By Henry A. Onwubiko
Africa must Unite or Perish – Kwame Nkrumah
In my preteen and less discriminate years before I embraced the opportunity for further education, and boarded a Pan-American airline flight from Ikeja (not yet renamed Murtala Mohamed) Airport to New York, class struggle was the unspoken veneer and accepted commonsense lesson throughout West Africa, that after the white man, Monkey dey work, Baboon dey chop. This antediluvian expression nearly decimated the harmonious social equilibrium and class tolerance on the accepted harmer-and-nail relationship between the baboon minority ruling class and the laboring monkey majority.
The endless cycle of unequal exchange and exploitation between the robbing Western imperialism and the ubiquitous pool of black labourers who promenade through its myriad neoliberal prescriptions with the increasing unwillingness of the monkey class to bear the burden of poverty, further weaponized their monkey ideology, that every day was now for the thief and one day for the owner of the house. Still, the social pacification of baboons, the monkeys and the neo-colonial agents of imperialism had long been secured by the bayonets of the army and police inherited from the colonial West African Frontier Force, anchored to an unwritten Magna Carta from the activities of sanctimonious pastors, dubious Imams and obedient lay citizens of several generations, which abridged upon departure, my mother had wisely reminded me to remember that all the five fingers were not equal.
America turned out to be a melting pot which fermented everything – even the five fingers – but not racism. I discovered that no matter how well-brewed in the pot, black people were not soluble in the melting pot because they bore the burden and tragedy of plantation slavery. The process of slavery divided black people into two classes in the African continent and abroad into two classes which Malcom X had categorized as the fight between the House and Field Negroes, its continental equivalent being the baboon minority in a pacified struggle against the labouring monkey majority. Malcom noted that under plantation slavery the class of House Negroes were the errand boys of the white planter who showered them with privileges to secure their unwavering loyalty in controlling the Field Negroes who laboured in his plantations from where he made his profit, and secured his scandalous standard of living. The Field Negroes constituted the significant majority of the slaves, whose class allies in the African continent were the labouring monkey majority.
From the American Melting Pot, it became evident that Pan Africanism or the political and economic unity of Africans under one state with socialist principles was not an option but a scientific imperative based on the history of plantation slavery which affected every black family for over 400 years (the first black slave having arrived in Jamestown in 1619), initiated by Western Imperialism. The intermittent period of transition for black people in America from plantation slavery to wage slavery in which White southern planters waged a civil war against their newly industry and manufacture-minded Northern brothers was proclaimed as the emancipation of the African from slavery. They were nevertheless besieged with genocide, through a series of pogroms, lynching by the Ku Klux Clan, the passage of Jim Crow Laws to propagate racial segregation and the doctrine of White Supremacy.
Despite the important value of the cheap labour of Africans emancipated from plantation slavery into wage slaves to activate their Northern industries, mining and manufacturing centers which included the assembly of machineries and automobiles, black people were targeted with racism, genocide, segregation and elimination as a final solution. While engaging Africans into the American British and other colonial armies to assure victory in their two world wars, the black man was denied the right to vote and from racial segregation were victims of sterilization and other subhuman malpractices by the White supremacists. No western soldier except mercenaries and spies have willingly fought against a Western nation unlike Africans in Western armies used as slaves to achieve as in the present AFRICOM and NATO commands currently surrounding Africa for their geopolitical interests and to prevent Pan Africanism.
The African was deprived of his humanity, and subjugated for several centuries under plantation and wage slavery, his natural resources of which the African continent was more endowed globally than any other territory, regularly embezzled with impunity, visited with genocide and occupation under Apartheid. Pan Africanism, a scientific ideology that reflected the anti-thesis of black enslavement, exploitation and dehumanization which guarantees the security of his natural resources for the development of Africans, those at home and those abroad under one nation, one socialist government, one security, one political and economic union was the inevitable solution. These were the tragic and dreadful conditions existing in the Diasporas and within the African continent by the beginning of the twentieth century and the transition from plantation slavery to wage slavery, articulated and summed up by Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over two million black people as members came to Harlem New York from the African continent and the various parts of the globe. The tricolor African flag of Red, Black and Green was uplifted and its national ideology proclaimed as Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad, and its Motto declared as one God, one aim and one destiny.
