|
Books by Chinweizu
The West and the Rest of Us
(1975) /
Decolonising the African Mind
(1987) /
Voices from
Twentieth-century Africa (1988)
Invocations and
Admonitions (1986);
Energy Crisis and Other Poems
(1978);
Anatomy of Female Power
(1990)
Towards the Decolonization of
African Literature (1980).
* *
* * *
CAACBA
Congratulates South Sudan
A Note from
Chinweizu
CAACBA (the
Committee Against Arab Colonialism in Black Africa)
hereby heartily congratulates the people and Government
of the Republic of South Sudan for winning their
independence. We salute their courage and persistence in
waging their protracted liberation war, which began in
1955; a war that has finally liberated them from the
dungeons of Arab colonialism; Arab dungeons where,
throughout the last two centuries, they suffered
enslavement, racism, Arabization, religious persecution,
second-class citizenship, genocide and other evils, ever
since Egypt’s Mohammed Ali Pasha sent an expedition in
1821 to conquer Sudan.
“South Sudan! O
yeah!”
In the land of the
ancestors, the spirit of John Garang must be pleased at
this victory that he masterminded.
We hear that Gen.
Joseph Lagu, who co-started the Anya-nya phase of the
war of liberation back in 1963, took part in the
proclamation and celebration of your independence on
July 9. We salute him.
We note with joy
that about 15 Presidents and Prime Ministers of Black
African countries came to the celebrations, including
those of Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia
and Zimbabwe.
Now that they have
come and seen for themselves the dismal condition in
which South Sudan was kept under Arab Colonialism, we
urge them to mobilize help for South Sudan’s development
and to prepare to provide diplomatic and military
support to South Sudan if Khartoum dares to resume its
war of colonialist aggression on South Sudan.
We also urge these
black African presidents to mobilize Black World support
for the African victims of Arab colonialism in other
parts of Sudan, e.g., Darfur, South Kordofan, and Nubia
so they too can liberate themselves.
We hope South Sudan
will continue to resist Arab neo-colonialism wherever it
rears its head, including in the African Union.
We pledge to
continue and develop our work of educating Pan-Africanists
on Arab imperialism and its horrors. And we, in
particular, pledge to keep urging Pan-Africanists to
support the struggles by the black Africans of Darfur,
Abyei, Kordofan, etc. to liberate themselves from the
racist Arab colonialist regime in Khartoum.
Chinweizu
Coordinator of CAACBA
16 July 2011
* *
* * *
Parable of the Nigger
Monkey, Python, and Eagle
You ask: “What strategic and
tactical advantages are possible for us in the current
situation? By what means do we gain the advantage?”
Dear Kwasi,
Thanks for raising
these issues. I shall try my best to address them. . . .
What I am aware of is the saying that “the enemy of your
enemy is your friend,” or more accurately, a possible
ally. And, even then, it takes astute diplomacy to turn
him into your ally. Please check with any generals you
know and find out the correct statement—they are, after
all, the professional experts in this field.
By the way, unlike
you, I am not interested in so-called “visionary”
generals or leaders. You never know what demons brew the
potions that give them visions. War is a deadly serious
business, not an affair for visionaries. What we, the
black race, sorely need and have long lacked are
practical, down-to earth, realistic and sober generals
and leaders. And we are at war—economic, military,
political, ideological, cultural, intellectual etc, and
have been for two or more millennia, and have been
losing non-stop all that time.
In any case, that
saying about the enemy of your enemy does not apply to
the present situation of the black race. Our situation
is that of having two simultaneous white-race enemies;
the Arabs and the Europeans. It is comparable to the
situation in WWII when the USSR found itself with two
ideological enemies: Nazi Germany and the Western
Alliance. It was therefore obliged to make an alliance
with the enemy that it considered less of a threat, and
that could help it defeat what it judged to be its
principal enemy. At first the USSR allied itself with
Germany, but when Germany invaded the USSR, it allied
itself with the West which could supply it with arms
from the factories of the USA. Luckily, the West saw
things much the same way and entered into alliance with
its Soviet enemy and gave them the materiel to drive the
Germans back to Berlin.
