazil to find the same - will not have books printed by university presses that no one will read.

In a diaspora starved of the images contained in this one-hour production, showing the constant devotion and work of the adherents, albeit in the background, to honor this magnificent oricha, it's easy to find my words harsh and hyper-critical. The documentary producers might argue they didn't set out to study history and they could not find anyone but academics to interview. But this is always the defense mechanism of the global North, that what purports to be a dialogue comes out to be a one-sided lecture. The global North, I argue, cannot have a dialogue with the global South, ever.

I welcomed the images contained in "Osun-Osogbo," since the West has been very reticent to give them to us. But hunger does not make me stupid. Having been to Havana, I know the difference between Diez de Octubre and Cambridge, MA.

The global North must be expelled from its occupation of our African Meccas. The pilgrimage of the diaspora is more of a jihad where, as the late Lakota activist said, "Europe must die," not thrive in the perspectives of Ivy League Negro academics. This is what is wrong with the United States, where everything is for sale, and if it is not for sale it is for the stealing. If you do not believe me, just ask Mobil Oil or British Petroleum, who with the force of the Western governments are continuing to suck the life out of Africa and making sure the peoples are powerless to object. This leaves a less than honey-sweetened taste in my mouth.

Ismaaiyl Brinsley

The Right wing has predictably blamed Ismaaiyl Brinsley's assassination of those two New York City police officers on the mayor and the protesters. The Left - and by Left I now mean the white left that pretends to guide us - has quickly distanced themselves from Brinsley's political act, striving to characterize this man's mental faculties: so, he tried to commit suicide. So what?

Bringing this fact up again and again shows they on that remedial Left have no knowledge, no respect, no empathy for the condition of Black people, particularly Black men, in this white-settler country. They know nothing and don't care to know the suicide rates among Black and First Nations peoples. Nor do they have these characteristics when it comes to our First Nations, whose stolen lands they do not want to talk about.

The bottom line, Left or Right, is that any African or First Nations person who shoots back, literally or rhetorically, must be insane.

The bottom line is the left and the right as they are presently constituted of white people, clowns, minstrels, and their ass-kissers does not want a revolution.

This should tell us why they would parade the families of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown in front of the media to express compassion for these police and ask for peace, when no police officer stood up for us.

This should explain why the mayor of New York has shown how he's been tamed by saying how the police assassinations was an "attack on every single New Yorker," not the murder of Black and Brown people mind you: the assassination of the police.

A white friend writes to warn me about making Brinsley a hero, points to his assault on his girlfriend. White people, allies or not, are quick to misconstrue these words and this post, and that is their problem - among many problems; and I hope we give them many, many more.

First, I will choose my own heroes. Second, when they start making an issue of the racists, sexists, and white nationalists who make up the lexicon of radical history - from whom we have all learned - they might be able to come to me about the deeper meanings of Brinsley shooting his girlfriend as somehow making his overtly political act questionable. I am not confused; white people may be.

If you fear revolution then you are content with the predicament of Africans and First Nations peoples and think another dissertation will solve this wretched problem of this wretched civilization. Again, white people will even misconstrue that elocution, and it is not for me to guide them. If their eyes stay closed, I hope we can drag them into the light.

When I think of Home I think of a Place

Imagine for a moment that you were adopted by a decent, loving family who had their hearts in the right place, who fed and clothed you, sent you off to school, and did their best to encourage your development in every way. You know they had heart for you, but as you get older you are also always aware that they are not your kin, that their family name does not give you a history. Family dinners and family reunions impress upon you your actual role as an orphan.

Still, you grow up. Then one day you decide to do some arduous, painful research and find your birth mother, maybe meet her or confront her if she's still alive. Mother, why did you give me up? You just want to know your place in the universe, and that you have a place other than as someone who was abandoned and picked up by kind, loving strangers.

After years of research, you find your birth mother, and you locate the state and town where she lives; you see she has brothers and sisters and cousins. You get an address. You buy a plane ticket. and you fly there to connect with your own roots.

When you arrive you find the address is that of a maximum-security, open-air prison of a feudal epoch, and most of your surviving kin, these brothers and sisters, are housed in it with life sentences. You pick up a local newspaper that details some sketchy but horrifying facts about life in the prison, the conditions, the bad food, the lack of plumbing, the rampant diseases, and maybe some slow-moving lawsuits to get things improved.

You read praises lavished on the local police forces  for their sternness and refusal to coddle "these people."

 ... I have written lately about the DNA results I've gotten over the last few years, first from my father, which was restricted to just Africa, and my own DNA tests, which covered anything there was to uncover.

I have noted that more than 70% of my DNA comes from Africa, specifically West Africa, and specifically the area that comprises modern-day Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, the Bubi, Tikar, Hausa, Fulani, and Tsogo Peoples. But more specific to that, the results tell me about my strong ties to Bioko Island, the homeland of the Bubi Peoples, off the coast of Cameroon but part of the nation of Equatorial Guinea.

As my awakening to what the United States really is as an adoptive parent has grown, this has steadily lead me away from the delusions and mirages that white-settler culture offers in abundance and toward finding my birth mother. And in doing that, I find this birth mother, Africa, in a dungeon of horrors worse than Guantanano or Abu Graib.

I find myself between a rock and a harder place, between a white-settler nation-state in my adoptive home and the land of my birth weaponized by the same white settlers.

