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Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism

By OPOKU AGYEMAN
(Excerpt from The Pan-African World View)
Forwarded by Chinweizu

On the strength of the nature and outcome of the historical links between Africans and Arabs over the last thirteen centuries, it is the hypothesis of this chapter that the two ideological-political move- ments, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, are antithetical and that, in the final analysis, there is no room for the coexistence of the two on the African continent. An underlying premise of this hypothesis is that African-Arab relations have, to date, been woefully un- balanced and that this asymmetry, as expressed especially in inter- national and inter-racial political relations, has been weighted in favour of the Arabs and woefully to the disadvantage of the Africans.      

It needs to be emphasized, from the onset, that the terms "Africans" and "Arabs" are used here as racial, not cultural categories. As Chancellor Williams has noted, the Arabs are "a white people," and of the same racial stock as the European Jews "against whom they are now arrayed for war."1 J. S. Trimingham's conception that the term Arab "has significance in a linguistic and cultural, rather than in a racial sense," and is therefore to be properly used in reference "to the result of the recent admixture" of Arabs and non-Arab peoples,2 smacks of ethnographic inaccuracy and has dubious analytic utility. The acculturated African in Northern Sudan is no more Arab than the Black-American is European. "In studying the actual records" in the history of the races, then, as Chancellor Williams counsels, "the role of White Arabs must not be obscured either by their Islamic religion or by the presence of the Africans and Afro-Arabs among them".3 As we shall see presently, the Arabs themselves insist that blood ties constitute the essence of their identity.     

The Arabs played a role in the invasions and conquests that wrought destruction on the ancient Black Kingdoms and empires of North-East Africa, as well as on the West African Black states of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The Arab slave trade in Africa was a destructive force that raged from the 9th through the 19th centuries in the Eastern seaboard of Africa, both preceding and outlasting even the transatlantic slave trade on the West Coast. The Arabs made depredations on the Sudan through the murderous campaigns of Muhammed Ali at the beginning of the 19th century, and joined in the European Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the same century in an effort, once again, to carve out an African empire for themselves. Through this nexus of social, economic and political assaults, the relations between Arabs and Africans took on the confirmed asymmetry of victimizer and victim.      

Despite their awareness of the glaring disproportion in the ex- changes between the two races, the Africans, supposedly on the basis of geopolitical considerations flavored with presumptions of Third World solidarity, argued their way vigorously, in the post- World War II era, into a political alliance with the Arabs. As Nkrumah put the case, Africa's freedom "stands open to danger just as long as a single country on the continent remains fettered by colonial rule and just as long as there exist on African soil puppet governments manipulated from afar."4 The construct involved here is one of a "marriage" founded on the conception that both the Africans and the Arabs on the continent shared identical interests in the independence of Africa — that together they shared the aspiration of liberating Africa from the imperialist encroachments of the Boers to the South and Israelis in the Middle East.      To lay bare the essentially expedient nature of this "wedlock", we need only remind ourselves of the core ingredients of Pan- Africanism, and set them against the dynamics of the ideological- political movement of Pan-Arabism. The core ingredients of Pan-Africanism include Afrocentricity; positive racial self-concept, commitment to racial resurgence; racial privacy; positive concep- tion of African history; corporate racial family; and unity. It is necessary to bear in mind the element of Afrocentricity in par- ticular, referring as it does to the Africa of the Africans, of Black people, and decidedly not to a geographical area which includes Africa's invaders — whether they be the Arabs who set foot there over a thousand years ago, or the Dutch who made their incursion some five hundred years ago. In Chinweizu's observation: "The Arab world, even if part of it shares the same land mass with us (Africans), is still the Arab world. Their preoccupation is Pan- Arabism."5

Pan-Arabism And what is Pan-Arabism? In a word, it is an ideological- political movement repr

esenting a conscious effort to create a united Arab nation. Its underlying principle is that the Arab states are parts of one indivisible Arab nation. Nasser articulated this principle, for example, in justification of the UAR’s interference in Iraq's internal affairs:

    We are one Arab nation. Both our constitution and the Iraqi

    Provisional Constitution provide in their articles that we are one

    Arab nation. Accordingly, every Arab state has the right to

    defend Iraq's Arabhood and independence from Britain, the

    USA, the USSR, and all other countries. We are one Arab family

    in a boat caught in the tempest of international politics.6 

There is no question that the concept of Arab "peoplehood" in play here is a racial one. Nasser himself affirmed this and made it clear that all other bases of identity among the Arabs — religious, geographic, etc. — are of secondary importance. Of the three circles at whose centre he envisioned Egypt to be — Arab, Islam and Africa

    the first, the Arab circle, stood out in pre-eminence. "There can be no doubt," he stressed, "that... (it) is the most important, and the one with which we are most closely linked."7      
    The Arabs are, of course, also very much bound together by a common religious heritage. Indeed, Islam is a core ingredient of Pan-Arabism. At the same time, being a more inclusive basis of identity, Islam embraces Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic states which, W.A. Beling explains, by virtue of their non-Arabic languages, as well as their racial and other differences, are "excluded from the Pan-Arab concept."8      
    Even so, the crucial role of Islam as an instrument of Pan-Arabism should not be missed. In this regard, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the religion of Islam arose partly in answer to the customary indictment by Jews and Christians that Arabs were "savages who did not even possess an organized church,"9 and partly in response to the state of feuding separatism and decadence in which the Arabs were mired. By launching the new religion, by permeating the nature of his fellow Arabs with an autochthonous religious impulse, one whose genesis, instrumentality and language they could readily relate to, Muhammad not only went a long way toward asserting the Arabs' creative genius, but he also succeeded in transforming his fellow Arabs, replacing their jealous divisiveness with a spirit of mutual defense designed to promote common politi- cal and material interests. His success in this was indeed staggering, for almost at once Islam proved to be "the most important force" in the Arabs' political and social rejuvenation.10      

Nor was this all. In its external ramifications, Islam soon triggered Arab empire-building as proselytizing brotherhoods "with an un- compromising aggressiveness unmatched in the history of religions" soon pierced into the heartland of Africa and beyond into Europe and Asia.11 The essentially imperialistic, rather than beneficent or missionary, role of Islam, is underscored by the fact, for instance, that it featured as an instrument of the Arab slave trade: the trade and the religion were "companions throughout, with the crescent following the commercial caravan".12 Revealingly, following the Moroccan invasion of Songhay, the African Muslims who had built and ruled the empire were not spared destruction by the Arab Muslims.13 This is by no means an isolated case. The historical sources are replete with complaints by black Muslim rulers about "holy wars" launched against them to take captives. The enslavement of black Muslims became very much the confirmed pattern.      

As far as Arabs were concerned, therefore, the utility of Islam, from the first, was seen to lie in its potential as a weapon for indoctrination, domination and, thereby, the augmentation of Arab power around the globe. In Nasser's own words: 

    When I consider the 80 million Muslims in Indonesia, and the 50

    million in China, and the millions in Malaysia, Siam and Burma,

    and the nearly 100 million in Pakistan ... and the 40 million in

    the Soviet Union together with the other millions in far-flung

    parts of the world — when I consider these hundreds of millions

    united by a single creed, I emerge with a sense of the tremendous

    possibilities which we might realize through the co-operation of

    all these Muslims.14 

    From such a trajectory, it comes as no surprise that the remaining circle in Nasser's orbital schema, Africa, which he characterized as "the remotest depths of the jungle," featured as merely a candidate for Egypt's, "spread of enlightenment and civilization" via Islamiza- tion-Arabisation.15     

In all, at the dictates of Pan-Arabism, loyalty to a particular state in the Arab world has been, in Bernard Lewis' words, "tacit (and) even surreptitious," even as Arab unity has been "the sole publicly accepted objective of statesmen and ideologues alike."16 Despite

much recent talk, in some academic circles, of the demise of Pan- Arabism in the wake of the defection of Sadat's Egypt, the ideological current remains appreciably strong, as witness the very fact of the tremendous storm generated in the Arab world over Sadat's policy — an indication, in itself, of a fight to keep the ideology alive.      