Kwame Nkrumah, also in search of education in 1945 was attracted as numerous black scholars to the American Melting Pot, and advanced Pan Africanism by projecting the black star on the Ghanaian flag of Independence in recognition of Marcus Garvey, and the UNIA. He proceeded in his numerous studies on the social and material condition of Africans to conclude that the Independence of Ghana, his own West African country (or that of any African country) was meaningless without the total and unified independence of Africa as one political, economic, nation with a unified continental security.
Nkrumah was tireless in his commitment to developing Pan Africanism. After his studies and enlightenment by Garvey from the American Melting Pot, he led the formation of the Manchester Pan African Congress in October 1945, and in 1960 with other Pan Africanists, produced a secret agreement with Patrice Lumumba, Sekou Toure, Modibo Keita, Julius Nyerere and others to forge a continental socialist, Pan African nation, under one political security and economic framework. Unfortunately, this plan was resisted by the Neocolonial forces of Western Imperialism and some of their leaders whose selfish interests secured them to the exploitative desires of their former colonial masters, and who preferred in 1963 to form the Organization for African Unity (OAU), and not the imperative solution of Pan Africanism.
Africa has continued to produce Pan African leaders that were killed in the class struggle to uplift the labouring monkey majority over the minority baboon ruling class, and House Negroes have continued to rob the mines, petroleum and other African natural resources for their former colonial and neo-colonial masters. President Moamar Ghadafi of Socialist Libya together with the uniting monkey majority was killed by the forces of Western Imperialism and its leprous baboon appendages for transforming the OAU to the African Union (AU) by his pursuit of the Pan African objective of making Africa one socialist nation under a single political and economic unit with one national security. Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso met the same tragic fate as he struggled to uplift the labouring monkey class or Field Negroes above the baboonic ruling minority and their neo-colonial masters. Only the labouring monkey majority and Field Negroes who reflect the sovereignty of the African people are historically equipped by slavery to form the single national socialist bond required of Pan Africanism. While Marcus Garvey and Malcom X arrived at this conclusion through their activities as organizers of the African masses, that the history of plantation and wage slavery has attributed to this class the necessity of their activity in forming the uniting bonds of the Pan African nation, Kwame Nkrumah arrived at the same conclusion that the class of Field Negroes or the labouring monkey majority are imperative elements in forging the necessary unity for a single continental Pan African nation that is the very antithesis of the present divisive neo-colonial African states bequeathed by plantation and wage slavery at the mercy of Imperialism and its neo-colonial agents.
As for the defensive content of democracy used by western hegemonic agents as the desirable veneer to measure good governance, Nkrumah and other Pan Africanists have observed that Western Imperialism through its press and propaganda applauds a military coup where its House Negroes or the minority baboon ruling class takes over a government of the neo-colonial micro states as democratic, otherwise it keeps quiet. However it considers a government to be undemocratic and to be sanctioned if the successful military coup plotters uplift the will of the labouring majority of Field Negroes, or the labouring monkey majority class in the interest of building Pan Africanism.
These results or claims over democracy are not surprising and are to be expected as Imperialism and its neocolonial and racist forces can only support the results or policies that will maximize their surplus value and profit without consideration of social justice, the will of the suffering majority. Consequently, July 26th, the date of their liberation was renamed by the Nigerien monkey majority as the Bazounic class because of the dethroned former President and neo-colonial lackey of French Imperialism, Mohammad Bazoun. The military liberators, true to their class interest, next suspended the mining of Nigerien Uranium by French multinational companies who exported it not only to all parts of Europe where it was used to generate constant nuclear energy transformed to electrical energy to light up France and their fellow European Union members. The Nigerien revolutionaries eventually expelled the French Ambassador, the 1500 French soldiers and ultimately severing relations with France the Western hegemonic and neo-colonial power. Meanwhile, to demonstrate its alliance to France, the United States withdrew its 500 million dollars aid to Niger without consideration of the presence of over 1100 American troops, military base and drones, still stationed in Niger due to its interest in Uranium and other national resources in the West African Sahel region, under the bogus claim of fighting terrorism, while preparing to use Niger as a launching pad for a possible third world war to defend its global exploitative unipolar hegemonic rule.