But these
anti-German allies went their separate ways and resumed
their enmity as soon as they had defeated and
dismembered Germany, their common enemy. In our case,
can the Arabs give us any help that would enable us
defeat the Europeans? Can the Europeans give us any help
that could help us defeat the Arabs? That should be the
key to any decision as to which side, if any, to ally
with. But I maintain that we are not even in a position
to enter an alliance with either. We should stay neutral
and see who beats the other, and take it from there.
That’s the best way for us to take advantage of the
situation. We have no need to get involved.
Those who think we
should side with the Arabs should tell us why; should
spell out the advantage of joining the Arab side which
looks most likely to lose. As for the West, they don't
need us to help them. An elephant crushing a python has
no use for a squirrel’s help. Why would they welcome an
alliance with us? So why should we even try to side with
them? In case you haven’t noticed, we are so weak that
our proper concern should be to build up our basic
economic and military capacity. We don’t manufacture
anything that counts in life, let alone that matters in
warfare. Unlike our 19th century ancestors who resisted
the European invaders, using the bows and arrows and
spears they produced by themselves, we today don’t
produce any of the weapons used by our armies. We have
lost the capacity to make even the bows and arrows and
spears that our ancestors made in the 19th century.
Without our foreign suppliers we can go to war only with
our bare hands and teeth against tanks, ballistic
missiles and atom bombs. We are not industrialized and
so can’t manufacture anything that matters today.
Therefore, getting industrialized should be our top
preoccupation.
The fundamental
question we must answer is: what are the permanent
interests of the black race? I would suggest that they
are our physical security and prosperity, together with
the power to guarantee both. These are what we have been
unable to establish for our race for well over two
millennia; as a result we have suffered invasions,
defeats, massive enslavement, land expropriations,
exploitation, humiliation and all the usual consequences
of defeat in war.
An alliance with
the weak Arabs is not in our interest; nor is a futile
moralizing and pointing at the double standards of the
world powers. Nor is the self-righteous enjoyment of our
feeling of moral purity—our presumed state of being
untainted by the violent and bloody ways of the wicked
world. If all this energy that many of us are
squandering in moralizing on Libya and Palestine etc,
could be channeled to finding out how to organize to
industrialize our societies, we would be much better
off. We have so many basic problems that should
preoccupy us instead of the conflicts between Libya and
the Europeans, and between the Israelis and the
Palestinians. We should mind our own business.
Let us just begin
with the matter of sheer physical survival. As we all
know, AIDS is severely depopulating our societies in
Africa and the diaspora. Why aren’t our ‘progressive’
intellectuals focusing on such a basic task as
eradicating AIDS from our societies? It can be done
within a five-year campaign. The cure and vaccine have
been patented in the USA. Why don’t we get our
governments to organize the eradication of AIDS using
the cure and vaccine that have been on the shelves since
the 1990s?
We can’t, in our
weakness, hope to eradicate Western imperialism or
capitalism even in another century. Why don’t we start
with easier tasks, tasks for which the tools are
available? If we secure our population against the
ravages of AIDS, we can then proceed to the task of
industrialization which would give us the economic and
technological basis for doing many other vital things.
We need to be quite
clear about one basic fact on which some of us are
hopelessly confused: North Africa is land we lost to the
Arabs 14 centuries ago. The European attack on Libya is,
therefore, not an attack on our land. Furthermore, we
are not Arabs, so the European attack on the Arabs in
Libya, or on Arabs anywhere for that matter, is not an
attack on us. And we should not get all worked up about
it.
We should also
recognize that whatever can reduce our enemies from two
to one serves our interest, and should meet with our
approval rather than outrage. So we should, in strict
neutrality, watch from the sidelines as the Arabs and
Europeans fight it out, and hope that only one of them
is left standing at the end of it all.
While staying
neutral, politically as well as emotionally, towards
their Arab-European war, what might we do to advance our
Black race interest? Besides waging a war on AIDS, we
could take advantage of the Arabs’ pre-occupation with
their war with Europe and help our people in Sudan and
Mauritania to liberate themselves from Arab colonialism
and enslavement. For that we don’t even need to go into
alliance with the West. We could source arms from China
and Russia and send them to our fellow Africans who are
resisting the Arabs in Darfur, Mauritania and other
places.