At this juncture, it is well to sum up the essence of the Pan-Arabist  ideology by noting that it is founded on the Arabs' belief, "illustrated  by the jihads through which, in the 7th and 8th centuries, they spread  Islam" into North Africa, Iberia and South Asia, 

    that in a rightly ordered world, dominion should belong to Muslims, and pre-eminently to the Arabs who gave Islam to the world. Since they not only lost dominion to the West but found themselves overrun by the West, they have suffered from a feeling that the universe is out of its proper order. They have therefore, as Muslim Brotherhoods demonstrate, longed for a restoration of dominion to the Faithful so the world will be set right again.17

In terms of goals, the cross-purposes of the two movements are self-evident. And this means that any "alliance" between them could only be one of convenience, limited to collaboration in the elimina- tion of obstacles (as posed by South Africa and Israel) toward the attainment of what are fundamentally opposed ends. The point cannot be overlooked, in this connection, that, outside the obliga- tions of the "alliance", Israel, the adversary of the Arabs, was neither automatically nor necessarily the foe of the Africans; by the same token, South Africa, the enemy of the Africans, was neither neces- sarily nor mechanically the foe of the Arabs. 

The lack of mutuality in the "Alliance"

It has to be emphasized that, even within such limited perimeters, success of the "alliance" depended entirely on a mutuality of com- mitment to its limited tactical purposes. And yet the evidence suggests that such a reciprocity was lacking from the beginning. The Africans drew upon, and were buttressed by, assumptions of Third World solidarity — "the shared experience of devastation and

humiliation under the boots of an expansionist West . . ."18 In Nkrumah's words:

    The fortunes of the African Revolution ... are linked with the world-wide struggle against imperialism. It does not matter where the battle erupts, be it in Africa, Asia or Latin America, the master-mind and master-hand at work are the same. The oppressed and exploited people are striving for their freedom against exploitation and suppression. Ghana must not, Ghana cannot, be neutral in the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.19 

 For their part, the Arabs seem to have conceived of the "alliance" solely in self-interested terms; in particular, there was concern to ensure their continued access to the waters of the Nile which, to Egypt, "is a matter of life or death" in the sense that "if the water of the river were discontinued or were controlled by a hostile state or a state that could become hostile, Egypt's life is over".20 In Nasser's words:

    The Nile which runs from Lake Victoria to Cairo is not merely a route crossing the ... African continent to the Mediterranean, but is the path of life in the full sense of the word and with all its dimensions.21 

This anxiety over the Nile, as old as the Arabs' incursion and occupation of Egypt from 642 A.D., was a key motivating factor in Muhammed Ali's annexation of the Sudan to the Egyptian Empire in the 19th century, and remains as acute as ever, as in Sadat's threat of June 5, 1980 to "retaliate with force" if Ethiopia interfered with the river's flow to Egypt. This was in retort to Ethiopia's complaint to the OAU that Egypt was abusing its rights to the Nile by diverting it to irrigate stretches of Sinai Desert in a million-acre irrigation scheme launched by Sadat.22      

And now to sum up the essence of the matter. In the eyes of the Arab leaders, Egypt is the most important entity in the Arab nation. It therefore matters very much that Egypt's lifeline, the Nile, lies in African hands. A united and hostile Africa could strangulate Egypt. Among other uses, then, an "alliance" between Africans and Arabs could be exploited to forestall such a unification of Black Africa.      

Organizationally, the "alliance" was born with the Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) which Nkrumah convened in Accra in March 1958, which assembled Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana, and to which Nkrumah declared: "If in the past the Sahara divided us, now it unites us. And an injury to one is an injury to all of us."23      

We now proceed to assess the "praxis" of the alliance since its inauguration in 1958, drawing on case illustrations in African-Arab intercourse in the Sudan, Zanzibar, Mauritania and the Organiza- tion of African Unity (OAU); on the triangular mesh of African- Arab-Israeli relations; and on the effect of Islam on African-Arab connections. 

The Sudan      

The backdrop to African-Arab relations in Africa's largest country (sharing borders with 8 countries, including Ethiopia) is provided by the Turko-Egyptian conquest of 1821 and the sub- sequent rule of a Turko-Egyptian government headed by Muhammed Ali which witnessed, among other things, the traffic in over 1 million African slaves for the Middle East market.24 This was followed by the Anglo-Egyptian colonization and rule from 1898 which would end in a grant of independence to a united, Arab- dominated Sudan in 1956. By the time of the launching of the "alliance" at the 1958 CIAS in Accra, the Sudan had been inde- pendent for some two years, during which everything had been done to complete the process of African political incapacitation and economic disinheritance in that land.      

For instance, on the insistence of the Egyptians, the British excluded the Africans from the independence talks. Then, a few months before independence, the Equatorial Corps of the Sudanese Army, which was based in the South, was disarmed and sent to the North, for fear that otherwise the Africans might break away from the imposed unity.25 In the economic area, some 300 African workers on the Nzara Cotton Scheme were arbitrarily replaced by Arabs. As for the new Sudanization policy which transferred posts held by the British to the Sudanese, all that the Africans got out of it was 4 posts out of the 800. The remaining 796 jobs went to Arabs.26

Even though the Sudan attended the CIAS in Accra, it came away from it with no wish whatsoever to achieve any Afro-Arab synthesis in the country in line with the spirit of "solidarity" which the "al- liance" symbolized. On the contrary, the government continued the tradition of Arab predominance at the expense of the African majority. As a former Prime Minister, Sayed Sadiq el Mahdi, con- veyed the point:

    The dominant feature of our nation is an Islamic one and its overpowering expression is Arab, and this nation will not have its entity identified and its prestige and pride preserved except under an Islamic revival.27 

This inner purpose has been echoed over the years by successive  governments and remains the guiding principle of the Arabs in the  Sudan to this day. Thus, another Sudanese Prime Minister, Mah-  goub, proclaimed in 1968:

    Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations 

    and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in

    Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent.28 

     Nor did the "revolutionary rhetoric" spawned by President Nimeiry after coming to power in the aftermath of a May 1969 coup d'etat lessen the Arabization drive, as some maintained.29 Indeed, following Nimeiry's accession to office, the Pan-Arabists "gained disproportionately high influence," as reflected in his decision in the Summer of 1970 to sign the Tripoli Charter which committed the Sudan, Egypt and Libya to a political federation.30 When some Africans protested the new wave of Pan-Arabist effusion, expressing the fear that a Pan-Arab federation incorporating the Sudan would convert the Africans into a minority and thereby worsen their plight, they were readily dubbed "racialist conspirators" and then ar- rested.31      

Meanwhile, Nimeiry's Prime Minister intoned loudly and clearly the purpose of his government, for the benefit of those who still might misconstrue its essential character:

    The revolutionary government, with complete understanding of

    the bond of destiny and forces of Arab Revolution, will work for

    the creation of economic, military, and cultural relations with

    brother Arab nations to strengthen the Arab nation.32

Not to be outdone, Nimeiry himself let it be known that the Sudan "is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission."33      Even though the African majority's value systems resisted as- similation into the minority Arab culture, the Arabs insisted on seeing them as a "cultural vacuum" to be filled by Arab culture "by all conceivable means."34 In consequence, under the Arab heel, a sizeable number of Africans Islamized and Arabised themselves to the point of "giving themselves Arab genealogies."35

The ultimate ambition of the Arabs, however, as the official  quotations cited above portray, was to have the Sudan wrenched  from Africa and absorbed into the Arab fold — made into an  integral part of the Arab world — on the basis of "the unity of blood,  language and religion." To this end, and at the further impetus of a  desire to create a room in the South of the country for settlement  by the displaced Palestinians, they embarked on a policy of sys-  tematic extermination of the African population. By July 1965, as  Allan Reed has ably chronicled, the intellectual class among the  Africans, in particular, had become the object of a furious exter-  mination campaign.36 Nor did this policy of extermination change  under successive governments. As late as December 1969, Allan  Reed witnessed the bombings of the cattle camps in Upper Nile. As  he wrote: "I passed through villages that were totally levelled, just a  few months after Nimeiry had talked about regional autonomy".37  Writing in 1968, The Daily Nation lamented that for years "whole  villages have been destroyed" and untold atrocities committed by  the Sudanese army.38     

 Inevitably, through their own organization, the Sudan African  National Union (SANU), the Africans resisted this regimen of  carnage; inevitably, this resulted in a civil war pitting the SANU's  Pan-Africanist nationalism39 against the Pan-Arabism of the  Arabs. It was a classic conflict between a people's yearning for  political self-determination and cultural autonomy and, in the  words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, the "flagrant colonialist"  ambitions of the Arabs.40     

Meanwhile, even as the Africans outside the Sudan, perhaps out  of embarrassment, affected ignorance of the strife in the Sudan, or  found specious excuses for staying aloof from it, the Arab world, for  its part, threw in its collective weight as Syria, Libya and Egypt, among others, took on direct combat involvement against the out-gunned and out-supplied Africans.      

