Decolonisation Is A Material Struggle

[Pictured: Frantz Fanon is one of the most articulate thinkers on anti-colonial liberation movements, colonial and post-colonial studies.]

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. . .”

—Amilcar Cabral

Decolonisation is not a theoretically eloquent dance to nowhere. It’s the awakening of a sleeping people taking over the means of production. It  is the material struggle of the last becoming the first, qualitatively supplanting the ideologies of the ruling class with the revolutionary ideas and cultures they have developed during the great showdown between the people’s army and the minions of private property. Decolonisation is the fire and fury unleashed unto the world in a historical encounter that is inevitable in this epoch of neocolonialism and capitalism-imperialism – and with this, an inauguration of another way of being.

At this point we must clarify that we do have a philosophical component to this fight. A war of world-views and of the class, race and gender elements whose reactionary hegemonies in the life of the mind must be challenged with progressive ideas and theories to win the material struggle. Our only clamour is that to philosophise  without  changing the materiality of social life will give no credence, no power, no reality to these progressive values and world-views we today are busy talking, writing and theorising about. We must learn the art of merging theory and practice within the organised masses of our people to win the ideological war at hand in this long protracted struggle. That in a nutshell is the thesis of this essay. Let’s move on, then, and hold this conversation.

Land, bread, and water – not a complex intellectual discourse on the ontologies and epistemologies of colonialism and its antithesis – are the deepest interest of the masses. Our people are today clamouring and hungered in the billions by the constant extraction and oppression of corporations, and as such, are caught either in the whirlwind of a vicious cycle of wage slavery or in the labour reserves of big capital. For a mass like that, it would be disingenuous to come with a decolonial program that is not rooted in qualitatively changing the objective material conditions. It would be basically fighting a futile battle against ideas and ideologies that are informed ever deeply by the superstructure that owes its lifeblood to the ever-thriving exploitative economic base that sucks the life, blood, and depths of the third world soils. That’s to say, if the program isn’t materialist and practice-base, it’s more useless than a toothless, clawless, caged lion.

To thin the mist of history a bit, let’s remember that when the righteous masses of the colonised Global South were being rallied in the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryears, the revolutionary leaders didn’t expose them to a program of fighting against mere racist ideas. They didn’t come with a complex decolonial philosophical program and neither did they busy themselves with the frivolous endeavours of competing in speaking and writing a language the masses will never understand nor decipher. They came with a simple program and named the enemy. The program was, let’s win self-determination so we shall no more live under the shadow of another human being as subservient economic and political slaves. That our enemy today is the coloniser and he must be booted out by any means necessary. And our people understood that. They yielded whatever little weapons they had, and as they sharpened their machetes, their determination to become an independent people who would win a glorious fight so their conditions are bettered permanently knew no bounds.

Kwame Nkrumah (pictured on a Soviet postage stamp) was a Ghanaian politician and coined the term “neocolonialism”. Photo credit: by Mariluna. Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

The decolonial program then must today be based on where we are today. What contradictions are inherent within our nations and people. It must be class conscious. It must be materialist. It can wear a dashiki and glorify ancient Egypt, but it still must be dialectical. It must invest in winning over the productive forces of our people in an organised fashion to reclaim what rightfully belongs to them and walk the long road to the progress and happiness of all of humankind. It must study yesterday, but not get caught in it. It mustn’t be romantic. It must waste no time in endless masturbatory insults on classic colonialism, but to study objectively the gains made in the liberation struggles, and use those facts in fighting to win against neocolonialism and the comprador class that has risen from amongst us. It must be a mass-based program whose focus is the creation of a people’s popular history that is classless and communist; anything less than this is but a waste of time and an attempt at marching into a dead end. Because great ideas that have no bearing in changing the conditions of the people are just that: great ideas – nothing else.

