Dhoruba Bin wahad on the 50th aniversary of ghana

[Kweku_Omowale]

ADDRESS BY DHORUBA BIN-WAHAD ON THE OCCASION
OF GHANA’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
dhoruba@hotmail.com

SHORT BIO:
SHEIK DHORUBA AL-MUJAHID BIN-WAHAD:

Dhoruba Bin Wahad, age sixty-two, is a former Black Panther Party
leader from New York. Once a Black Political Prisoner in the USA for
nineteen years Bin Wahad is a long time Pan-African activist, writer, and
lecturer. Born to parents from the Caribbean and Southern United States,
Bin Wahad was raised in the Southeast Bronx and Harlem. Bin-Wahad is a
Muslim, Father, and Husband, and to several generations of Africans in
the Diaspora, a Freedom Fighter and Hero Elder.

Bin Wahad on several occasions has appeared before United Nations
commission on Human Rights and its commission on Decolonization as a
non-governmental organization representative. He has participated in and
organized several International Tribunals on Political Prisoners and
American human rights violations. Bin Wahad, a orthodox Muslim, is also
involved in conceptualization of a Pan-African Refugee and Relief
Foundation, capable of channeling the talents and resources of the African
Diaspora into an aid agency for African refugees and displaced persons in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Bin Wahad now an advocate for the establishment of
an all-African international relief agency under the auspices of the
African Union, is a vociferous critic of white supremacy and its off shoot
philosophies.

As a writer Bin Wahad’s writings have appeared in numerous
publications from the “Covert Action Bulletin� to a number of anthologies
featuring African-American activist writers. He has written in several
editions of the ground breaking intellectual publication “Black Scholar�,
collaborated with Mumia Abu Jamal, and Assata Shakur on the book, “Still
Black Still Strong�. He continues to write for various Black publications
and weekly newspapers. His writings have been published in African and
Middle-Eastern newspapers. Bin Wahad’s experiences were featured in
two award winning documentaries “Framing the Panthers in Black & White�
and “Passin’ it On�. Both videos are available for viewing and are
currently on file at the Schaumburg Museum of African History in his
native Harlem, New York, and the W.E.B. Dubois Center for Pan-African
Culture, in Ghana, West Africa. Bin Wahad is also a regular commentator on
local West African talk shows and has extensively toured the UK and
Europe speaking before Human Rights groups, anti-racist organizations, and
at various progressive forums. As a contributing correspondent to
Pacifica Radio station WBAI’s African Kaleidoscope, Bin Wahad has provided
timely insight into current affairs on the African continent from a Pan
African perspective. In recent years, Bin Wahad has also acted as an
unpaid consultant to various grass root Civil Rights campaigns in the
United States.

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Let me start by placing my thoughts in context with a quote from
Amilcar Cabral a true son of Africa and brilliant Pan-African freedom
fighter, and historical contemporary of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, in who’s memory I
dedicate the theme of my talk on Ghana’s independence and why I believe
the Pan-African vision of united Africa, kindled 50 years ago by
Ghana’s independence is now at a vital crossroad after decades of ignorant
and self-seeking African leadership.
“We can state that national liberation is the phenomenon in which a
given socio-economical whole rejects the negation of its historical
process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining
of the historical personality of that people. It is a return to history
through the destruction of imperialist domination to which it was
subjected.�

Pan-Africanism is essentially an ideology developed by the African-
Diaspora and based on the fundamental proposition that during the rise of
European mercantile expansion and imperial conquest of Africa. people
of African Ancestry shared a common historical experience. Moreover,
this common “African� experience, included as its basis the suspension of
Africans as the determinant factors in their own historical development
and the imposition of European historical development as the
determinant factor in the lives of Africans everywhere. In this sense, modern
Pan-Africanism is an ideological response to the epoch of European and
Arab imperial conquest and their respective slave trades.