The 1972 settlement which granted the Africans regional autonomy in the South was a tactical accommodation that changed little. Writing seven years later, D. M. Wai noted that the only thing that tied the two racial groups together was "a mutually hateful contiguity from which neither could escape."41 It was an "illusion", he emphasized, to think that the schism that separates the two races had been resolved. For, in spite of the numerical superiority of the Africans, and despite the settlement, Africans still remained "at the periphery of central decision-making". Only one person from the south was in the Cabinet; one out of 45 ambassadors was from the

South; only 8 out of the more than 200 Sudanese in the diplomatic service were from the South.42      

Subsequent developments have overridden the tactical aims for which the Arabs made that settlement. Upon the discovery of oil in the South, Nimeiry moved, in February 1982, to unconstitutionally dissolve the South's ruling bodies, to replace them with a military-led administration of his own choosing, and to pursue a new policy of dividing the region into three subregions, the better to reduce the South's political influence and dilute its autonomy. When African politicians voiced opposition to these violations of the 1972 settlement, Nimeiry had them promptly detained.                   

Not a synthesis, then, but the triumph of Arabism over Africanism is the tale of the Sudan in the era of the "alliance."

    The greatest achievement of Arabism in the Sudan has been the unquestioned acceptance by the whole world that this is an Arab state, in spite of the fact that only about 30% of the population is Arab. Indeed, the predominance of the Arab Sudanese in the country's culture, politics, administration, commerce and industry makes it de facto an Arab state.43 

The fact of the matter is that, invariably, the Arabs in the Sudan,  like all other Arabs, "have conceived of the universe as rooted fundamentally in Arabism. For them, there is little disagreement about the national character the Sudan should adopt, and what its national aspirations and loyalties should be.”44 

Zanzibar and Mauritania      

The Arab slave trade and Arab enslavement of Africans in the lands they controlled were interrelated, indeed twin, phenomena. For centuries, African slaves in Arab hands served as domestics, eunuchs, soldiers, agricultural serfs, and as slave-gangs on irrigation works, in sugar and cotton plantations, as well as in gold, salt and copper mines. Known as the "guardians of female virtue", the African eunuchs served at harems throughout Arabia. Thousands of African boys between eight and ten years old were castrated every year and the survivors of the crude and painful operation were reared into eunuchs.45 For the African military slaves, the tendency was, once they had outlived their usefulness, to be betrayed into slaughter by those they served self-sacrificially.46 Nor has the phenomenon evaporated into the thin air of history. Survivals of it, Bernard Lewis informs us, "can still be met" in Egypt, for instance, where the Nubian servant "remains a familiar figure... to this day."47 Likewise, the Anti-Slavery Society reports that there were in 1962 some 250,000 African slaves in Saudi Arabia alone.48      

Our concern however, is not so much with the remnants of the odious institution in some specific Arab countries. In other words, we are here addressing a historical phenomenon in the Arab world as a whole, which we deem to have "continued without interruption" to the present day.49      

Consider Zanzibar. It is difficult not to remember that the out- rage of Arab wholesale enslavement of Africans in that island, which began in 1698 with the Omani Arabs' creation of a plantation economy and a commercial empire in the North-Western Indian Ocean,50 ended only in 1964 with the Pan-Africanist Okello's heroic overthrow of the Sultanate. In the period between 1698 and 1964, Zanzibar attained a dubious distinction as the most important slave market in the Indian Ocean. It became a land where being "upper class" meant that one was not only an Arab first and foremost, but also that one could afford a great number of African slaves. It developed the convention that, once born an African, one was "a slave forever, even in the next world."51     

Indeed, the Africans were called washenzi — "uncivilized beings of a lower order"52 — and, on this account, were considered to be deserving of every abuse. Thus, it was customary to have the wombs of pregnant African women opened so that capricious Arab women could see how babies lay inside of them,53 even as it was fashionable to have Africans kneel for Arab women to step on their backs as they mounted their mules. Slaves suspected of fugitive intentions had their necks "secured into a cleft stick as thick as a man's thigh, and locked by a crossbar. Sometimes a double cleft stick was used and one man locked at each end of it."54 Routinely, men, women and children were killed or left tied to a tree, 

    for the scavengers to finish off when they couldn't keep up with the caravan, either through illness and exhaustion, or starvation, or both. Mostly, they were finished off with a blow from a rifle butt, or their skull smashed with a rock, as in the case of the child whose mother complained that she couldn't go on carrying him and the heavy ivory tusk. Ammunition was too precious to waste on a slave.55 

Okello, upon visiting the island, and before single-handedly plan-  ning the coup that overthrew the Arab regime in 1964, learned, to

his chagrin, that a phenomenon he assumed to be buried in history

was alive and vigorous in that land; he heard an elderly African

lament: "My grandfather was a slave, my father was a slave and I

too am now an Arab slave;"56 and he heard the shrill retort of an

Arab: "Whether you like it or not, you niggers and black slaves will

forever remain under the flag of our Holy Sultan. We shall deal with

you as we please."57      

Significantly, Nasser gave the unqualified support of the United  Arab Republic to the Arab oligarchy in Zanzibar. Like the British  Colonial Office, the Arab leader took the side of the Arab minority  against the African majority over the future of the protectorate,  prompting this comment from a British newsletter: "Zanzibar is a  part of Africa and not the Middle East. The Afro-Shirazi are a more  important group than the Arab minority. These facts should be  taken into account before the protectorate ends. If not, there will  be trouble in the sweet-scented remote islands."58 And, once  trouble erupted in the form of an African coup d'etat which even-  tually ousted the Arab political order, it came the turn of Gaddafi  of Libya to take up the championship of Arabism in Zanzibar.   Speaking on October 7, 1972, at a rally at the Tripoli Stadium to   mark the anniversary of the Italian evacuation from Libya, Gaddafi   declared: 

    Zanzibar was all Muslim, and almost all the people were Arabs ... In 1964, the enemies of Zanzibar plotted and staged a massacre in which they slaughtered over 20,000 Arabs in Zanzibar. It was the most notorious massacre in the world. . . . All the Arabs were annihilated in Zanzibar and African rule developed there.59 

Partly in retaliation for this "massacre" of the Arabs, Gaddafi then set out, on his own admission, to support Idi Amin's Uganda in its war against Tanzania, the political entity that has, since 1964, incor- porated Zanzibar. But if Zanzibar in East Africa represents an outrage that has only recently been liquidated, Mauritania in Northwest Africa, occupying as it does another vital zone of interaction between Arabism and Black Africa, symbolizes a raging and perennial Arabian anachronism.     

The process began with the invasion of "white Berber nomads" into the area in the first millennium A.D. An Arab invading force joined them from the 14th century and, in time, out of the fusion of the Berbers and Arabs, came the present ruling elite, "the white Moors." Whatever residual biological differences separate these "white Moors"60 from pure Arabs, they are now so completely identified with the Arabs linguistically, religiously, culturally and ideologically that, to all intents and purposes, they are indistinguish- able from them. Indeed, a number of historians, use "white Moors" and "Arabs" interchangeably in their works.     

The official designation of this Northwestern portion of Africa is the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. As in the Sudan, the Pan- Arabist outlook of the political system has never been in question. Thus, upon the country's admission into the Arab League in 1973, President Ould Daddah pledged: "Mauritania will make every effort and mobilize all its energies for the Arab cause."61 Nor is it any surprise that a Pan-Arab Ministry was created in the country and that Jiddou Ould Salek, as its political head, reaffirmed in 1979 the country's attachment "in its totality to Arabo-Islamic culture."62 Again, as in the Sudan, policies of enforced Arabisation of the Africans have been the norm. For instance, in 1966, Arabic was declared the official language of the country, in the teeth of African opposition.    