Decolonisation is about land. Therefore, our nationalism is righteous, whether it be the nationalism of the indigenous of the Americas, the peoples of Africa, or the aborigines of Australia. It’s about winning the land back and building independent societies from the ravages of settlers to the adventures abroad of big money. Today the masses are calling for expropriation of land without compensation as part of an active decolonial program, because without land, everything else fades into thin air whiles the starvation, the sickness, the clamour, and the squalor spiral ever on in the shantytowns, slums and favelas. Decolonisation is winning the land to honour the resolve of our ancestors yesterday and descendants who will survive the beautiful tomorrows yet to come. To this vein we stand today with the fighting people of occupied lands from Azania to Palestine in their righteous struggle for their lands.

Decolonisation isn’t woke, it’s a nightmare.

It’s a messy, habitual, continuous nightmare that plagues both coloniser and colonised in the suburbs and shantytowns. Because the coloniser and colonised are old friends, they have become synced in their anticipations of the dreadful end. An antithesis whose contradiction will only be resolved in the burning-down-to-the-ground of the master’s house. The happiness of the coloniser is the wretched state of the colonised, and vice versa. Theirs is a dialectical relationship that can never be woke, since the day it wakes up it will result in the eternal sleep of the benefactor. So the work today is to awaken the beast within the neocolonial peripheries and remind it of the ending of the friendship. That it won’t be transformed into a complaining Philosophy or a harmless aesthetic, but a program of action whose basis is righteous indignation at the forces of oppression that have stolen the land underneath their feet. For the day the third world wakes up, the first world goes to an eternal sleep filled with the nightmares of the afore time colonised – again, the dialectic, but overturned, this time, to serve the ones that rightfully deserve it.

Decolonisation, then, is to organise for socialist revolution. It’s not academic conferences and coffeehouse bullshit. It is scientific in its analysis and materialist in its theory. It doesn’t beg to be heard in ivory towers, because it’s catching fire in the working class and peasants quarters of the Global South. It is calculated in its advance and its highest development is found in the proletarian and peasant movement that denounces the labor aristocrats of the colonial metropole as it marches forward in seizing production and changing the tide of consumption. Knowing it has nothing to lose but its shackles and in winning worlds it will bring forth the historically-needed economic, social, cultural, political destiny of the world to a radiant beginning(s). It’s the great poetry in motion of a people finally taking ownership of their own dance as they walk into a newness hitherto unseen by the reactionary forces of a decadent world; a reality of their own making, becoming and being in a zeitgeist that’s made through fire, hail, and brimstone.

To conclude, our decolonisation today must sit and converse with the people in a language they understand. It’s a striving at naming and knowing the enemy and the friend of the colonised. It must know that we will never mentally decolonise without winning over the economic base and replacing the ideologies of the bourgeois superstructure with that of the progressive masses. It’s primary insofar as land, bread, and water remain the province of the private. It’s popular, messy, beautiful, poetic, bloody, and in the end, worthy of the final becoming of humankind in its continuous motion and movement to happiness and progress as it enters the vortex of the very eternal.

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The Real Dragon: George Jackson and the Black August Tradition

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

“I don’t want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics.”

— George Jackson 

The dragon never physically flew out, but his thoughts, writings, and practice encircled the black globe in the fire-spitting style of a true and living dragon — the metaphor gains sharpness the deeper we delve in the many variants of the lives and afterlives of the man. George Jackson was the compañero who wasn’t afraid; a righteous brother who frightened and shook the empire whiles locked up in her deadly dungeons for all his adult life. What conditions create a man so beautiful, cold, calculated, and brilliant as George? Why was the system so afraid of a young black brother such as this? Why did he stand out and continue to do so after all this time? To look at George’s life is to see a body in motion, racked with questions of the impossible and a near denial that such a man really did walk amongst us; nay, caged amongst us.

Studying the life and times of brother George is to come to certain hard conclusions that are ever necessary in the grand scheme of things. It is to look at the prison system that kept him captive and see a slave plantation whose abolition has become an ever-important need in the age of mass-incarceration of black and African people in the US settler colony. The criminalization of black existence and the glaring contradictions of the capitalist dystopia as African lives continue to be in primitive accumulation. It is to see the enduring human spirit, despite captivity and slavery, flourishing and blossoming and yearning for nothing short of liberation and the human right to dignity. His life speaks across the times in a transhistorical encounter with our times when so many like him continue to suffer the privation of white supremacy and commodification of the human being.

