marcus garvey pan african university - Blackherbals.com

Continued from page 16 – The Urgency of the Pan
Afrikanism Ideal in the 21st Century
Africa can play a constructive role in the international
community and, in the light of their bondage under
European imperialism it can bring sanity to a world torn
by greed, self- interest, and inhumanity.
To enable the despoiled continent of Africa to come into
its own, it must restore the pristine dignity of the Africans
themselves, before attempting to revive the stature of
man in the council of nations. This is one main reason
why, on their countries attaining independence, African
nationalists sought to create an image of the African
personality which will undertake this sacred mission. But
it should never be forgotten that under the most grinding
oppression of slavery Africans themselves also thought of
the African personality.
When the slaves sang their sorrow songs either in the
plantations of America or of the Caribbean, they
remembered Africa, their home. These African slaves did
not accept slavery as their lot; they were not supine.
There were sporadic insurrections. Nat Turner
unsuccessfully led his fellow slaves against the plantation
owners of Virginia, just as Spartacus did in the days of
Rome. Toussaint L’ouverture, from Dahomey,
successfully led the slaves of San Domingo against
Spain, British and France; he founded the Republic of
Haiti.
We must refocus on the fundamentals of our situation as
black people. Since white Europeans began raiding sub-
Saharan Africa in the 15th century for Negro captives to
enslave; since white Arabs invaded Egypt in 639AD; and
indeed ever since white Persians conquered Black Egypt
in 525BC, the cardinal question for Black Africans has
been;
How can Black Africans organize to survive in the
world, and with security and respect?
That question has remained unanswered for 25 centuries.
We must today face and answer it correctly for the
conditions of this 21st century, or we perish. For the sake
of continuity, we must ask; is any of the 20th century
brands of Pan- Africanism still relevant to our situation
today? Can any of them help us to organize and survive,
with security and respect, in the world of the 21st
century?
We are clear that Pan Africanism is the primary objective
and condition for alleviating our suffering and better
enabling our progress and development. We must
politically educate and organize the scattered, suffering,
and struggling African Masses worldwide into the
movement and organization for the total liberation and
unification of the entire black Africa. We accept, as a
17- Traditional African Clinic August 2013
historical fact and current reality that all persons of African
descent, wherever we are scattered, in Africa (north
and south of the Sahara) and the African Diaspora, are
African, and belong to the Africa.
We understand that the scattering of Africans all over the
world and our continuing untold suffering is due
primarily; to the racist, capitalist, imperialist system and
that nation, class and gender struggle is the motive force
for qualitative, revolutionary, change and progress in
Africa and the World. The struggle is for the complete
independence, unification and revolutionary development
of black Africa.
Pan-Africanism must be our objective for the total
liberation and unification of black Africa. The African
people must be politically educated and organized in a
mass, revolutionary movement to achieve the Pan-
African objective; and that ideological struggle and
revolutionary work are the essential determining forces in
our struggle to achieve Pan-Africanism.
Just over a decade into the 21st century, things are critical
for African people. Capitalist Imperialism has continued
to experience the crises that have convulsed it since its
initiation as a dominant global political economy.
The march of capitalism in the form of rehashed
variations of the ideologies of exploitation has continued
and has completed its dominance of the globe. All of this
has had a brutal impact on the masses of poor and
working people in every section of the world with any
semblance of industrial development and now threatens
even the most remote cultures that have yet to be
overwhelmed by the avaricious passions of the profit
machine.
Central to this continuation of this culture of death,
destruction, rape and robbery, stands the African. In the
fifty odd years since the military defeat of the African
revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and 70s, the
counterrevolution has refused to let up in its policy of
containment and destabilization of the African working
class. It has continued to spit on the legacy of our thrust
for freedom.
The vultures and bottom feeding parasites of bourgeois
society continue their brazen, parasitic political
exploitation of the African masses, while the lumpen
petty- bourgeoisie grow fat and wealthy on the trap of
economic extraction in the form of advanced merchant
capitalism, usury, the illegal drug trade, and so on. In the
final analysis, the African nation and its revolution is in
critical condition; after a nearly four decades of
stagnation, it is short on vitality, long on decay, and rife
with abject confusion- the legacy of vicious
Continued on page 18