 Out of a population of 1.5 million, the Africans constitute ap- proximately 500,000. They are all slaves, in varying degrees. As the Anti-Slavery Reporter has noted, no other nation has so many slaves.63 Entry into-slavery "is by birth, capture or purchase. The first

... is the most common: being born to an existing slave woman."64

Purchase is still current: the sale of children, who, incidentally, all belong to the mother's master, is the most common. Even those among the Africans who have managed to purchase their freedom, and who are thus legally free, continue to be regarded as property by their former Moorish masters. As Le Monde has indicated, whenever these "freed slaves" escape the grip of their former masters, they are hunted down by the police and the administration and quickly restored to bondage, all "in the name of an interpretation of Islamic law."65      

Slavery is indeed the way of life in Mauritania. A typical sight in Nouakchott, the capital, according to Bernard Nossiter, is that of "slaves working in gardens and vegetable plots . . . while their Moorish masters sit under trees, sipping mint tea."66 And the avenues of escape from servitude remain as elusive as ever. As recently as February 1980, demonstrations staged by the African Freedom Movement saw the movement's leaders arrested, held without trial for months, and then tortured to a point where some of them went mad.67      

On July 5, 1980, as a way of "calming the slaves until the Govern- ment (of President Haidala) has had time to work out plans on how to cope with the anti-slavery movement,"68 and in an effort to improve the country's international image, the Mauritanian govern- ment published a decree abolishing slavery. Those who knew that slavery had been formally abolished twice before and that the country's independence constitution itself proclaims that "All men are born free and are equal before the law," could only greet the new announcement with skepticism.      

Indeed, when investigators of the Anti-Slavery Society visited Mauritania "to see how far the new decree was being put into effect," they concluded that it had had no practical effect.69 No wonder, for "the upper and middle officials of the government, the judiciary, the police and the rest of the civil service", do, for the most part, have their own slaves and are determined to keep them.70 As it happens, the most dramatic consequence of the decree seems to have been the government's decision to set up a national commission, composed of Muslim jurists, economists and administrators, to work out compensation for the enslavers for the loss of slaves they have not yet incurred!      

When the Anti-Slavery Society proposed that, to demonstrate its sincerity, the Mauritanian government should ratify the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and the supplementary convention on the abolition of slavery, the slave trade, and institutions and practices similar to slavery, this triggered a revealing rejoinder in August 1981 from the Mauritanian government. It let it be known that it was not the only country which enslaved Africans and that, in any case, any effort "to wipe out this form of discrimination," no matter how earnest, would founder on the rock of Maurtania's technological underdevelopment "which makes all talk about human liberty completely derisory."71      

In other words, until the country becomes technologically sophisticated, there is, in the thinking of the white Moors in Mauritania, every justification for enslaving the Africans. As for Western critics, given the historical record of the West's own victimization of Africans, it was the Mauritanian government's view that they had no moral authority to hold brief for the Africans: 

    It is very easy for citizens of certain countries who in the past developed this form of discrimination called slavery to its most debasing degree within a framework of pure Machiavellianism and sheer materialism: It is easy ... for these people to try to relieve their consciences by setting themselves up as defenders of victims in countries which have not had the chance to ex-perience technological development.72 

 

That Arab enslavement of Africans is not a matter of the past but a continuous, persistent and present scourge is further underscored

by some gruesome details of "the slave trade route from Africa to

the Arab countries in the 1970s" provided by Tribune de Geneve.73

Research done at the Encyclopaedia Africana Secretariat in Accra

has also pointed up cases of African pilgrims selling their children

to Arabs in order to pay their expenses for the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Scarcely less startling is the news that broke in February 1973 to the

effect that Arab traders had been for years exporting to the Middle

East Ghanaian children "between the tender and undiscerning ages

of thirteen and fourteen to become the virtual slaves of wealthy

Arab families."74 The shock this revelation registered on public

opinion in Ghana is well captured in a lengthy and poignant editorial

of the Weekly Spectator: 

    Over the past two decades Ghana has led the quest for the restoration of the black man's lost glory and set the pace for the rediscovery of the African personality. It is therefore revolting and exceedingly bewildering to note that this glorious land of liberty is being used for the watersheds of the revival of slave trade.... We recall vividly the uncertain days of the struggle for independence when Lebanese and Syrian merchants in Ghana constituted themselves into a volunteer force and with three-feet-long batons in their hands, cudgelled down freedom fighters in the streets of Accra in open daylight.... It would appear that we have taken our tolerance too far and they have taken our leniency for weakness and are now adding injury to insult by trading our young daughters like apples or any other commodity. ... Our children must be defended against slavery.75 

African-Arab relations before, within, and beyond the OAU 
 If there is any relief from the gloom of a historically victimizing  Arab behaviour towards Africans, it lies in Ben Bella's stirring  rhetoric at the inaugural meeting of the OAU in 1963, pledging  10,000 Algerian volunteers for a showdown in Southern Africa: 

    A charter will be of no value to us, and speeches will be used

    against us, if there is not first created a blood bank for those

    fighting for independence. We must all agree to die a little.76 

 

It was the same Ben Bella impulse which dictated that, having itself only recently achieved its independence, Algeria would proceed to organize special programmes of training for African liberation movements in Southern Africa. Among those who trained this way in Algeria was a corps of FRELIMO fighters, including Samora Machel, soon to become the President of Mozambique.

To better understand this aberration from the Arab norm, it is necessary to explore some background facts. These relate to the tenacity of the support which Algeria received from three "radical" African states (Ghana, Guinea and Mali) which operated within the Casablanca bloc alongside two "radical" Arab States (Egypt and Muhammad V's Morocco) and the Algerian government in exile, the GPRA. The three African countries not only gave recognition to the Algerian government in exile, but they carried their support to the point where they boycotted the Lagos Conference of Inde- pendent States, held in January 1962, in reaction to the refusal of the organizers of the conference to invite the GPRA.      

Beyond such collective efforts, Nkrumah, for one, tirelessly proclaimed, in international forums, the justness and the moral imperatives of Algerian liberation. He also gave Frantz Fanon, the GPRA's Ambassador to Africa, a base in Accra from which to solicit support for the Algerian cause among the non-Casablanca African countries, and to work toward the opening of a southern front through the Mali frontier to ease the delivery of arms to the FLN.      

Hardly forgettable is also the selfless, even self-sacrificial, con- tribution of Frantz Fanon to the same Arab cause. A black man, and a native of Martinique, he was soon to discover in his travels that it was not only in Europe that a black person, "regardless of his level of education and culture, was always primarily a Negro — and therefore inferior"77; even in the Third World, supposedly united by the struggle against imperialism, racism remained rife against black people. Thus, while he served in the Free French army in North Africa, "the eyes that turned to watch him in the streets never let him forget the color of his skin."78 In Fanon's own testimony, "I was astonished to learn that the North Africans despised men of color. It was absolutely impossible for me to make any contact with the local population." In all, he concluded, there was no question that the Arab "does not like the African."79      

For all that, Fanon set out to counterpoise universalism to this virus of racism, Arab or otherwise. And so, after studying medicine and psychiatry in France, and while serving the French government in Algeria in the fifties, he formally joined the FLN in 1956. From that time on until his death, he devoted himself, in the words of I. L. Gendzier, "with the intensity and the enormous talents at his disposal to the many tasks he performed for the FLN and Algeria."      

In addition to doing medical work in Tunisian hospitals and contributing his services to the L'Armee de Liberation Nationale (ALN) centers for soldiers and refugees, he worked for the FLN press organs, first Resistance Algerienne and then el Moudjahid. He also represented Algeria to the Africans.80 On the strength of a conviction that the plight of the oppressed knows no boundaries, he made Algeria, rather than Martinique or France, into the focal point of his life. So seriously did he take his adopted cause that in 1958, while pleading the Algerian case at the Accra All-African People's Conference, he was so emotionally overcome that he "appeared almost to break down."81 All this, even while he continued to encounter what he himself characterized as an "appalling" level of racism against Africans in the Arab world.82      

Ben Bella, as one of the "historic leaders" of the FLN, was impressed by this multifaceted black support. After Algerian independence, he moved to show his appreciation through reciprocal gestures both on the African scene, as we have noted, and inside Algeria, in measures commemorative of Fanon.      

