Who is an African remains a contentious question on which a consensus may never be reached; but who Negroes are is not in doubt or debate. By their woolly hair or black skin, or both, you shall know them. Neo-Garveyism is interested in Negroes/Black Africans, NOT in Africans. Anybody who is a Negro by appearance, but is insecure about being called a black or Negro, or who is uncomfortable about the words race, Negro or Black, is invited to stay away from Neo-Garveyism.
4] What is the constituency and what is the project of NeoGarveyism for the 21st century? NeoGarveyism is for those Pan-Africanists who accept that the correct constituency of Pan-Africanism is the black race and that the paramount project is to build a black superpower in Africa. Neo-Garveyism is inviting Pan-Africanists to return to the pre-1958 constituency of Pan-Africanism and to stop evading the question of Black powerlessness in the world.
5] One of the crippling failings of Continentalism is that is has been oblivious to the question of racial power, the lack of power by the black race. It has been oblivious to this mother of all the problems of the black race. Another is that it has been inflicted with complexes about race, and has been afraid of being smeared as “racist” by our white-supremacist enemies, Arab and European alike.
Pan-Africanism was a mono-racial movement before Nkrumah perverted it with his multiracial, integrationist, Afro-Arab Continentalism. Some Pan-Africanists are very scared of returning to that original mono-racialism lest their white liberal “friends” accuse them of racism. It is therefore important to point out why an organization is not guilty of racism, simply because it is monoracial.
Any group, monoracial or multiracial, is racist only if it subscribes to the superstition that one race is superior and another inferior.
Therefore, a monoracial Negroes-only Pan-Africanism, which does not claim that Negroes are superior, is not racist. Neither Garveyism nor Neo-Garveyism claims that Negroes, or any other race, is a superior or inferior race. Therefore it is a racial but not a racist movement. Those who call it racist are either ignorantly misusing language or up to mischief. White liberals like to play mischief by falsely accusing monoracial Negro groups of “black racism.” That way they intimidate ill-informed Negroes into admitting white enemies into their groups, so that the whites can then control and misdirect the black struggle against white domination and white racism.
Steve Biko rejected this accusation when white liberals hurled it at his Black Consciousness Movement. He wrote: “Those who know, define racism as discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation. In other words one cannot be a racist unless he has the power to subjugate. What blacks are doing is merely to respond to a situation in which they find themselves the objects of white racism. We are in the position in which we are because of our skin. We are collectively segregated against — what can be more logical than for us to respond as a group? When workers come together under the auspices of a trade union to strive for the betterment of their conditions, nobody expresses surprise in the Western world. It is the done thing. Nobody accuses them of separatist tendencies. Teachers fight their battles, garbagemen do the same, nobody acts as a trustee for another. Somehow, however, when blacks want to do their thing the liberal establishment seems to detect an anomaly. This is in fact a counter-anomaly. The anomaly was there in the first instance when the liberals were presumptuous enough to think that it behoved them to fight the battle for the blacks.” [Biko, I Write What I Like. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987, p. 25]
[Biko’s full critique of integration should be required reading by all Black Africans today. I encourage Pan-Africanists to study and learn from his powerful refutation of the charge.]
We must organize the black race regardless of what anybody says. As Garvey pointed out, “To suggest that there is no need for Negro racial organization . . . is but to, by the game of deception, lay the trap for the destruction of a people whose knowledge of life is incomplete.” [Philosophy & Opinions, II: 16] “Opposition to race independence is the weapon of the enemy to defeat the hopes of an unfortunate people.” [“African Fundamentalism”]
We must therefore insist that the Negro race has as much right as any other human group to organize itself and to define and defend its interests in the world, and we should not be conned or intimidated into not exercising that right.
6] Some Pan-Africanists claim that we already have “black power” in Africa. I can’t see what they are referring to. I see black governments but I don’t see black power. I see black governments that are neo-colonial fronts and agents for white power. All I can see are weak neo-colonial governments with armies that can defend them only against their own unarmed populations. Which black African army is self-supplied with doctrines and equipment? Which of them can defeat a regiment of Lithuanian girl scouts? The black presidents of neo-colonial African countries do not represent black power. They are white power in black face. After all, President Obama is in the White House, the mansion and symbol of white power, wielding and serving white power. Does that mean that there is now Black power in the USA? Just like Obama, the presidents of the neo-colonial countries of Black Africa do not exercise black power. They are black agents of white power.
But whatever or wherever this alleged “black power” in Africa may be, did it deter or defeat those who threw the AIDS bomb on Black Africa? Has it defeated the Arab attack on Darfur? What did this alleged “black power” do to defend South Sudan from Arab colonialists in the last half century, or to end the Arab enslavement of blacks in Mauritania? What is it doing to protect Haiti from being tortured by the USA, France and their UN? Can it defend us against the EU? Can it take on NATO? If not, we need to focus on building the black power with which we can fully liberate and protect the Black race from NATO, the UN, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Arab League. That is the measure of the black power that we need and that Neo-Garveyism is proposing that we build.
7] Some argue that we were not the exclusive or unique victims of racism and slavery and should therefore not make them the focus of our Pan-Africanism. On the contrary, Pan-Africanism, if it is to be of value and service to us, should focus on all the evils that have been inflicted on us. And it should make it its mission to ensure that we never again suffer any of them. Whether others have also suffered them is a totally irrelevant consideration. If you have cancer, it is your duty to get rid of it, regardless of whether others also have cancer.
8] Cultural Pan-Africanism, which some urge us to restrict ourselves to, is important; but it is not enough. It is not adequate to our liberation needs. A Sankofa Movement for the reclamation of the values, tenets and institutions of our Black African heritage we must have. Sankofa is important for our identity. But Sankofa is not enough for our survival and advancement. A purely or narrowly cultural Pan-Africanism does not address our problems of racism, neo-colonialism or poverty, or the power gap between us and others in the world.
We must also ask: What changes must we make in our ancestral cultures if we are to be victorious over our enemies? That is the key question we must pose and answer. Only such retentions, changes and additions as are dictated by this criterion are legitimate. Even democracy, in whatever version we choose or invent, has to meet this criterion. If it can’t, then we must discard it. However endearing, and however attached we may be to the values and customs of our culture, that culture is fatally deficient if it cannot win encounters on the battlefield. If a people love their culture, they must see to it that it is, at any time, militarily stronger than any potential challenger.
No matter how ecologically viable it may be; no matter how good or virtuous its values and customs may seem; no matter how advanced it may be judged in this or that aspect or department, a culture is fatally deficient if it fails to win when challenged on the battlefield. And our ancestral African cultures failed woefully when put to that test in the last several centuries. We must bear that in mind and do everything to correct that chronic weakness.
We need particularly to note that returning to our roots does not mean reverting to retarded and ineffective technologies or worldviews. As Cabral admonished: “No one should think that the culture of Africa, what is really African and so must be preserved for all time, for us to be Africans, is our weakness in the face of nature. . . . We should not persuade ourselves that to be African is believing that lightning is the fury of the deity (God is feeling angry). We cannot believe that to be African is to think that man has no mastery over the flooding of rivers. (Unity and Struggle, pp. 57-58).
