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No Easy Victories: African
Liberation
and
American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000
From Tanzania to Kansas and Back Again
By Walter Bgoya
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In this
essay, written for the book, No Easy
Victories: African Liberation and American
Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000,
the publisher Walter Bgoya tells of his
years fighting racial inequality in the U.S.
in the 60s, and of mutual discovery between
Tanzanians and some of the American
activists involved in African liberation
movements during the 60s and 70s.
Walter
Bgoya is the managing director of Mkuki na
Nyota, an independent scholarly publishing
company in Dar es Salaam, and chairman of
the international African Books Collective.
From 1972 to 1990 he directed the Tanzania
Publishing House, which played a major role
in making Dar es Salaam a center for
progressive intellectuals from around the
world. Its publications included Walter
Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
Agostinho Neto's Sacred Hope, Samora
Machel's Establishing People's Power to
Serve the Masses, and Issa Shivji's
Class Struggle in Tanzania. |
At the end of July
1961, I and several hundred other African students left
our different countries on scholarships offered by the
African American Institute. I was placed at the
University of Kansas. Before going to the university I
stayed for a month with a generous and deeply religious
white family in a little town called El Dorado. The stay
with this family offered me the first experience of
living in the United States.
I was taken to
church every Sunday and stood in line with the priest
after service to shake hands with the whole
congregation, as the African student who was staying
with the Cloyes. Not having seen any black person in the
church, I was intrigued and asked my hosts if there were
any black people in the town. Yes, I was told, there
were Negroes (the term in use then), but they had their
own churches. I thought it strange that there were
separate churches for black and white people, but I did
not want to embarrass my family any further so I did not
pursue it. I did, however, ask if I could meet a family
of black people and arrangements were made.
The visit did not
go well, unfortunately, perhaps because neither they nor
I were prepared for it. Only one member of the family
greeted and sat with me - quite uncomfortably, it was
obvious. The others went on with their business,
oblivious to my presence, not even greeting me, which as
an African I found insulting. Perhaps the fact that I
had been brought there by a white family made me part of
the white world with which they had problems. I was
deeply disappointed. I learned later that relations
between Africans and African Americans were complicated
and that it would take special efforts to make friends
with people of my own race.
Going to the
university in September was the beginning of four years
of intense involvement in the struggle against different
forms of racial discrimination at the university and in
the town surrounding it, leading to the 1964 takeover of
the administration building. Protesters were arrested,
tried, and acquitted. The story has been told in
This
Is America? The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas, by
Rusty Monhollon (2002).
The struggle at the
university exposed me to unpleasant experiences with
rightist groups, including the John Birch Society and
the Ku Klux Klan, who burned a cross outside my
apartment. I was called all sorts of names in
threatening letters and phone calls - I was a "
communist" and a " foreign agitator" - and I was advised
to take these threats seriously. But while my
involvement in a leadership position in the campus civil
rights movement was deeply resented by right-wing white
people, we had great support from liberal and
progressive white students and faculty members.
I returned to
Tanzania in 1965, having learned many lessons from my
years in the United States. I had immersed myself in the
struggle for rights and human dignity regardless of my
status as a foreign student. I rejected the notion that
as a foreigner I had no business getting involved in
black people's struggles; after all, I was not spared
the indignities of racial discrimination in housing or
refusal of service in restaurants and other places. I
learned to speak up and to challenge authority when I
believed it was wrong.
Back home, my
outspokenness did not endear me to my superiors at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I was assigned to
work, or to politicians who did not accept that their
ideas could be challenged. A one party state under the
Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), Tanzania was
hierarchical and authoritarian, and one was expected to
conform and to do as one was told.
It was clear after
a short time in the foreign ministry that I needed to
make some alliances at the workplace and outside if I
was to survive. A group of youth leaders had been
invited by Mwalimu Nyerere soon after the 1967 Arusha
Declaration (TANU's policy on socialism and
self-reliance) to form the TANU Study Group, a kind of
think tank for the ruling party. I was asked to join and
we met once a week on Sundays to discuss current
political and economic issues, both national and
international, and to forward recommendations to the
party leadership.
Major issues during
that period were the struggles for liberation from
Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau; settler colonialism in Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe) and South West Africa (Namibia); apartheid in
South Africa; and issues in other places such as French
Somaliland (Djibouti), Comoros, Sahara, and, outside
Africa, East Timor. The Vietnam War, the struggle for
admission of the People's Republic of China to the
United Nations, the Soviet Union's invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968, and support for Cuba were among
the other issues that exercised us.