While Western Imperialism accuses the Nigerien military junta of being punished for taking power by undemocratic means, it had initially welcomed the Gabonese military junta, a neighbour to Niger that deposed President Ali Bongo who had retained power for French Imperialism against the suffering monkey majority of Gabon.
Here, Western Imperialism initially welcomed the military coup as a mechanism to ease out of power the aging and ailing Bongo while replacing him with a younger upstart, still under their watch who was not only a member of the Baboon ruling class, but is expected to continue to secure the national resources of Gabon for Western Imperialism under the guidance and management of the French bourgeoisie.
The consequences of the class struggle between the minority baboon ruing class with the exploitative neo-colonial agents of Western Imperialism against the labouring monkey majority class in the micro states of Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Chad created the opportunity and condition for the ascent of Pan Africanism and the formation of a class alliance of the labouring monkey class to form a single unified government, common security with a common political and economic union. The necessary scientific steps are being taken by Goita of Mali, Tchiani of Niger and Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso who have begun to form a single political and economic union under a common security. They have vowed to defend their nation against the neo-colonial discontents created by France, NATO, AFRICOM, the European Union, and the reactionary baboons of Western Imperialism, under the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). These constituted classes of the Baboon minorities are united by the imperialist masters under their claim to have won their elections by a fictitious democracy in their neo-colonial micro states.
By manipulating ECOWAS its democracy boys and its army to fight the Nigerien military junta, France attempts to revert its expulsion as thief of Uranium belonging to the Niger people. While the labouring monkey majority of Niger remains in darkness, without electricity, France and the rest of Europe will be lit with the Uranium of Niger. By these acts, Western Imperialism has necessitated the condition for the formation, defence and growth of the Sahelian Alliance and the ascent of Pan Africanism. Libya and Moamar Ghadaffi, its Pan African leader was defeated by NATO and the local neo-colonial forces of Western Imperialism because there was no such Sahelian Alliance under the foundations of a united monkey labouring class that constitute the will of the majority of African people. The present Sahelian Alliance which unites Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger stands under the declaration that under their common singular security, an attack on one Pan African state is an attack on all the states, or on the entire Pan African nation. Indeed, the hesitancy of ECOWAS to invade Niger or other Pan Africanist Sahelian states as dictated by Western Imperialism, is because it most likely would bring defeat within their own neo-colonial micro states. Through the predictable challenges to power by its own monkey majority class which it may not easily retain by bribery, buying of votes and loans from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other western money lending institutions with their neoliberal prescriptions aimed at multiplying poverty among the monkey class while enriching the baboon minority ruling class who use the money to buy the votes and consequent democracy.
In this last stage of Imperialism, it is important to recall from the African diasporas the two black classes defined by Malcom X as the Field Negroes class majority, and the House Negro minority who not only look after the house of their White masters but help to keep tab on the Field Negroes labouring in the plantations. An example is the present attack on the African National Congress ruling party of South Africa which came to power by the combination of armed struggle by the monkey majority class and elections against a White minority regime who by force had occupied most of the lands of black people characterized by racism, apartheid and reactionary violence. However, in the United States, House of Representative is Mr. John James, a black conservative House Negro and anointed chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs who for the sake of propaganda dim it necessary to explain why the United States considers South Africa its enemy.
Mr. John James speaking with his white master’s voice, gave the reason that the African National Congress, the party of the monkey majority of the developing Pan Africanist government of South Africa was violating the rules of democracy in its policy of restitution and land redistribution to Black people whose lands were seized by White settlers during the dark days of Apartheid and white minority rule. His tragic condemnation of the land restitution policy by the ANC, showed his lack of reflection of his own American history where the emancipated blacks were neither given lands of their own or money to start a new life. Mr. John James as a House Negro is not the only member of his class used to wage the interclass struggle to further the aims and objectives of Western Imperialism to subjugate the development of Pan Africanism and to achieve genuine emancipation from Western Imperialism by the African masses. Another House Negro is Loydd Austin, the black National Defence Secretary of the United States who true to his class has committed himself to organizing the AFRICOM – a military contingent to NATO aimed at containing China and Russia and to prevent the emergence of Pan Africanism by subjugating African sovereignty under the interest of Western Imperialism. Loydd Austin uses his black colour and origin as a ticket to recruit black soldiers in his campaign among African leaders and military officers. Western imperialism has also utilized another House Negro – Pamala Harris – fixed as vice president of the United States as an agent for its campaign against Pan-Africanism in the African continent through cash inducement where bribes of millions of dollars are given to leading members of the baboon minority ruling class in such neo-colonial states as Ghana and Senegal to strengthen the minority baboon ruling classes in the opprobrious battle for democracy to retain power and sustain the neo-colonial alliance with Western Imperialism against the labouring monkey majority class whose will, sovereignty and unity are necessary to build a continental socialist African nation of one security, one economic and one political union.