When ever one thinks of Pan-Africanism they almost always first think
of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, an African-Jamaican native and Kwame Nkrumah of
Ghana, West Africa. In the first quarter of the 20th century Marcus
Garvey, having moved to the United States, led the largest mass movement
of Black people based on the ideology of Black Nationalism and
Pan-Africanism in the history of the African Diaspora. His organization, the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) advocated “Africa for
Africans� at the height of European domination of the African continent.
Garvey, like Pan-African spokespersons before him made the connection
between the livelihood of Africans in the Diaspora and those on the
continent long before European imperialism and imperialist competition
between European -states evolved into the modern globalized economy we are
victimized by today.

A foremost advocate of Pan-Africanism on the African continent was of
course Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Nkrumah realized that before Africa
could achieve economic prosperity Africa must first achieve Pan-African
political unity and independence: That without Pan-African political unity
or union, the economic development of the continent will depend on
individual “states� relationship to a global economy dominated by former
imperial powers. In short, in order for Africa to prosper, Africans must
return to acting in their own interests and cease operating as a
footnote to European development and history. Africans must take control
over their own destiny, this in essence is the fundamental proposition of
political Pan-Africanism.

Those of us living here in Ghana often ask ourselves to what
“historical personality� are Africans returning? Specifically, to what
historical legacy have modern African nation states returned? Have we returned
to the glory days of Songhay, or Mali, or the empires of Oyo or
Ashanti, when Africans basically made their own history and organized their
own geopolitical relationships? Or have we returned, through ethnic based
political parties to the old pre-colonial days when the white man
negotiated with the Ga to undermine the Fante, and conspired with each to
undo Ashanti power in the sub-region? Have we returned to the days
before the Arab conquests of African lands and the spread of Islam’s
liberating message rather than to the ideology of mercantile that drove
individual Muslim potentates fashion their trans-Saharan slave trade – or to
the waning years of the British Empire and European subjugation of
Islamic political rule and the rise of Pan-Arab racism towards non-Arabized
Black Africans that still reverberate through regions of the Sudan,
Central Africa, Western and Northern Sahara and East Africa? Exactly what
historical personality are African Leaders reclaiming? Or are they
just doggedly holding the line against the rise of a New African, a New
Africa?

On the eve of the 21st century, Africa is up for sale at bargain
basement prices. Many African states and Africa’s political leadership seem
to engage in dead end diplomatic and economic activity because they
perceive Africa as undeveloped rather than disorganized, misled, and its
resources grossly misappropriated for the benefit of Africa’s elites.
African leaders, by and large have accepted Euro-centric concepts of
government and the notion that true power is hierarchical in nature and
externally conferred. Consequently, African states have acquiesced to
Eurocentric power paradigms that marginalize Africa while simultaneously
maintaining the economic balkinazation of the continent initiated by
European colonialist. To African states desperate for hard currency and
favorable foreign exchange rates for their narrow export based
economies, exploitation of Africa’s natural resouces by “foreign investors�,
particularly western institutions of finance capital, is just another
game. “We are in power� Africa’s ethnic, religious, and business elites
would declare� to critics from the African-Diaspora who question the
almost absolute venality of Africa’s political leadership and the
astounding incompetency of African states set up essentially to macro manage the
control of one clan, or the influence of one regional power center over
a generally impoverished and illiterate population. The short termed
benefits derived from such “political� arrangements hardly begin to
outweigh the long term damage that is done to the Africa, its environment,
it’s peoples, and the African psychic. The piecemeal prostitution of
Africa is a game African’s can lose.
The European writer William Shakespeare once pondered the dynamic
tension between human consciousness and social being, “to be or not to be�
he wrote, “that is the question�. Indeed, for Africans in the 21st
century, both on the continent and abroad, “to be or not to be African – is
the question. The synthesis between Africa’s strategic and
geopolitical potential and Africa’s return to its own historical continuum is
indeed the question confronting African civilization today.