The point that must be stressed, however, is that these efforts at reciprocity, given their transience and all, are not so remarkable as the fact that anti-African tendencies inherent in the Arab world quickly extinguished them. Thus, within two years of his Addis Ababa oratory, Ben Bella was ousted from office by forces in Algeria which, among other things, deeply resented Ben Bella's "deviation" from Islamic fundamentalism and Arabo-centrism; forces which, in the post-Ben Bella era, have been concerned to emphasize Algeria's "Arab-Islamic heritage" and, by the same token, to de-emphasize the African orientation in its foreign policy.     

The ouster of Ben Bella and the re-orientation of Algerian foreign policy is not unrelated to the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. Visiting the country following Fanon's death and Ben Bella's ouster, Simone de Beauvoir discovered that "no one in Algeria spoke for Fanon." Similarly, I. L. Gendzier, writing in J970, noted that Algerian officials "consistently avoid any discussion of Fanon's political ideas."83 Any suggestion that he contributed significantly to the Algerian struggle was resisted; indeed, there was a "concerted policy" to downgrade him as a theorist of the "Revolution"; to prove "that he was not even Algerian"; to protect the "authenticity" of the "Revolution" as an all-Algerian, all-Arab and all-Muslim phenomenon. In short, as one official put it, the burden of official effort was to "de-Fanonize" Algeria and, in the process "de-Algerianize" Fanon.84      

When all is said and done, then, Fanon's "fatal flaw" as I. L. Gendzier notes, was that he was neither Arab nor Muslim. It is significant that, as far back as 1957, he was left out of the political inner circle — the National Council of the Algerian Revolution. In a revealing confession, El Mill, an Algerian official, indicated that, had Fanon been an Arab, he would have been acknowledged as "the major theoretician of the Algerian Revolution."85 The reality that emerges from all this is that, for today's Algerian officialdom, what is of paramount importance is "Blood ties as opposed to commonly held values.86 Though Fanon helped with their cause, he was, biologically, not one of them and therefore had to be repudiated.      

It is no less noteworthy that, either out of customary Arab con- tempt for things African, or as a function of the reorientation of national priorities away from African concerns, the Algerians have studiedly kept those of Fanon's writings that touch on the predica- ment of black people — such as the text of his statement at the AAPC in Accra in 1958 and of his lecture delivered at the 2nd Congress of Black Writers held in Rome 1959 — out of the limelight of print.      

There is no greater evidence of Arab repudiation of Afro-Arab "common anti-imperialist front" than is offered by this dismal tale of the dispossession of Fanon in Algeria.      

Another specious fruit of the Casablanca "radical" coalition was the involvement of Morocco, the UAR and, later, Algeria in the Congo (i.e. Zaire), ostensibly on the side of the pro-independence forces, as the crisis-engulfed country battled against western neocolonialist penetration and dismemberment.      

The Congo, "the heart of Africa," constituted, economically, geographically, strategically and politically "the most vital region in Africa,"' one whose degree of independence would substantially determine the ultimate fate of the whole continent of Africa. If the "alliance" was to have a modicum of credibility, it was of the essence that the Arabs should be seen to contribute appreciably to the African effort to wrest the Congo from the neocolonialist web of the West, spearheaded by the Belgians, the Americans and the British.     

The point attains special pertinence when it emerges, in retrospect, that the Arabs had, in their own right and in collabora- tion with the Belgians, played a not inconsiderable role in the rape of the Congo. As Edward Alpers has shown, the violence, degrada- tion and rampage that accompanied the Arab slave trade was "most noticeable in the Congo ... where the Arabs... totally devastated

the countryside, killing and seizing hundreds of people in order to

supply the ivory which was being sought.87 Henry Stanley, the

explorer, also had occasion in 1889 to remark, concerning Arab

activities in the eastern Congo, that "slave raiding becomes in-

nocence when compared with ivory raiding.88 In time, and sig-

nificantly, as we have noted, King Leopold of Belgium entered into

association with Tippu Tip, the leader of the Arab slave traders,

appointing him governor of his Congo International Association

whose trademark was the use of the force of arms to compel the

Africans to exploit the country's wealth in rubber and ivory.      

Against this backdrop, let us now assess the contribution of the Arabs to the struggle for genuine decolonization in the Congo. In the early stages of the crisis of post-independence disintegration, Morocco and the UAR, in company with the African Casablanca Powers, contributed troops to the UN peace-keeping force. Upon the failure of this effort, marked by the assassination of Lumumba, the neocolonial forces gained ground to a point where, in July 1964, Moise Tshombe, the Western puppet, assumed office as the country's Prime Minister. Ali Mazrui states that, from then on, among those who were "the most forthright" in refusing recognition of Tshombe's accession were the "radical Arab States."89 This they did, Mazrui goes on to explain, out of conviction that to recognize Tshombe was to forgive him for his betrayal of the Congo's inde- pendence.      

Upon a closer look at the evidence, however, it is not at all clear that the anti-Tshombe exertions of the Arabs in the Congo had anything to do with an urge to aid the cause of African inde- pendence. As part of the evidence, we must recall the brutal and terroristic career of the Organization de L'Armee Secrete (OAS), an outfit of French settlers in Algeria, in waging for years, and to the very end, a hideous war in defense of the West and French "civiliza- tion." Only Algeria's accession to independence drove these colonists, some 800,000 of them, from Algeria, out of fear of

reprisals for their colonialist crimes.90 The connection between all this and the Congo is that Tshombe, in Arab eyes, committed an unpardonable offense when he recruited many of these die-hard former French settlers of Algeria into his army. From all this, it would seem decidely more plausible to attribute Arab opposition to Tshombe to a concern to settle old scores with him, rather than to any motivation to minister to African independence.      

The primacy of Arabist aims in the Arab role in the Congo is further underscored by the incident of July 1967 when the plane on which Tshombe was traveling was highjacked over the Mediter- ranean and brought to Algeria. The Congo Government requested his extradition to the Congo to face a death sentence. In response, and quite revealingly, the Algerians made the return of Tshombe conditional on a complete re-alignment of Congolese foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel.      

Overall, the cutting edge of our thesis (that Arab behaviour toward Africa is motivated, at best by self interest, at worst by antipathy to Africans, and hardly ever by considerations of reciprocity in the "alliance") is provided by the role of the UAR and Morocco, through contributions of troops and logistical support, and in collaboration with the USA and France, in aiding Mobutu to push back radical African insurgency across the Shaba Province, both in 1977 and 1978.91      As for the OAU, the organisational expression of the Afro-Arab "alliance" since 1963, its very composition illustrates the familiar imbalance in African-Arab relations. Nine members of the Arab League — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Djibouti, UAR, Sudan, Mauritania and Somalia — are also members of the OAU. While, on this account, Arab interests are well represented in the OAU, African interests, on the other hand, are hardly represented in the Arab League. The membership of Somalia and Djibouti in the Arab League, far from making for the counter-penetration by the Africans, constitutes the triumph of the Islamization-Arabisation efforts of the Arabs. The explanation of Somalia's Arabisation lies, firstly, in the age-old conversion of its people to Islam and the susceptibility to Arab influence that this engendered, and, secondly in the seduction and entrapment of the country by Arab aid.92 As for Djibouti, even though its population is made up of the Issas (who are related to the Somali and the Galla of Kenya and Ethiopia) and the Afars (who are relatives of the African people of Ethiopia), its Arab puppet President, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, insists that the people of the country "are 100 percent Arab" and that this justifies his decision to adopt Arabic as the country's official language, and to make the country the 21st member of the Arab League.93      

It goes without saying that the Arabs have been doing everything to capture control of the OAU. This was apparent, for instance, at the OAU Summit in Mogadishu in June 1974 when all the Arab members relentlessly pushed for the candidacy of a Somali for the Secretary-Generalship of the organization, as against a Zambian candidate. As Ali Mazrui would observe of the incident: "At least among the English speaking black states there was some bitterness. The behaviour of the Arab states in their lobbying for the Somali was interpreted as an attempt to put the OAU under Arab or Muslim control."94 This scenario was again played out at the eleventh annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Dakar in May 1975 where it became impossible to elect a new president of the bank because the delegates "were bitterly ... and almost equally . . . divided between a Ghanaian and a Libyan candidate."95      

