Ideology and Party Building key to African Liberation

[Jacuma]

There is much confusion in the contemporary global African political-economic
struggle. Many of the supposed movers and shakers in the African world are
not wedded to the interest of our people, but in fact are dedicated to the
exclusive satisfaction of their own selfish and shortsighted desires, perceived
needs, and aspirations. These people are the main tools of imperialism in its
neocolonial phase.

Of late there have been many personalities that purport to speak for the
interest of Africa and Africans. Among them we find people who seems more the
spokesperson for the American-Anglo bloc than of Africa -- such as the role
played by some in opposition to the Zimbabwe struggle for land reclamation.
There
are others who use false claims of adherence to Pan-Africanism to disguise
their military, subversive and general subservient role on behalf of western
imperialism in Africa, as is the case in the Great Lakes area and elsewhere; and

there are others, who, in the name of \"African renaissance\" and other catch
phrases and cliches, eschew the role of land and the organized people, that is
deny the role of tangible capital and properly qualified human capital in
development, in favor of the crumbs of the imperialist system. And of course
there
is a veritable litany of such individuals in the diaspora, in the US, in the UK
in the Caribbean and elsewhere -- all the Colin Powells and Condi Rices of
the world so to speak. They are all opportunists, and they can only succeed
where there is confusion. They are those who are totally wedded to global
racism,
i.e. global imperialism, they believe that whatever the ruling class, which
is essentially a class of the elites of one \"race\", the white race, is in a
sense the voice of God.

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah wrote in Consciencism,
\"Neo-colonialism is a greater danger to independent countries than is
colonialism. Colonialism is crude, essentially overt, and apt to be overcome
by a
purposeful concert of national effort. In neo-colonialism, however, the people
are divided from their leaders and, instead of providing true leadership and
guidance which is informed at every point by the ideal of the general welfare,
leaders come to neglect the very people who put them in power and incautiously
become instruments of suppression on behalf of the neo-colonialists.\"

\"It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle\'s eye,
hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and
honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory. To allow a
foreign country, especially one which is loaded with economic interests in our
continent, to tell us what political decisions to take, what political courses
to follow, is indeed for us to hand back our independence to the oppressor
silver platter.\"

This is a vital lesson that many of our people, particularly many of those
who are ostensibly our leaders, have not internalized.

Then there are those well meaning individuals who believe that Pan-Africanism
can be achieved through peaceful mediums. This is not possible since, the
opponents of Pan-Africanism have no problem with the use of violence in varied
forms to prevent its emergence on the world stage.

And there are still others who believe that a, indeed in some cases they
believe THE, fundamental aspect of Pan-Africanism is a belief in an
all-powerful
deity (God(s) and/or Goddess(es))

This kind of thinking is at heart idealism; and best remedied by the approach
of the PDG, which understood that as God and religion are \"good\" forces and
the organized people in a mass party and organizations and Revolution are
\"good\" forces, the two are aspects of the same phenomena. This approach is in
accord with the view of Nkrumah that held:

\"Insistence on the secular nature of the state is not to be interpreted as a
political declaration of war on religion, for religion is also a social fact,
and must be understood before it can be tackled. To declare a political war
on religion is to treat it as an ideal phenomenon, to suppose that it might be
wished away, or at the worst scared out of existence.\"


Our late brother Kwame Ture frequently admonished us that \"confusion was the
enemy of revolution.\"

Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin made a similar obvservation about
opportunism and opportunists:

\"At present not a single Russian Social-Democrat can have any doubts that the
final rupture between the revolutionary and the opportunist tendencies was
caused, not by any `organisational\' circumstances, but by the desire of the
opportunists to consolidate the independent features of opportunism and to
continue to cause confusion of mind by the disquisitions of the Krichevskys and
Martynovs.\" pp. 184-5 V I Lenin \"What Is To Be Done\"

The elements who are consciously opposed to Pan-Africanism, are deliberately
spreading confusion of various types in the hope of retarding the political
-economic liberation of African people.