In the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs I was assigned to the Africa desk and it
was there that I had the opportunity to meet and work
with liberation movements and their leaders. I also
worked with the OAU's Liberation Committee, which had
its headquarters in Dar es Salaam.
Not all Tanzanians
supported the government's policy of supporting the
liberation movements. There were some high officials and
politicians who thought Tanzania was unduly exposing
itself to dangers and was expending financial and other
resources it could ill afford in support of the wars of
national liberation in Africa. They did not say this
openly - who would dare question Mwalimu Nyerere?
Nevertheless they slowed things down, frustrated the
more radical supporters of the liberation movements, and
even occasionally resorted to calling them CIA agents as
a way to discredit them.
Relations between
the Tanzanian government and the liberation movements
were generally good but difficult situations did
sometimes arise, especially where there were two or more
liberation organizations from the same country. Cold War
politics influenced debates and decisions in
international forums inside and outside Africa. There
were also contradictions. On one hand, the liberation
movements were grateful for the support they enjoyed
from Tanzania and from Mwalimu Nyerere; on the other
hand, they feared that Tanzania might exert undue
influence on their "internal affairs." A good example of
this was the response of the liberation movements to the
1969 Lusaka Manifesto.
The document, which
had been written by Nyerere and adopted by the leaders
of the Frontline States, put forward the position that
the heads of state would dissuade the liberation
movements from continuing the armed struggle if the
Portuguese and South African regimes accepted the
principles of independence and majority rule and agreed
to start the process of negotiations to that end. The
liberation movements were incensed by this position. In
the first place, they argued, it had been taken without
consulting them. Second, the decision on the means by
which to pursue the struggle was a sovereign decision
that only they and no one else could take. Third, each
struggle had its own character and there could not be
one position that would fit all.
The Lusaka
Manifesto was adopted by the OAU. We argued with the
liberation movements that armed struggle was not an end
but a means toward an end, and if that end could be
secured peacefully, there would be no reason for war.
But the liberation movements never quite accepted the
position. In 1971 I had the honor to be assigned to
draft the Mogadishu Declaration, which nullified the
Lusaka Manifesto. The declaration argued that since the
Portuguese colonialists and the apartheid regime had not
responded positively, frustrating the hopes of the OAU,
there was no alternative but to continue to support the
armed struggle.
The 1960s and 1970s
were exciting times in Tanzania's history. Because of
Mwalimu Nyerere's leadership and his desire to build an
African socialist society based on the African concept
of ujamaa, he attracted many Western intellectuals. For
African Americans, Tanzania came to embody many of their
historical aspirations, including the possibility of
returning to Africa to stay, which a few of them did.
African Americans
coming to Tanzania often arrived with names of
individuals and institutions to contact, including in
some cases the foreign ministry, and I was privileged to
be one of the individuals who was contacted. It was a
period of mutual discovery between those African
Americans and Tanzanians, with unresolved questions and
frustrations but also fulfillment, especially in 1974
around the time of the Sixth Pan-African Congress.
Some members of the
Drum and Spear group—Charlie Cobb, Anne Forrester,
Courtland Cox, Geri Stark (Augusto), Jennifer Lawson,
Kathy Flewellen, and Sandra Hill—stayed for short
periods of time. Others, such as Bob Moses and Professor
Neville Parker, stayed longer and made invaluable
contributions to Tanzania in the field of education.
Bill Sutherland stayed the longest, followed by others
such as Monroe Sharp and Edie Wilson. Walter Rodney, who
was at the University of Dar es Salaam, had great
influence on discussion and debates around the period of
the Pan- African Congress.
I left the foreign
ministry in 1972 to join and manage the Tanzania
Publishing House. There, my involvement in liberation
support activities actually increased, as I was now less
constrained by diplomatic and civil service orders.
Publishing became another front in the struggle. Looking
back after the end of apartheid and the liberation of
the continent, we salute those who bore the brunt of the
enemies' blows, and we remember with respect and pride
those who paid the supreme price. Among those who worked
together, friendships and comradeship endure, along with
a feeling of connection to a larger network. On all
continents there are still many who remain committed to
freedom and to inevitable victory of the next stage of
the African revolution. As before, victory will not be
not easy, but it is essential.
This
excerpt, taken from
No Easy Victories for web presentation on
allAfrica.com and
noeasyvictories.org, may be freely reproduced if
credit is given to No Easy Victories. Please mention
that the book is available from
http://www.noeasyvictories.org and
http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com.
posted 28 October 2007
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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