At a personal, intimate level, to look at his life is to see a studious, steadfast and consistent life given to the liberation of black people, and all toiling people, under the yoke of capitalism-imperialism. A life lived in love of the people — a true ox for the people to ride. He laid no claims to grandeur or greatness, his preoccupation was with how we get free! How can the unconsoled be consoled and the last become first. But George comes from a tradition, a living lineage that inspired his whole life as a revolutionary black man in the hellhole of the imperial state. For we recognize that the individual is a social being who’s becoming and fullness is only realized through the people. He knew this too, hence his constant emphasis on taking Revolution back to the masses; the sufferer, the fella, the captured and the odds job man.

Black August started as a commemoration of George’s defiant spirit, but more than that, it is testimony to that radical, revolutionary tradition that never quenches. The August of our lives as a global African humanity stretches back to Touissant and the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the birth of Garvey and Fred Hampton and many many more. August is indeed very august and replete with our glorious struggles for liberation and self-determination. In connecting George Jackson to this living and breathing tradition, we honor him truly as he would have wanted to be. Constantly in his letters we are reminded that he is with the progressive forces of the African world, that his sustained inspiration came from giants of the struggle the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Fanon, etc. What this means for us today is to go back to that source from whence he was drinking from and deduce lessons and learnings in advancing this unfinished project of national liberation.

Nkrumah, like many others from his time, emphasized in no uncertain terms the need for African unification under scientific socialism. This is an integral part of the tradition we have inherited today and is linked intimately with the just and righteous struggles of black people in America. The home of black people in the diaspora and at home remains in Africa, and until such a time when this homeland of blackness is liberated and free from the machinations of domination, black people everywhere will be powerless, disrespected, and oppressed at will. And today, as Africa grapples with failed neocolonial states, black people continue to be the skunk of the planet wherever you might go around the world.

This then calls for a shared internationalism that is grounded foremost in revolutionary Pan-Africanism in the continuity provided to us by the likes of Kwame Ture and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. In times gone by, in the callings of Marcus Garvey and UNIA to rally Africans all over the world and to build alliances where needed to advance our cause.

Beyond Pan-Africanism, the struggle to dismantle the neocolonial conditions in which black folks continue to live in the United States, like George Jackson brilliantly told us decades ago, has to be linked to an international struggle of the oppressed, and as such it will be won when the global struggle, which Afro America is an integral part of, will see the end of the empire with her tentacles cut off from all over the oppressed world. Fascism in America is trained and perfected on black bodies, then transferred and expertly translated as policy around the world. At the same time, military killers in Iraq go home to terrorize black lives in the streets of Minneapolis. Many locations, one enemy. This too must be understood clearly and the lessons applied for our inevitable victory.

Ultimately, it’s a recognition of the sheer power and possibilities that lay in the hands of Afro America that will give Black August it’s due place as an institution for self-determination and radiant new beginnings. Those millions of beaten down, imprisoned, overworked and back-bent workers and peasants that make America’s machines run are the only true vanguard of the humane struggle to change the conditions of humanity and halt an empire whose barbarism has outshone all other empires before her.

Oppressed humanity continues to look to Africans in America as they lock horns with the devil. Knowing this contending class of people will determine the course of human history — the one who emerges victorious moves the old hands of the human story, either to prosperity for all, or perdition. But knowing the arc of history, in the end it’s the oppressed who win since they have nothing to protect and everything to gain in this glorious fight. A protracted and long struggle, but victory being assured for the long-suffering fella who embodies the truth in her very being.

To truly honor George Jackson and the Soledad brothers is to struggle for what they stood for; it is to study their bequeathal to this generation and make it come to life. To organize and study hard as they did, and never for once cower before the elemental forces of oppression. To never be counted amongst the broken — George died victorious and unbroken in the harshest of places, in the hands of the most vicious. To know that eventually the prison gates will open and the real dragon will fly out.

Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”