The Arab bid for influence in the organization attained marked success with the accession of President Moktar Ould Daddah of Mauritania to the chairmanship in 1971; of King Hassan of Morocco in 1972; and of the Islamized Idi Amin of Uganda in 1975 upon the holding of an OAU Summit in Kampala in July of that year. It is significant that, in spite of the manifest objectionableness of Idi Amin's Kampala as the venue of the Summit in many African eyes and, on that account, the boycotting of the conference by a number of African countries, the leaders of six of the eight OAU member-states which are also members of the Arab League attended the Summit. In the view of a Tanzanian daily, this highlighted "the Arab world's determination to take Africa along with it in its Middle East policy."96 The well-documented indictment of Idi Amin by international organizations — the International Commission of Jurists, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, the Commonwealth, and the European Economic Community — to the effect that there had developed under him "a consistent pattern of gross human rights violations",97 did not bother the Arabs one whit. Indeed, as Gaddafi pointedly told Newsweek in a 1979 interview: "That's not our business."98 Clearly, Arab interest in Uganda was confined to the promotion of Arab interests — the establishment of a beachhead from which to work for the control of the source of the Nile, as well as the settlement of the displaced Palestinians — through the snare of Islam and the enticement of petrodollars. To this end, the Arabs pushed for the March 1975 agreement on "technical, economic and scientific cooperation" signed between Amin's Uganda and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The consequence of it was the influx of an additional large number of Palestinians into Uganda where, among other things, they took over businesses left by expelled Asians, as well as the training of the Ugandan army. As Obote complained to the OAU: "Cases were known in Uganda in which Palestinians, together with Amin's murder squads, kidnapped and subsequently murdered their victims ... all of whom were Ugandan citizens of African stock.'199 As we know, a large number of Palestinians and over 1,000 Libyan troops were captured by Tanzania during the Ugandan-Tanzania War which ended in Amin's expulsion from Uganda and his migration into Libya.100      

For the Arabs, then, the imperatives of the Arab Nation, rather than any concern for solidarity, albeit in a tactical "alliance", account for their membership in the OAU. It is significant, in this regard, that virtually all the Arab members boycotted the 1967 Summit meeting in Kinshasa on the ground that Middle Eastern questions were absent from the agenda. They were, and have been, interested in the organization only to the extent of holding it captive to their purposes. That they have been markedly successful in this objective is reflected in the organization's silence over Arab atrocities in the Sudan, Mauritania, and elsewhere, and over Gaddafi's aggression in Chad and elsewhere, even as the OAU vociferously condemns Israeli incursions into Arab lands.      

The organization's accommodation and indulgence of Gaddafi is especially revealing of its divorce from African concerns. In spite of outcries by Uganda, Ghana, Gambia, Niger and other countries that the Libyan has been subverting their countries;101 in spite of his aggression against Chad, manifested, in part, in his seizure of the uranium-rich Aouzou Strip since 1973, and in his unconcealed bid to absorb Chad into an Islamic union with Libya;102 in spite of his self-proclaimed apostleship of the Nasser doctrine of an Arab civilizing mission to Africa and of the ambition of an Arab-Islamic empire across Africa into the Middle East;103 and in spite of his demonstrated and menacing zeal to acquire sophisticated military capabilities to enable him to fulfill these anti-African ambitions, he has been allowed to operate within the OAU to a point where he came close to becoming its chairman in 1982.      

In the face of so much African acquiescence, Gaddafi felt at liberty in 1973 to initiate a boycott of the OAU's tenth anniversary celebrations unless the site was moved to Cairo, or Ethiopia agreed to break relations with Israel. To nobody's surprise, Ethiopia caved in and broke relations with Israel.      

It is a fitting tribute to African self-immolation in the organization that the issue which virtually paralyzed it in 1982 was an intra-Arab one. The matter in question, the abortion of the August 1982 Tripoli OAU Summit, had nothing to do with African outrage over, for instance, Arab efforts to carve Eritrea out of Ethiopia and into the Arab world, but rather over which Arab interests, Moroccan or Algerian, should prevail over the phosphate-rich Western Sahara. The decision by the OAU in February 1982 to admit the Polisario Front as its 51st member opened a split that mortally threatened the organization. Meanwhile, even as the OAU wallowed in the throes of demise, the Arab League was left relatively intact to pursue the Arab business.      

A second effort to convene a Summit in November 1982 also failed, this time on account of Gaddafi's effort to impose the exiled former leader Goukouni Oueddei on Chad. Gaddafi, the prospec- tive host, simply refused to admit the delegation of President Hissen Hebre of Chad, presumably because Hebre had proven to be less pliant to his neocolonialist designs on the African country. The Foreign Minister of Chad then appropriately requested "all African countries present in Tripoli not to take their seats at the side of the enemies of Africa."104

South Africa and Israel in Africa-Arab relations

The European Jews, as they set their sights on Palestine at the beginning of this century, also nourished ideas about colonizing a portion of Africa for their excess population. Thus, upon rejecting Joseph Chamberlain's offer of Uganda as a home for these Caucasian Jews, the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, nonetheless went on to concede that Uganda might be eminently suitable for an extension of Israel. As he put it: "Our starting point must be in or near Palestine. Later on we could also

colonize Uganda, for we have a vast number of human beings who

are prepared to emigrate ... "105 Not surprisingly, this expression

by European Jewry of a colonizing intent jarred many an African

ear. Still, there is no question that this colonialist intent pales into

insignificance against the infinitely greater outrage of actual and historic Arab atrocities in Africa.     

At the level of rhetoric, it bears notice that, overall, Israeli protestations of solidarity with African causes have been at least as impressive as any professions made by the Arabs. Golda Meir, for instance, could be moved to articulate the common experience and consciousness of oppression, discrimination, and slavery shared by Africans and the European Jews.106 And Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, could feel called upon to assert: 

There is still another question arising out of the disaster of the nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they are black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoners, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say... that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist the redemption of the Africans.107     

Upon occasion, it developed that there was more to such decla- rations than words. Thus in July, September and November of 1961, when the "alliance" between the Africans and the Arabs had already been struck, the Israeli government openly condemned Apartheid and voted at the UN General Assembly in favour of sanctions against South Africa.108 Significantly, these efforts evoked reprisal from South Africa in the form of a rescission of the special concessions in foreign currency regulations which allowed South African Jewish organizations to transfer money and goods to Israel.109      

In spite of such travail, and despite the flourishing links that developed via technical assistance and diplomatic representation between Israel and Africa, Africans made a habit of condemning Israel to please the Arabs, as in the resolution of the All-African People's Conference of December, 1958 condemning Israel as one of the "the main perpetrators of neocolonialism".110     

The Africans might be said to have fulfilled their obligations under the "alliance" when they took the side of the Arabs in the 1967 Middle East war. Guinea, Somalia, Burundi, Zambia, Mali, Tanzania and Senegal were numbered among those who vociferously declared their support for the Arabs. The general African reaction was captured in Senghor's statement: "We cannot remain indifferent to the struggle which our brother Arabs are undergoing."111 Significantly, these gestures earned an Israeli retort: "Israel makes it clear to African countries that it could not provide effort, money and expertise for development if they repaid all this with anti-Israeli demonstrations".112      Undaunted, the Africans were even more forthcoming in support of the Arabs in the 1973 war, on account of which, almost to the last country, they severed diplomatic relations with Israel. This extraordinary display of solidarity was self-sacrificial in the extreme. As Ali Mazrui elaborates: 

    A suggestion that Africa broke off relations with Israel for the sake of cheaper oil from the Arabs ... distorts the sequence of events. By the time OPEC dramatically raised the price of oil, much of Africa had already sided with the Arabs on the Palestine question . . . The trend against Israel in black Africa started in 1972, and had converted even Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire to its side before the outbreak of the October war, while the energycrisis did not hit the world until about the last ten weeks of 1973.113     

To better appreciate the altruism in play here, compare the African response to the Middle East situation in 1973 with the general African default over the cause of liberation in Rhodesia in 1965, when only a handful of states complied with a unanimous OAU resolution that member-states break diplomatic relations with Britain over its foot-dragging policies. Overall, it is fair to say that when E. Feit pronounced that he knows "of no historical instance" where a people have "voluntarily invited unknown per- secutions and sanctions upon itself for another,"114 he reckoned without the Africans. For presently, all these unrestrained demonstrations of Arabophilia triggered an Israeli backlash: "No longer constrained by the necessities of black African friendship", as E.A. Nadelmann noted, "Israel (now) pursued its relationship with South Africa with an element of vindictiveness". Contending that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", Israel now upgraded its mission in Pretoria to full ambassadorial status, even as it broadened cultural and military links with the Apartheid regime.115 And how did the Arabs reciprocate this extraordinary gesture from the Africans?      