Clearly our main goal is to clear away the confusion so that we can move
forward. We must separate those who are consciously agents of imperialism, from

those who make errors, mistakes of judgements, and have lapses of faulty
analysis. To do this we have to be clear ideologically Again Nkrumah\'s
Consciencism
provides us with key insights:

\"Just as a morality guides and seeks to connect the actions of millions of
persons, so an ideology aims at uniting the actions of millions towards specific

and definite goals, notwithstanding that an ideology can be largely implicit.
I am aware that in this usage I depart somewhat from the fashionable one.
It is often thought that an ideology has to be a body of writing of one
individual, or a small group of individuals, directed only at fundamental change
in a
society. This is an evident mistake. An ideology, even when it is
revolutionary, does not merely express the wish that a present social order
should be
abolished. It seeks also to defend and maintain the new social order which it
introduces. But while it is defending its own social order, it is still an
ideology, and the same. That is to say, an ideology can remain an ideology
while defending an existing progressive society. Nor can the fact that some
particular ideology is not explicit on paper prevent it from being one. What is

crucial is not the paper, but the thought.\"

\"I have said an ideology seeks to bring a specific order into the total life
of its society. To achieve this, it needs to employ a number of instruments.
The ideology of a society displays itself in political theory, social theory
and moral theory, and uses these as instruments. It establishes a particular
range of political, social and moral behaviour, such that unless behavior of
this sort fell within the established range, it would be incompatible with the
ideology. What I mean may also be expressed in the following terms. Given
the ideology of a society, then some political behavior would be incompatible
with it and some other political behavior would be compatible with it. Given a
socialist ideology, for example, the political dictatorship of capital would
be incompatible with it. There is always a definite range within which
social-political theory and practice must fall if they are to conform to a
socialist
ideology. Thus ideology displays itself in moral theory and practice...\"

\"The ideology of a society is total. It embraces the whole life of a people,
and manifests itself in their class-structure, history, literature, art,
religion. It also acquires a philosophical statement. if an ideology is
integrative in intent, that is to say, if it seeks to introduce a certain order
which
will unite the actions of millions towards specific and definite goals, then
its instruments can also be seen as instruments of social control. It is even
possible to look upon \'coercion\' as a fundamental idea in society...\"
....

\"In order that true independence should be won, it is necessary that positive
action should come to overwhelm negative action. Admittedly, a semblance of
true independence is possible without this specific relation. When this
happens, we say that neo-colonialism has set in, for neocolonialism is a guise
adopted by negative action in order to give the impression that it has been
overcome by positive action. Neo-colonialism is negative action playing
possum.\"

\"In order to forestall this, it is necessary for positive action to be backed
by a mass party, and qualitatively to improve this mass so that by education
and an increase in its degree of consciousness, its aptitude for positive
action becomes heightened We can therefore say that in a colonial territory,
positive action must be backed by a mass party, complete with its instruments of

education This was why the Convention People\'s Party of Ghana developed from an
early stage its education wing, workers\' wing, farmers\' wing, youth wing,
women\'s wing, etc. In this way, the people received constant political
education,
their self-awareness was increased and such a self-image was formed as
ruthlessly excluded colonialism in all its guises. It is also in the backing of

million of members and supporters, united by a common radical purpose, that the
revolutionary character of the Convention People\'s Party consists, and not
merely in the piquancy of its programs. Its mass and national support made it
possible to think in realistic terms of instituting changes of a fundamental
nature in the social hotch potch bequeathed by colonialism.\"

The successes of the CPP, and the PDG, although eventually overwhelmed by the
immense negative forces aligned against them, still remain the best model for
all liberation.

Their model must be taken to the global stage, and given a world-wide,
all-inclusive framework, because the nature of the problems confronting us are
global and all-pervasive. Hence, the mass party we need is a mass party
comprised
of all the individual African mass parties who oppose the recolonization /
continuing colonization of Africa.

Roy Walker