How can any progressive thinking African doubt this? Since the period
of decolonization on this continent, marked in history by Ghana’s
independence in 1957, African poverty, poor health care, environmental
degradation and ineffective state bureaucracies have grown exponentially,
and worse tendencies of mediocrity and mismanagement firmly
institutionalized. Indeed, the malaise of African backwardness is as necessary to
the ‘new world order� as debt and inflation are to modern capitalist
economies. And one need not posses a Ph.D. from a prestigious western
university to understand that time is fast running out for Africa.
Despite the apparent dour circumstances Africa finds itself in today,
we nonetheless stand at the threshold of a new century, a possible new
beginning. Though still encumbered by the psychological baggage of a
bygone era, that I identify as a form of AIDS, an apparent communicable
political disease known as “Africa’s Imperialist Dependency Syndrome)
Africa can still emerge as the centrifugal force behind the equitable
global redistribution of wealth. AIDS however is a geopolitical killer.
This political disease is highly infectious, and has its highest rate of
infection among segments of Africa’s population who believe only
through non-African intervention, such as Foreign Aid, Investment, and in
some cases low intensity recolonization can Africa pull itself up out of
the muck and mire of hundreds of years of slogging through the filthy
backwater of European historical expansionism as iconic footnotes to the
glory of white supremacy and Empire.
Saddled as we are today with dozens of insecure elderly politicians
holding on to power, military and police establishments on the Continent
with little or no regard for African humanity, African Armies led by
African Generals motivated not by African honor and warrior ethos of
community protection, but by Ramoesque barbarism and the ethics of Fascism,
creating a Pan-African moral high-ground maybe impossible, but we must
try. The difficulties that lie in path of Pan-African political unity
and economic intergration are daunting. Indeed, some of us sitting
here today have ran afoul of these very forces of which I speak, and who
among us here today can say that the liberties of ordinary Africans are
vouchsafe by any of the 53 states that currently constitute the African
Union?
Our best minds and ideas are dragged down by outmoded thinking and
self-hatred. Africa’s resources are squandered and worker’s imagination
dulled by state bureaucracies, and uninspired bureaucrats. Often thwarted
by the abysmal ignorance and systems of miseducation, the best of
efforts to move Africa forward often degenerate into boondoggles, or another
dream deferred� development project. All of this and more has alienated
Africa’s youth and dulled their enthusiasm for progressive and
aggressive participation in African governance, while simultaneously
squandering the enormous political and economic potential of Africa’s Diaspora.
The best minds, the most talented, innovative, and creatively
aggressive flee Africa to not just survive, but to thrive. Africa is in need of
her brightest children, but instead, Africa retains mediocrity while
driving away quality. Africa hemorrhages talent to Europe and has little
to show for it except debt to European Finance Capital. Africa is
facing the new millennium like a beggar on horseback - riding straight to
the devil. Africa is in crying need of a “New African� personality ready
to meet the challenges, which lay ahead - a New African for the 21st
century.


Without Afro centric modalities of power, Africa and Africans can never
effectively rise above the negative pressures of history and regain
their dynamic historical personality. With each passing day the pressure
increases for dynamic and revolutionary change on the African continent.
Reform has come to the end of its rope, anything short of revolutionary
change on the African continent will amount to applying a Band-Aid to
the ma1ignant tumor of African dependency. Time is pressing in upon us.
Africa and African’s must seize our own destiny and emerge from the
shadow of European power into our own light, or collectively sink further
into the quagmire of political balkanization and the unmanageability of
uneven infrastructural development.
To accomplish the massive transformation of Africa’s resources into
better quality of life for ordinary Africans, we must construct a
principled Pan African political Paradigm to sustain and manage the social and
political activities of African peoples while achieving systematic
trans-national capitalization of Africa’s resources. Any other approach, in
my view, is ultimately a waste of time and resources. Debating
corruption while useful do not address the fundamental issue and serves to
conceal the real enemy of African development: That enemy is debt: That
enemy is U.S. and European market controls and trade relations which rely
upon African underdevelopment and dependency. Indeed, the European
nation-state evolved as a mechanism by which the ‘rich’ could “legally�
steal the surplus value of working people’s labor and transfer it into
their own pockets, hence, the “modern corporate state� can be seen as a
legal artifice by which corruption and financial exploitation acquire
political and moral legitimacy. Ironically, this appears to be one of the
few salient features of the European state culture African leaders have
‘Africanized’ with any degree of alacrity. Similarly, the international
system of trade and commerce evolved along with the aggressive policies
of European states, until what we have today are the rules laid down by
former imperial powers made into international laws for everyone.
It is my belief that the African Diaspora will play an essential role
in the success or failure of Africa’s economic emergence in the 21st
century. Unlike any previous historical moment since decolonization,
Africa can achieve the rapid Political consolidation of its vast economic
potential. Despite the seeming global influence of U.S. and European
Finance Capital, Africa is poised to move from the margins of economic and
geopolitical impotency to the center stage of human development in the
next millennium. We, Africans at home and throughout the Diaspora stand
at the precipice of our own collective rebirth as a people, or we
teeter precariously close to the abyss of ignoble debt, dependency,
mediocrity and politically obsolete state structures. We must decide whether to
bravely and boldly step toward our future, or slip into the darkness of
obscurity and slouch into the 21st century. The decision is entirely
ours to make. African’s can collectively decide to fashion a global
Pan-African Syndicate (and international polity which would follow such an
undertaking) and thereby transform the political character and economic
importance of the largest Diaspora on the face of the earth. An
integrated Pan-African global syndicate or association with economic and
political roots firmly embedded in Africa’s political consolidation would
provide Africa with invaluable economic and diplomatic leverage in
pursuit of her objectives and policies. A consistent mode of Afro centric
thought, a dedicated Pan African agenda, and determined mobilization of
mass opinion among all progressive sectors of the African family are the
necessary ingredients for termination of the decolonization process
begun with Africa’s independence struggles and interrupted by the
“cold-war�.