In the face of the emergency energy crisis that followed the Arab oil boycott, Africans asked for help and received a stingy response. Afro-Arab relations were quickly reduced, in Arab hands, to inter Islam-relations, or at best to small and sporadic aid flows;116 the so-called Bank for the Economic Development of Africa turned out to be an Arab and not African-Arab bank, with decisions on all projects made solely by the Arabs; again, being a commercial bank and not an interest-free-loan institution, its objectives proved to be profit rather than aid. Reduced to supplicants, the Africans alternated between shrill calls for substantial Arab "reciprocity of solidarity,"117 accusations of Arab ingratitude,118 and empty threats of economic retaliation —as when in June 1974, the East African Legislative Assembly at its meeting in Nairobi suggested that the Nile River be diverted by the East African States so that they could then sell its water to the Arabs, in exchange for barrels of oil.119      And what of Arab-South African relations in the period, the acid test, if you will, of Arab reciprocity or the lack of it?      

At the emergency session of the Council of Ministers of the OAU in Addis in November 1973, a resolution was adopted calling on the Arabs "to extend the oil embargo to South Africa, Portugal and Southern Rhodesia until they comply with the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolution on decoloniza- tion." Significantly, four years later, in March 1977, at the Summit Conference of African and Arab leaders in Cairo, President Kaunda of Zambia both complained and pleaded that "Our Arab brothers should not be a party" to the aggressive actions of the Southern African racists by keeping up oil supplies to them.121 The implica- tion in Kaunda's statement — that the Arabs were still in economic cahoots with the Boers — was soon, if obliquely, confirmed by the South African Foreign Minister, Hilgard Muller, in a claim that South Africa had sought systematically in "recent years" to build up contacts with the Arabs "by means of discreet diplomacy".122 There were, indeed, reports of substantial deals between the Arabs and the South Africans involving the exchange of oil for gold.123     

What emerges, then, is the triumph, once again, of the traditional imbalance in the relations between Africans and Arabs. As Thomas Land has reflected: 

    In theory, in exchange for the diplomatic isolation of Israel, black

    Africa was to enlist the support of the Arab north in unseating

    the white-minority government of South Africa. But, in practice,

    South Africa gained in the process by strengthening its ties with

    an increasingly friendless Israel, while it went on trading with the

    Arabs as well as the rest of the world. 124 

    These facts make the Africans' singling out of Israel's relationship with South Africa for special condemnation both hypocritical and irrational. Since African states retain diplomatic relations with such countries as France, West Germany, Britain, Japan and the U.S.A. — all of which are major backers of South Africa — the insistence on diplomatic ostracism of Israel cannot logically have anything to do with Israel's relations with South Africa, but only with the compulsion to please the Arabs at the expense of Africa's own best interests. It all fits neatly into the traditional mold of asymmetrical relationship between the Africans and the Arabs across the centuries. 

 Cast in this analytic light, the argument that the Arabs owe the Africans no political debts since "most of the Arab world treated South Africa as a common enemy for many years"125 becomes lame. The Africans' break with Israel in 1973 had nothing to do with outrage over Israel's relations with South Africa but was calculated to oblige the Arabs; in contrast, Arab antipathy toward the Boers has little to do with a sentiment of solidarity with the Africans, but arises from such links between Israel and South Africa as the Arabs deem injurious to their cause — as is shown by their furor over the intelligence that the South Africans aided the Israeli air force during the 1973 war.126

Islam and Africa-Arab relations


     From the beginning, Pan-Africanism demonstrated a concern to  cater to the spiritual needs of its racial constituency. It was recog-  nized that every enduring race and people have had their own concept of Deity, with a supreme being made in their own image; and have nourished an autochthonous religion which gave them strength and pointed them toward positive achievement. As Garvey reasoned, no race or people made any impact on the world which allowed themselves to become enslaved to a religion which derogated and diminished them. Succinctly put, again in the words of Garvey, "it is only the inferior race which worships an alien God."127      

The Africans of antiquity, the first to institutionalize religion on  Earth, fashioned the Eternal Spirit in their own image. Likewise,  the traditional religion of pre-colonial Africa, based as it was on the  intermediacy of dead ancestors, also fulfilled the condition of in-  digenousness. That the Asante, for instance, cultivated and prac-  tised it, explains in good part the remarkable durability of their  political order in the 18th and 19th centuries.128 In the same vein,  Pan-Africanism at its dawn sought to create its own religious in-  frastructure in the form of the African Orthodox Church which  Garvey founded in 1920, proclaiming: "Our God must be seen  through the spectacles of Ethiopia; our God must make us strong  . . . not slaves to another race and another people."129 Instead of  pictures of white Christs and Madonnas which have become key  elements of European imperialist culture in the last couple of  centuries, the African Orthodox Church featured pictures of Black  Christs and Black Madonnas; instead of the inculcation of meekness  and docility into the African congregation — the specialty of "alien"  religions — the African Orthodox Church sermonized that "The God  we worship and adore is a God of war as well as a God of peace."130      

Despite such efforts, black people as a whole remain immersed  in alien religions and continue to pay heavily in psychological disorientation and servility. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo’s current tribulations bear witness to this phenomenon in so far as the African's relationship to white Christianity is concerned. He has asserted that the African's subordination to non-African overlords in spiritual matters is a reflection of the "inferiority complex which haunts Africa"; and he has cried out that “To convince me that I can only be a full Christian when I shall be well brought-up in European civilization and culture is to force me to change my nature."131      

Significantly, the Archbishop's efforts to remodel the Catholic Church in Zambia in a manner more suited to Africa's spiritual realities stirred the ire of the Papacy, leading to his being summoned to Rome to be disciplined.      

The relationship of Africans to Islam bears similar marks of disorientation and servility. Islam, the religious infrastructure of Pan-Arabism, has, from the first, been a means of Arab penetration into non-Arab societies. The fervent commitment of Arabs to the practice of Islam, and the weaknesses of Pan-Africanism, have meant that the familiar imbalance in African-Arab relations emerges in the field of religion as well. As far back as 1917, British policy makers in East Africa noted "a tendency on the part of the natives, to call themselves members of the Mohammedan nation."132 The gain of Islam in molding masses of Africans into Arabophiles have been no less spectacular in recent years, thanks to such additional impetuses as Nasser's 1961 pledge, as part of the UAR's drive to

win influence in Africa, "to exploit Cairo's considerable resources in Muslim teaching and culture."133 As E.A. Nadelmann has written: 

    The influence of Islam in the continent, where one of every four or five Africans is a Muslim has created a sense of identification and religious brotherhood with the Arabs to the North. Islamic Africans have often encouraged closer ties between the Arab and African states . . . comprising as they do the majority of the population in the Arab League states of Sudan, Somalia and Mauritania, as well as in Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Niger and Chad; about half the population in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Ethiopia; and substantial minorities in Tanzania, Kenya, Cameroon, Upper Volta, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Benin. Africa contributes close to 50% of the membership of the Islamic Conferences . . . and its avowedly Muslim countries make up 40% of the total membership of the OAU.134 

Nor does Islam's influence stop at disposing millions of Africans  favourably toward the Arabs and their anti-African purposes; more  directly and devastatingly, Islam remains a source of enfeebling  separatism in various African societies. As Ali Mazrui has noted,  the spread of Islam through East and West Africa has served "to  reinforce separatist tendencies. In Nigeria in the last decade before  independence, Muslim Northerners — fearful of the political  militancy of Christian Southerners — talked seriously of secession.  The word 'Pakistanism' entered the vocabulary of West African  politics."135 Since then Islam-induced disturbances have regularly  erupted in that West African country.