The police in this narrative - the African governments which can very loosely be called governments, because they do no governing at all - all carry arms manufactured by Western nation-states, Western nation-states who are essentially the social workers who facilitated my adoption in the first place. These African police states have, at best, a cynical view of their captives, whom they allow to exist somewhere between abject misery and starvation.

The reality of this more than washes over me but is like a deluge through which at first I cannot see a direction.

I wonder: what is my purpose here all along? Because as I have pretended to grow in this adopted home - by which I clearly mean the Western hemisphere, my birth mother has faced a worse brutalization that was kept from my knowledge. My adoptive parents did not tell me. My schools did not inform me.

The Western flag I was to pledge allegiance and was alleged to symbolize all that was modern and good and civilized was in fact making vast swathes of humanity untried prisoners of torture in chambers of horrors and concentration camps.

When I get beyond looking at Africa as a spiritual home, the Mother Continent, or whatever religious relic many trifling Negroes try to make of it, a stand-in for the Garden of Eden and Heaven - the actual, daily terrors in our homes cannot be hidden.

It cannot be hidden in a place like Equatorial Guinea and Bioko Island, the land of my ancestors. It is no home to go and be nurtured or to reconnect with long, lost family. It is not a place to have a family reunion. It is not even good enough to be a place for privileged, white Europeans to go and have a ClubMed vacation and be waited on by poor natives. It is a place in dire, dire need to be liberated, as any political prisoner would be, and by any means on the table. These are places that need revolutions.

Having this knowledge I know it must have been in the strategy of the white settlers as they broke their African captives to totally disassociate their knowledge from their homes and their families. Hell has been let loose in steady infernos on that continent, and its children in the diaspora are, on the whole denied the outrage due them, and therefore the inkling to do something about it, as the Irish were in regards to British occupation of Ireland; or the Jews still are in defending the nation-state of Israel. The little-discussed Vietnamese community in Southern California is a Republican constituency just as anti-communist as their Miami counterparts. But, by design, as the late John Hendrik Clark said repeatedly, "Blackness" only describes what you look like; it does not tell you where you're from.

In "The Whiz," Dorothy sings "When I think of home I think of a place where there's love overflowing ..." before she clicks her magic shoes and returns to New York City. The joke is on us. My ending would have had her wake up with a gun in her hand, a copy of Che's manual, "Guerrilla Warfare" at her side, and in the land of her ancestors ready to organize the people and drive out the client class and Euro-kiss-assers.

Now, imagine you were kidnapped by a family who did not have your best interest at heart and essentially did the same things to you ...

The Global Race War and Revolution

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.

An Open Letter to a Young Black Man who could have been Me

An Open Letter to my younger self, my, older self, and my other selves.

Dear, brother,
It says a tremendous lot about the decimation of our culture as Africans in the diaspora that our young have to re-learn what our elders went through, and they often learn it stubbornly, unwillingly. I speak from experience, but I am not speaking of the data on the timeline. I think we all pretend to know that; I am speaking of the implications.

Let's put aside for this letter that most of the fault lies with white civilization, which took you from your home, made you and that home into something neither would recognize.

But part of this is the fault of our own elders who - unlike ANY oppressed people I know of - hand their own children over to the white racist society to grow into complete men and women, even though these elders know better. They know no other option than to hand over their treasures because they are so removed and disconnected from their source, so it follows that we would be just as hopeless.

And so we go about trying to blend in and do our best for these elders, who are no better than the African and Arab dictators installed by European powers: their values are one and the same; they answer to their bell ringing. It is not in their plan that we grow into men and women.

And Hawaii will not give that to us, though it HAS removed me from the mainland, and this is a good thing, because - maybe like you - it has allowed me to breathe.

Part of the fault in our being so lost lies with us, as adults. We keep seeing manifestations of what this white-settler state thinks of us, plans for us, but we simply refuse to believe it. We feel we cannot believe it because we "know" there is nothing else. And we "know" there is nothing else because we do not know we came from somewhere. It is this "knowing" that is the cornerstone of the government schools in which we were all sent to learn. Nothing.

I have to say: it must begin with us knowing we came from somewhere. This doesn't mean dressing it up in the archetypes of patriarchy [viz. "Great Kings and Queens of Africa"], which is bullshit to keep you tethered to a warped ideology. You cannot Africanize European Christianity and make things right.

Hawaii sovereignty will not replace our origins anymore than dabbling in Buddhism or getting an MBA from Harvard will, which are just some of the things we do to distract ourselves, but the sovereignty cause does shed light on how white capitalism works [for them], and why MY homeland of Bioko Island and Cameroon are further along down the same toilet that occupied Hawaii will go. Hawaii is just South Central LA and Ferguson, MO. in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii is the Pine Ridge Reservation with a beach.

I say this in this particular way because these manifestations of white supremacy and imperialism are to be studied, to illuminate who you are and where you came from and how you got here, but they are not diversions.

When I got back from my first trip to Cuba, several small magazines and newspapers asked me to write about it. I could not. For the life of me and the need of money I could not. Then it dawned on me that I could not because it wasn't Cuba I learned about; it was the United States of America.

[I had to go back then and re-read James Baldwin's "The Discovery of What it Means to be an American"]

Brother, if you have friends taunting you and calling you names for speaking about the racial issues of the day; if you have boyfriends calling you "nigger", I say it's way passed time to stop and look around because it's going to get worse.

When Polonius tells his son Laertes in "Hamlet": "TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE ..." he's not telling him to be whoever he wants to be. He's telling him to know where he came from, and remember his ancestors.