Pan Africanism – the building of a united continental nation with a single military, political and economic union for all Africans remain an objective necessity which only when realised can end the exploitation of their labour, natural resources, the incessant and competitive neo-colonial wars with its accompanied famine and mass poverty, brain drain, depopulation, and genocide, all induced by Western Imperialism. As an imperative strategy for the continental formation of the African nation, Kwame Nkrumah emphasized the significance of the class struggle, and the affinity between the labouring monkey majority class in the African continent, in alliance with the field negro majority in the diasporas in forming a common spontaneous bond of unity for the foundation of the Pan-African nation. Sorting for such an affinity should lead to preparations to capture the desirable popular state power through armed struggle or peaceful negotiations. There has been clandestine motives of neo-colonial agents and local stooges to infiltrate and undermine the formation of Pan Africanism, as is evident from the chairmanship of President Fakke of Senegal, one of the chairmen of AU, with the latest attempt of inviting Israeli Zionist agents as observers in the African Union, or the regular strategy of corrupting the baboonic or house negro ruling minority class. Africa, Nkrumah had observed, has no choice under imperialism than to unite or perish.
Colour, class and nationality has long been tools of Western Imperialism to prevent Pan Africanism in order to retain the services and control of black people to build their hegemonic domination and unipolar rule. In these trying times, the starring House Negroes include Barack Obama, John James, Loydd Austin and Linda Thomas Greenfield, the current chairlady of the baboon minority and House Negro class in the United Nations. Of dishonourable mention is His Excellency President Ruto of Kenya, who for only a 100 million dollars was lured by Western Imperialism to engage the Kenyan defence forces to Haiti to bring Africans to kill their fellow Africans and shamelessly calling this perfidious action an example of Pan Africanism.
In conclusion, Pan Africanism emerged from the dreams, suffering and longing of Africans deprived of their land, dragged through plantation slavery to present day indecent wage slavery or unemployment and racism, Jim Crow, lynching, apartheid and genocide for freedom and self determination. It took the courage of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association with a membership of over two million Africans to articulate the solution to build up their own continent as a single socialist nation with African characteristics, one political, security and economic union, under the nationalism that Africa is for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. Marcus Garvey observed that nothing short of the singular nation under one government and one security with its distinguished citizens of various affairs would prevent an impending genocide of immense proportion on black people and restore their dignity and humanity.
Many Western propagandists, House Negroes or its baboonic ideologues, argue that Pan Africanism is the romantic return to Africa by African descendants in the diasporas. This fallacy rules out the fact that many Europeans are Americans but they do not entertain going back to Europe. Africans have the choice to defend their Pan African nation as well as remain wherever they choose to be on the globe. Pan Africanism remains the basis of their honour and dignity, protection, and respect. With the actualization of Pan Africanism in the African Continent, Africans cease to serve in the Western Hegemonic wars of Ukraine, Gaza, etc or be part of the neo-colonial army of AFRICOM which Western Imperialism uses to retain its unjust unipolar hegemonic rule, and geopolitical interests while continued underdevelopment, famine, poverty, racism and genocide remain the lot of black people and their unborn children. Why should Africans be recruited by western agents to serve in their national armies, assigned to kill, to impose their hegemonic rule and interests contrary to Pan Africanism? With the single Pan African nation, well implanted in Africa, the great Marcus Garvey can now be exhumed and returned to his rightful resting place of Ethiopia where he remains a model of unity with his fellow Pan African comrades as Ethiopia stretches forth her hands to restore genuine peace to mankind.
• Onwubiko is Professor of Biochemistry, University of Nigeria, Nsukka