For those who think
it is in our interest to side with the Arabs, let me
tell the Nigger Monkey parable, a parable about Nigger
monkey, desert python and bald eagle:
Once upon a time, a
nigger monkey sat high on his tree branch, plucking and
munching fruits and heard, without being concerned, the
desperate cries of another monkey who was being
strangled on the ground by a python. Not long
afterwards, the same python was snatched up by an eagle
and thrown hard against a rock. As the python writhed in
pain because of its broken spine, the nigger monkey was
overcome with universal animal sympathy, and rushed down
to nurse the injured python and to clamor against the
viciousness of the predatory eagle. But as soon as the
python was strong enough again, it promptly strangled
and swallowed the nigger monkey.
Far too many of our
vocal intelligentsia are obsessed with advocating
“justice” for everybody on earth. Admirably magnanimous,
but naïve, since we do not have the power to secure
justice even for our race, let alone for any other
people. We need to get rid of our obsession with
moralizing, and get focused on seeking victory rather
than “justice”—especially justice for everybody else but
ourselves. Without power we cannot enforce whatever
notion of justice we have. Nor can we have victory over
our enemies. So, shouldn’t building up our own power be
the first task on our agenda?
I hope these remarks help in
addressing the issues you raised.
Yours
in the service
Chinweizu
* *
* * *
|
Slave: My True Story
By
Mende Nazer
Born into the Karko tribe in the Nuba
mountains of northern Sudan, Nazer has
written a straightforward, harrowing memoir
that's a sobering reminder that slavery
still needs to be stamped out. The first,
substantial section of the book concentrates
on Nazer's idyllic childhood, made all the
more poignant for the misery readers know is
to come. Nazer is presented as intelligent
and headstrong, and her people as peaceful,
generous and kind. In 1994, around age 12
(the Nuba do not keep birth records), Nazer
was snatched by Arab raiders, raped and
shipped to the nation's capital, Khartoum,
where she was installed as a maid for a
wealthy suburban family. (For readers
expecting her fate to include a grimy
factory or barren field, the domesticity of
her prison comes as a shock.) |
 |
To Nazer, the
modern landscape of Khartoum could not possibly have
been more alien; after all, she had never seen even a
spoon, a mirror or a sink, much less a telephone or
television set. Nazer's urbane tormentors—mostly the
pampered housewife—beat her frequently and dehumanized
her in dozens of ways. They were affluent, petty, and
calculatedly cruel, all in the name of "keeping up
appearances." The contrast between Nazer's pleasant but
"primitive" early life and the horrors she experienced
in Khartoum could hardly be more stark; it's an object
lesson in the sometimes dehumanizing power of progress
and creature comforts. After seven years, Nazer was sent
to work in the U.K., where she contacted other Sudanese
and eventually escaped to freedom. Her book is a
profound meditation on the human ability to survive
virtually any circumstances.—Publishers Weekly
* *
* * *
 |
Escape from Slavery: The True Story
of My Ten Years in Captivity and My
Journey to Freedom in America
By
Francis Bok
Seven-year-old Francis Piol Bol Buk was
living happily on his family's southern
Sudan farm. One day in 1986, he was sent on
errands to the marketplace. There, a slave
raid ripped him from his contented life and
threw him into a wretched existence serving
under a northern Sudanese Arab. After he
escaped at age 17, Buk made his way to Cairo
with a black market passport incorrectly
listing his name as Bok and became a U.N.
refugee allowed to settle in the U.S. in
1999. |
Although he found contentment in Iowa
among other refugees, the following year Bok decided to
work with an American antislavery organization, and
testified before Congress about the atrocities in Sudan.
While this is a remarkable story, its power is conveyed
most effectively through Bok's simple retelling. His
sincerity compels, especially when he describes the
decade of mistreatment he endured. After two failed
escape attempts, he's told he'll be killed in the
morning, and while bound, he thinks of the morning
ahead: "I would be dead and finally through with this
place and this family. My mind preferred death." Yet
when his master changes his mind, Bok immediately starts
plotting again. For all his emotional strength, though,
Bok remains humble. He thanks God and everyone who helps
him escape slavery. This is a powerful, exceptionally
well-told story, equally riveting and heartbreaking.
Although legal strides have been made, with the help of
people like Bok, the persistence of slavery in the world
makes this a work that can't be ignored.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
posted 26 July 2011 |
