http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/ en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:52:25 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/images/misc_2/rss.jpg http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/ http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/40112-speech-frantz-fanon-congress-black-african-writers-1959-wretched.html Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:01:57 GMT Speech by Frantz Fanon at the Congress of Black African Writers, 1959 Wretched of the Earth Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom Source: Reproduced from Wretched of the Earth (1959) publ. Pelican. Speech to Congress of Black African Writers. Colonial domination,... Speech by Frantz Fanon at the Congress of Black African Writers, 1959
Wretched of the Earth
Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom

Source: Reproduced from Wretched of the Earth (1959) publ. Pelican. Speech to Congress of Black African Writers.

Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.

Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonising power. The area of culture is then marked off by fences and signposts. These are in fact so many defence mechanisms of the most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the simple instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the oppressor does not manage to convince himself of the objective non-existence of the oppressed nation and its culture. Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.

Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisan style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.

The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities. The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and to open up the struggle for freedom.

A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty.

By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness.

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.

It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.

On another level, the oral tradition - stories, epics and songs of the people - which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula 'This all happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow'. The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically.

The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation - highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds - are taken up and remodelled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and epic stories of a colonised country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, towards the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for dramatisation, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress.

Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork, for .example, which formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three or five figures appear. The traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by the rising avalanche of amateurs or of critics. This new vigour in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and faces which are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on the same pedestal, the artist invites participation in an organised movement.

If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colours, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the stylisation of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years' time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.

We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same impatience in this field. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigour and feel the approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose. Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music and of literature and the oral tradition. His world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together.

We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have seen that this movement and these new forms are linked to the state of maturity of the national consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and more to express itself objectively, in institutions. From thence comes the need for a national existence, whatever the cost.

A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable is to try to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonised country the most elementary, most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state.

The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is the re-establishment of the nation in order to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase.

Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the eve of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There remains one essential question: what are the relations between the struggle - whether political or military - and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of a culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom, however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture, is in itself a negation of culture? In short is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?

We believe that the conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterwards gives validity and vigour to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it. The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man.

This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict. A struggle which mobilises all classes of the people and which expresses their aims and their impatience, which is not afraid to count almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph. The value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions necessary for the development and aims of culture. After national freedom has been obtained in these conditions, there is no such painful cultural indecision which is found in certain countries which are newly independent, because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in the terms of its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A nation which is born of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the people while changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture.

The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.

And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture.

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connexion with the African consciousness. The responsibility of the African as regards national culture is also a responsibility with regard to African-Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact of a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills that every independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still entrenched is an encircled nation, a nation which is fragile and in permanent danger.

If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.

Further Reading:

Frantz Fanon
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa
Social Roots and Social Function of Literature, Trotsky. ]]> Carriers Of The Torch Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/40112-speech-frantz-fanon-congress-black-african-writers-1959-wretched.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/39964-black-panther-party-43rd-anniversary-history-monthblack-panther-party-43rd-anniversar.html Sat, 17 Oct 2009 09:57:06 GMT This October marks the 43rd anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. To celebrate this milestone, the It’s About Time Committee and The Commemorator are presenting a two-day Book Fair and Teach-In at the Laney College Student Center, 900 Fallon St., on Friday, Oct. 23, 12-3 p.m., and... This October marks the 43rd anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. To celebrate this milestone, the It’s About Time Committee and The Commemorator are presenting a two-day Book Fair and Teach-In at the Laney College Student Center, 900 Fallon St., on Friday, Oct. 23, 12-3 p.m., and Saturday, Oct. 24, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m., as just one of many scheduled October events.

On Saturday, we will be celebrating the birthday of Bobby Seale, co-founder and chairman of the Black Panther Party. There will also be a presentation by Elbert “Big Man” Howard, an original founding member and international spokesperson for the BPP, who will introduce his idea for an historical site which would serve the Oakland community and attract visitors and revenue to Oakland.

Historically, the Black Panther Party contributed to the Oakland community by starting the first Free Breakfast for School Children program and free Medical Clinics which served the people and led to testing and research for sickle cell disease. These programs in Oakland evolved into nationwide programs and set models for ones which exist today.

Our school, the Oakland Community School, served as a model for the charter schools of today.

It is a known historical fact that before the Black Panther Party, candidates of color did not get elected here in the city of Oakland. This practice was changed forever after the Black Panther Party led a voters’ registration drive that engendered votes and support for Black candidates. The election of candidates to public office who are Black, Asian, Native American and Hispanic, past and present, such as Lionel Wilson, Ron Dellums, Barbara Lee, Willie Brown and many others, owe their successes in part to what the Black Panther Party initiated so many years ago.