Between the independence of Ghana in 1957, and the end of White settler
rule in southern Africa in 1992, the struggle for a united Africa and
an effective Pan African internationalism took a back seat to cold war
rivalry and the economic “development� of individual states. It is time
for those of us who claim to be progressive, who claim to be African
patriots, who fancy ourselves as opinion makers, to insist through every
means available to us, including armed struggle when non-violent means
are unavailable, that Africa’s leaders understand that Pan African
unity is objectively synonymous with African economic development and
that they carry forward policies and programs that will result in the
immediate Pan-African unification of the continent. Africa is a unique
place with its own set of preconditions for development. Economic
development is a delusion without the political union of the African
continent. This can be seen time and time again in South Africa’s relationship
to its neighbors, or Kenya’s relationship with its neighbors, and in
Egypt relationship with its southern neighbors. The economic prosperity
of a single developed national economy surrounded by poorer
underdeveloped economies only lead to regional instability and the export of
social problems.
Even those Africans who worship the White man’s pseudo science of
macro economics should take note: The economic development and the
industrialization of America and European nation-states, the latter
collectively referred to today as the “European Union�, never achieved significant
economic development without first arriving at Political union. Why do
Africa’s political elite consistently avoid this singular lesson of
socio-economic development and insist on regional and narrow nationalist
agendas that undermine the basis for continental unity? Because it
suits their elitest ambitions and narrow nationalist agendas. It is the
pursuit of narrow nationalist and ethnic agendas that the America and
Europe rely upon to maintain African dependency on their “services� and
markets. When conflicts of competing nationalist agenda’s boil over into
regional civil wars, the erstwhile “peacemakers� from America and
Europe are there to lend African’s a helping hand. Indeed, the United
States has decided that in furtherance of its war on Islam it deceptively
trumpets as “the war on terror�, economic engagement on the African
continent should take the form of bolstering the military institutions of
“friendly� African nations, rather than support African economic
integration. For the United States, it is much more feasible to help train,
equip, and indoctrinate African soldiers under its newly formed
“African Command� than to underwrite a hydroeclectric plan for Central and
East Africa that provide electricity for a continent with over 35% of the
world’s hydroelectric potential but where 85% of its inhabitants are
without electrical power. Africa’s elites and their military
counterparts have no problem with America’s condescending policy toward their
continent, and in fact are lining up for Pentagon handouts and programs,
eager to rush into battle in defense of United States interests as so
recently illustrated by the African Unions swift deployment of
“peacekeepers� to troubled Somalia.