The Black Panther Party led the way and laid the groundwork nationwide that made it possible for the disenfranchised and the oppressed to vote and elect candidates who would reflect the needs of the community and, thus, better serve them.

Every October in Oakland and many other cities, there are educational events held to commemorate the unique and important contributions that the Black Panther Party made to our collective history.

Please join us in celebrating Oakland’s rich and life-changing history on Oct. 24. We look forward to seeing you there. For more information and updates, visit our websites: It's About Time - Black Panther Party Legacy & Alumni and Big Man : Elbert Howard : The Black Panther Party.

Demonstrating that the legacy of the Black Panther Party remains relevant and very much alive, don’t miss the short film “Operation Small Axe,” directed by Adimu Madyun, a documentary centered on Prisoners of Conscience Committee Minister of Information JR and the internationally renowned Block Report Radio show. It will be screened at two of the month’s events: first during the Black Panther Film Festival, Saturday, Oct. 17, 1:35 p.m., at the West Oakland Library, 18th and Adeline in West Oakland and also during the celebration at Laney College, on Saturday, Oct. 24.

* Share/Bookmark ]]> Carriers Of The Torch Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/39964-black-panther-party-43rd-anniversary-history-monthblack-panther-party-43rd-anniversar.html http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/39777-che-friend-world.html Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:19:54 GMT Because he was a man who fought and died for what he thought was fair, so for young people, he is a man who needs to be followed. And as time goes by and countries are governed by increasingly corrupt people ... Che's persona gets bigger and greater, and he becomes a man to imitate. He is not a God who needs to be praised or anything like that, just a man whose example we can follow, in always giving our best in everything we do.

-Alberto Granado

Che’s life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom. We will always honor his memory.

-Nelson Mandela

One billion people, that is, “one in every 6 inhabitants of the planet,” according to the UN World Food Program, writes Jerry White, are going hungry this year (“UN Report, 1 Billion of the World’s People Going Hungry”). Only 8% of the world’s hungry population is the result of floods, droughts, or temporary food shortage. As White explains, this “catastrophe” is product of the “capitalist profit system” that continues the “oppression of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.” “Sixty-five percent of the world’s hungry people live in just six countr ies: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.”

The present crisis, he argues, “underscores the criminal misallocation of financial resources by governments around the world.”

Who benefits from the capitalist profit system?

“IMF-dictated “development” programs” benefit “the banks in London, New York and Tokyo” and “the native ruling elites.”

And the government tells you that things are looking up! Well, keep looking up because that is where things are getting better!

One percent own 40% of the world’s total assets, according to Global Issues. The richest 20% consume 76.6% of the world’s income. And more! Half the world (3 billion people) lives on $2.50 a day. Twenty five thousand children die each day from poverty! That is - each day!

“Five hundred and sixty-three thousand people lost their jobs in April of this year,” according to David North in “Economic Crisis and the Resurgence of Class Conflict in the United States.” Another 6,000,000 workers have been thrown out of work, he writes. The “highest unemployment rate is in the West, where it now stands at 9.8%. It is 9.0% in the Midwest.” In Michigan, the unemployment rate (as of March) is the highest in the country at 12.6%.

These unemployment rates translates “into other indices of extreme social distress,” North writes, such as the “tidal wave of foreclosures and personal bankruptcies, declining college enrollments, rising crime rates, and [the] general deterioration in the health and well being of the population.” Imposed on workers are “wage cuts of 10% and higher” which are “eroding [the] living standards and pushing millions of workers to the very brink of financial disaster.”

The situation is worse for Black Americans. Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed in “The Recession’s Racial Divide,” points out that “Blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment.”

Blacks have passed a recession: “What’s happening now,” Ehrenreich and Muhammed write, “is more like a depression.”

A “socialist solution” is required to end the injustice of this worsening condition, writes David North. The American and international working class must seize political power and “establish popular democratic control of industrial, financial and natural resources” and develop “a scientifically-planned global economy that is dedicated to the satisfaction of the needs of society as a whole, rather than the destructive pursuit of profit and personal wealth.”

Each of us would have to feel the fight in order to arrive at this solution! Who could motivate us to pursue this goal?

This isn’t a tale of derring-do, nor is it merely some kind of ‘cynical account’; it isn’t meant to be, at least. It’s a chunk of two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams. In nine months, a man can think a lot of thoughts…And if, at the same time, he’s a bit of an adventurer, he could have experiences which might interest other people and his random account would read something like this diary…

The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentina soil. The person who is reorganizing and polishing them, me, is no longer me, at least I’m not the me I was. Wandering around our ‘America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought…

On an October morning, two young Argentineans drink sweet mate under a vine tree. A question, “as if part of our fantasy,” comes before them: “Why don’t we go to North America?”

“North America? How?”

“On La Poderosa, man.”

“I was restless, too, mainly because I was a dreamer and a free spirit; I was fed up with medical school, hospitals and exams.”

That’s how it began - two middle class young men from Argentina take leave of their medical careers to begin a journey to discover “our America.” They set off from Cordoba, Argentina in 1951 and arrive in Caracas, Venezuela July 14, 1951. One, Alberto Granado, will return to become a biochemist in Santiago, Chile. The other, writing of their adventure in his diary, went on to become a citizen of the world, a champion for the poor and working class, a revolutionary - Ernesto Guevara de la Serna - “Che” to his many comrades around the world.

Along the way, Che begins to feel the fight. It is out there. It is in the stories people him about their personal, and therefore, very political struggles. The married couple in Baquedano, Chile, teaches the young Che to feel the outrage. While the four, the couple, Che and Alberto broke bread and drank mate, the older man spoke in “expressive language.” They were “Chilean workers who were Communists.” In order to pursue a “fruitless pilgrimage in search of work,” the couple had to leave their children behind with neighbors. In the meantime, the community was aware of the “mysteriously disappeared” who were believed to be “somewhere at the bottom of the seas.” Fear cannot stop them from pressing on, and they were headed for the sulphur (sic) mines in Chuquicamata where “the weather is bad and the conditions so hard that you don’t need a work permit and nobody asks what your politics are.” It is the paradox of capitalism, Che surmises. The workers receive “meager crumbs” and long-term health conditions for their eagerness to work. Capitalists win in a no-win scenario where individuals and families survive and may resist in their own way but without organization and unification of their communal struggle. Even as communist workers, Che recognized, the couple and, many like them, were politically conscious enough to recognize the wrong done against them but suffered from the lack of an effective movement to push back the waves of capitalist abuse. As Che writes in The Motorcycle Diaries:

It’s really upsetting to think they use repressive measures against people like these. Leaving aside the question of whether or not ‘Communist vermin’ are dangerous for a society’s health, what had burgeoned in him was nothing more than the natural desire for a better life, a protest against persistent hunger, transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose real meaning he could never grasp but, translated into ‘bread for the poor,’ was something he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope.

But Che did not miss the outrage and the potential to educate others to see it and feel it as he did in the faces of this couple.

There is a schoolteacher from Puno in the “realms of Pachamama” - Peru. “Wasn’t he in fact a typical product of an education which damages the person who is granted it as a favor to demonstrate the magic power of that precious ‘drop of blood’?” Nonetheless, Che listened as the teacher’s voice “took on a strange inspired resonance whenever he spoke about his Indians, the formerly rebellious Aymara race.” He listened as the teacher spoke of “the need to set up schools which would help individuals value their own world [and] enable them to play a useful role in it,” Che writes. There was a need to change completely the present system of education (education, that is, according to the white man’s criteria), only fills them [the Indians] with shame and resentment, leaving them unable to help their fellow Indians and at a tremendous disadvantage in a white society which is hostile to them and doesn’t accept them.

The courageous display of the schoolteacher was not lost on Che.

In Puno, too, were the fishermen who had never seen a white man and who lived according to “age-old customs, eating the same food and fishing with the same methods they used five hundred years old”

There are the workers, the fishermen and the Quechua of Cuzco, “the navel of the world.”

The only word to sum up Cuzco adequately is evocative. An impalpable dust of other ages covers its streets, rising in clouds like a muddy lake when you disturb the bottom.

Che and Alberto pass the walls of Sacsahuaman where the “Quechua warriors” an “inventive” people and skilled in mathematics, had established “serrated walls” in what seems to Che a “pre-Inca” stage of civilization. Nonetheless, the warriors were successful in driving their enemies back beyond the borders of Cuzco. As Che writes, the serrated walls were formidable”: “when enemies attack, they can be fought from three sides, and if they penetrate this line of defence, (sic) they come up against a similar kind of wall and then a third,” writes Che. Once the conquistadors arrived in search of gold, the temples of Cuzco were “razed to their foundations” and the walls “used to build the churches of the new religion.”