An Afro centric paradigm can be transformative especially if it directs
Africa toward independent and hitherto unexplored avenues of social and
economic integration and development - Pan African development! That is
to say, such a paradigm can return Africa to its own historical
process. But how is this possible? Given the critical areas of conflict in the
Ivory Coast, Eastern Congo, Sudan’s Darfur, Somalia, Chad and CAR,
Nigeria’s Delta region, how persuasive can Pan-African diplomacy be? The
beginnings of Pan-African political unity is Afro-centric thinking
rather than Euro-centric thinking by a significant segment of Africa’s
leaders. Once the “proposition of African political union� is accepted in
something more concrete than abstract principle then a Pan-African
paradigm of power become possible.

But social practice determines the veracity of ideals and therefore the
criteria by which we should measure the effectiveness of an Afro
centric philosophy. In guiding the affairs of African states the extent to
which the state effectively challenges exploitive Eurocentric modalities
of power and neutralize them is of paramount importance. For the
ordinary African from the Diaspora this is crucial to the relevancy of their
presence in Africa on any significant scale . The African Diaspora
often confuse “African culture� with power and political self-determinism.
This is a psychological myopia derived from chattel slavery and
constant subjugation to the overriding ideology of white supremacy. African’s
from the Diaspora are easily deceived by cultural and traditional
displays into thinking that “tradition and the African state� are one in the
same, albeit on different levels. Nothing could be further from the
truth. African political leaders by and large make use of culture and
tradition for their own narrow political ends, rather than as a means to
promote people’s collective ambition. European colonialist
disempowered and castrated African traditional institutions and their leadership
in order staunch popular resistance to colonial rule. African states
and African leaders by and large continued this policy after
“independence� in the hope of keeping “Chiefs� and the mass constituencies out of
politics. For the modern “African nation-state� “traditional�
mechanisms of power are subservient to the legal power of the state and thus
political partisanship in Africa often degenerate along ethnic,
linquistic, or religious lines. We must be clear about this, because the
salvation of Africa may very well lie in the capacity of the African
Diaspora to mediate African conflicts rather than African state’s relying upon
their former colonial masters for effective conflict resolution.
The African Diaspora is therefore correct to subject “traditional�
African� hierarchical structures and institutions of power, especially
where those structures abetted the European and Arab colonial conquest of
Africa, to a “New African� criterion of Afro-centric political analysis.
This is because a political Afro centric Paradigm should and must
evaluates its cultural ally of “tradition� based upon how supportive
“traditional� practice is to Africa’s Pan-African consolidation, and how
culture contributes to the African liberation. In a word, tradition is
only relevant when it is empowering - when it supports the need of the
people to exercise authentic power. This may not reflect how cultural
Pan-Africanism, such as currently practiced by Ghana, and other West
African states perceives its role in the liberation of Africa and Africans.
Generally speaking, elitist exponents of cultural Pan-Africanism tend to
treat “African tradition� as static and relegated to ritual
celebration, rather than as a dynamic political and social force belonging to the
present. Even so, cultural Pan-Africanism plays a crucial role in the
development of a universal African socio-ethos essential to the
formation of an authentic African power base. Moreover, because African
tradition is often the ritualized reflection of the African’s multifaceted
socialization and spirituality, cultural Pan-Africanism, if correctly
oriented, serves as the cultural reservoir from which an Afro centric
modality of power derives it subjective sustenance - its mass support. This
is essentially the contradiction of State sponsored and elitist
contrived initiatives such as Ghana’s “Joseph Project�, PANAFEST, and
Emancipation Day Limited. These “cultural promotions� are attempts to develop
an opportunistic trans-African capitalist framework or achieve a
fabricated African “spiritual & material� synthesis within an exploitive
global economy that consistently marginalizes Africa. While the African
Diaspora generally does promote traditional modalities of power we by and
large oppose reactionary cultural norms associated with ethnic rivalry,
and reconciliation with the global paradigm of white supremacy and its
international institutions of finance capital.
I will close with a quote from Al-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz, Malcom X:
"A race of people is like an individual man; until he uses his own
talent, takes pride in his own history, expresses his own culture, affirms
his own selfhood, he can never fulfill himself. I for one believe that
if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and
the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and
when the people create a program, you get action."