Remnants of the old religion at the Temple of the Sun, with its carefully cut stones, rise above the base and the tombs of the Incas. The surrounding area betrays “various social classes...each of them occupied a distinct place according to category, more or less independent from the rest.” Even on the luxurious buildings, Che found only “straw roofs.” Cuzco was no longer the navel of the world, and the “indians no longer worked the barren earth with the same devotion and the conquistadores had certainly not come to eke out a living from the land, but to make an easy fortune by heroic deed or simple greed.” Cuzco can evoke, writes Che, two or three cities, as it turns out. There is the land the Incas nurtured, the land of divided wealth and material resources, and the land it could be…if only…

On the way to the colony in San Pablo, the two young men witness “a ragged group of young lads,” Peruvian conscripts, suffering from lethargy, “put up with their instructor’s anger” as they run through drills every Sunday. But “they are all victims,” Che writes, of the absurd. On Huambo, Che and Alberto stop by a hospital where they witnessed patients “wait for death with indifference.” While those who work at the hospital “do an unsung but praiseworthy job,” the general conditions are “appalling” and the sanitary conditions “terrible.” Even the new hospital, a few kilometers from the old one, “has the same disadvantages as the old” it has no laboratory or surgical facilities…and it is infected by mosquitoes,” writes Che. The leper’s colony in San Pablo “lacks basic amenities, like all-day electric light, a refrigerator and a laboratory.”

But, again, it is the people - the Yaguas, “the indians of the red straw” living under wooden planks with “tiny hermetic straw hut to shelter in at night.” The children have “big bellies and are rather skinny. Among other things, the adults suffer from rotting teeth. By the time Che and Alberto arrive in Bogotá, Che writes that he feels he has been around the world twice! “There is more repression of individual freedom here than n any country we’ve been to, the police patrol the streets carrying rifles and demand your papers every few minutes which some of them read upside down,” Che writes to his mother.

Finally, Alberto and Che reach Venezuela where, as Che writes, he drifted away from the city of Caracas to think. At the end of The Motorcycle Diaries, Che tells us he knows who he is and where he belongs: “I now knew…I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.” It was possible, indeed, imperative to construct a movement of enlightened people in union with an enlightened indigenous people. When the U.S.-backed Bolivian army surrounded Che Guavara and his men on October 9, 1967 and prepared to execute him, Che told them to bring it on! But the fighting will continue! As long as there is injustice in the world and imperialist powers unwilling to desist in the killing of the majority of the world’s population, there will the potential for the fight to continue!

I think of a man who could not sit still while people suffered through no fault of their own when I think of Che. People were born into abysmal poverty and forced to live and ultimately die, he realized, in the same status, if not worse, while others flourished. Much like our beloved Malcolm, Che operated out of a sense of urgency. Time was not money; it was passing while people suffered and died in misery. He could not return to Argentina from his journey through South America and donned the white coat of a medical doctor. Che, we know, had to have his green fatigues and in fatigues. Even Commandant Fidel could not keep Che behind the desk in the Ministry of Interior. Because he saw violence in the needless suffering and death of others, he was in search of battles where people embraced the chant: enough is enough!

“Along the way,” Che writes in 1954 from Guatemala, “I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruits, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are.” He put on his boots and green fatigues to join the Lumumba Battalion in the Congo, in Algiers, and in Angola. There he is standing among the people and witnessing the global struggle against the inhumanity of capitalism.

I cannot imagine a Che taking the gloves off today with 1 billion people living in poverty. Che, the ordinary citizen who dared to repeat the message of the symbolic message of “Jesus of Nazareth,” is honored in the western world by capitalism as the iconic image of political marginalization. While Che’s face appears on designer apparel for the youthful rebel, the Church’s marketing of crosses and framed pictures of the long-haired white-looking Jesus halts human resistance to the mass action of States against the pursuit of freedom. The exchange of money and material items, the unthinkable is concealed. That is, the sacrifice of comfort on behalf of the world’s hated majority and a dangerous idea that could result in serious change for the world’s majority is not for sale. The legacy of Pax Romana and the survival of its newest descendent, Pax Americana, flourish.

But there is Che in Honduras and in Gaza! There he is in Lakota land, and he’s there in New Orleans.

What if we look to the memory of Che Guavara with our hearts and not our cash? Rather than a billion people in poverty, can we imagine a billion Ches as all of us fighting against capitalism and imperialism and fighting for the human rights of indigenous people? Imagine billions of diary entries recording the day each writer recognized his or her role in the war against Mother Earth? And what if each writer wrote: I am listening to hear the beating hearts, and I am synchronizing my heartbeat with the heartbeat of the world’s majority. The sound would be deafening and instantly disappear the destroyers of the world. The denigrated would throw off despair and Mother Earth would agree to circulate clean air and water. Gardens of food and medicine products would sprout everywhere in abundance. Imagine as Che once did so many year ago. And it could be so...

I see myself being sacrificed to the authentic revolution, the great leveler of individual will, pronouncing the exemplary mea culpa…I brace my body, ready for combat, and prepare myself to be a sacred precinct within which the bestial howl of the victorious proletariat can resound with new vigour (sic) and new hope.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. ]]> Carriers Of The Torch Moorbey http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/carriers-torch/39777-che-friend-world.html