Similarly, the Eritreans, "primarily Muslim," have been in rebel-  lion against a long-standing Christian theocracy in Ethiopia. It is all  very much a "Muslim bid to pull Eritrea out of Ethiopia . . ."136  Noticeably the Arabs, at the Eighth Conference of Islamic Foreign  Ministers in Tripoli in May 1977, insisted that Eritrea is essentially  a religious issue, and one that they reserve the right to resolve in  their favour.137 The secessionist movement in Chad, instigated by  Libya's Gaddafi, is, like that in Eritrea, "a rebellion by defensive  Muslims against a supposedly Christian threat or hegemony."138  Indeed, on the strength of the fact that Eritrea is Muslim, the Arabs  insist on claiming it as part of the Arab world. By the same token,  as a map published in 1959 by the Arab League indicated, parts of Niger and the whole of Chad, Senegal and Mali are designated as

Arab.139      Kenya, too, has been the prey of the separatism wrought by Islam.

The reaction of the Daily Nation to the call of the National Union  of Kenya Muslims (NUKM) for Muslims in the country to actively  rally to the support of the Arabs during the October 1973 War sums  up the matter: 

    The position of the National Union of Kenya Muslims is divisive because it puts a wedge between the Muslims and all the non-Muslims in this land. While the NUKM obviously feel they can declare and join a war, the constitution of this country states clearly that these powers are vested only in the person of theHead of State. Where do their loyalties lie? To the Arab Muslims or the Kenyan Head of State?140 

It is to be remembered that one of the conditions attached to the  meagre aid that the Arabs have given to the Africans has been the  promotion of Islam in any recipient country. Thus, for example,  President Bongo of Gabon was compelled to change his name from  Albert-Bernard to Omar in October 1973. Astonishingly, and contrary to the weight of historic evidence, Bongo let it be known that  his reason for converting was "because Islam makes no distinction  between men."141 In Uganda, this promotion took the form of a  systematic persecution of Christians who constitute the overwhelm-  ing majority in the land. Visiting Uganda in 1974, Gaddafi  demanded of Amin that he Islamise the country "at any price."142  Amin himself would later admit that his decision to turn Fridays into  days of prayer and rest was a price the country had to pay for  continued Arab cash, especially Libyan. Overall, there was little  surprise that, at the Islamic Summit Conference held in Lahore,  Pakistan, in February 1974, Uganda was admitted as a Muslim state,  even though, according to the 1959 census, little more than 5 percent of the population of Uganda was Muslim.143 In all, it has hardly mattered to these Arabs that the 1958 CIAS in Accra, in which all the independent Arab States based in Africa participated, passed a resolution attacking religious separatism as an evil practice which militates against African liberation and unity. But then, as we have noted, it is one of the cardinal goals of Pan-Arabism to forestall the materialization of black African unity.      

The emphasis on the Arab language as the only vehicle for the  comprehension of the Koran has added to the Arab advantage in  Afro-Arab relations. Adherence to the Islamic faith is, almost  everywhere, virtually inescapable from knowledge and thought in  Arabic. There is an inevitable connection between the faith and the  language because, as O. Aguda has noted, "a translation of the  Koran into any other language is regarded by orthodox Islamists as  an 'interpretation' and not an authentic doctrine."'144 In conse-  quence, the remarkable spread of Islam in Africa has been accom-  panied by the equally remarkable spread of the Arab-influenced  languages of Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in the West. Swahili  has been adopted as a national language by Tanzania, Kenya and  Uganda, at the same time that it is in widespread use in such places  as Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Of course, being imprisoned in the  language of Arabia is no less a phenomenon in cultural colonization  than being incarcerated in the language of Britain or France.      

It is remarkable how much blindness and irrationality on the part  of Africans it has taken to facilitate the Islamisation campaign of the  Arabs, considering the abysmally low conception of black humanity  that exists in the Arab mind and in Islamic traditions. As against the  wishful thinking of black opinion leaders such as Edward Blyden  and Malcolm X, that the Arabs and Islam are free from the infection  of prejudice against black people, B. Lewis, for instance, has estab-  lished, in a well-researched study, the reality of an association in  Arabia of blackness, ugliness and inferior station — of "a very close  connotation of inferiority attached to darker and more specifically black skins. "145 The Prophet Muhammad himself was known to refer to Africans as "the distorted of God's creatures."146 Thus, a good black slave who lives a life of virtue and piety "will be rewarded by turning white at the moment of death".147 Indeed, the Koran itself connects sin, evil, devilry and damnation with blackness, while whiteness has the opposite associations.148 Revealingly, the Egyptian government's furor over the Paramount Pictures' film, Sadat, which led to the drastic decision not to allow any film from that studio ever to be shown in Egypt, was simply to do with the fact that a full-blooded Black American, Louis Gasset, Jr., had acted the role of Sadat.      

At its most basic, the Muslim belief that black people are con- demned to a fate of slavery by divine ordinance is at the root of the Arabs' irrevocable commitment to the enslavement of Africans. Thus, despite the fact that Muslim law unequivocally forbids the enslavement of Muslims of whatever race, evidence shows that the law was generally not enforced to protect Muslim captives from Africa. The record shows that African Muslims in the Arab world "were regarded as inferior and subjected to a whole series of fiscal, social, political, military and other disabilities."149 Nor has time changed these realities. Louis Farrakhan, a black American Mus- lim, following a 1980 tour of Arabia, came away vociferously attack- ing "the hypocrisies of classical Islam, especially in regard to race," adding: 

    I see Muslims taking advantage of Blacks in Arabia and Africa. I will not jump over the black Christian to find brotherhood with an Arab Muslim . . . The ghettoes in the Holy city where the Sudanese and other black African Muslim live are some of the worst I have seen anywhere ... I see racism in the Muslim world...150 

Set against these facts, Libya's self-righteous assertions of Islamic beneficence to Africa attain a surreal quality: 

    Christianity equals imperialism, Islam equals freedom and the age of the masses . . . Colonialism has exploited the Christian religion for its own interests especially in Africa... Islam did not come to Africa through colonialism but as a humanistic religion for the liberation of man.151 

Significantly, this rhetoric was tailored for the consumption of African delegations attending a conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Tripoli. Only the assumption of African infantile incapacity to think, to know the realities and to construct an edifice of self-interests out of it — only the assumption, articulated by Gaddafi, that the Black race occupies "a very backward social situation"152 —could have emboldened the Libyans to the declaration of such palpable untruths.

Conclusion


     The horrendous tale of African-Arab relations that began with the Islamic whirlwind and erupted into the Arab slave trade is hardly buried in antiquity. On the contrary, over the years, it has been recharged and re-enacted to a point where it remains a fixture in contemporary politics, albeit under the guise of an "alliance".     

We have sought to establish that, in spite of the "alliance", the  imbalance has persisted. Arab aggression and penetration has con-  tinued, taking such detrimental forms as the UAR's and Morocco's  intervention against genuine decolonization in Zaire; Saudi  Arabian and Libyan neocolonialist machinations in Djibouti;   Libya's invasion of Chad and, to this day, its occupation of Chad's   rich uranium fields; and Libyan-Palestinian adventurism in Amin's   Uganda. 

Arab enslavement of Africans is hardly a thing of the past; it persists to this day with a vengeance in such places as Mauritania, while the scourge of colonization and forcible Arabisation of Africans survives in such places as the Sudan. Arab racism, whose wellspring is the Koran itself, acquires a conspicuous new manifes- tation in, for instance, the de-Algerianization of Frantz Fanon. On top of all this, the assumed quid pro quo of the "alliance" has worked one-sidedly to the Arabs' advantage: the very institutional expres- sion of the "coalition" since 1963, the OAU, has become a virtual captive of the Arabs in the service of Arab interests. Despite the organization's injunction against the fomenting of religious separatism, the path of Arab imperialism has been oiled and smoothed by the weapon of Islam whose spoils include the conver- sion of untold millions of Africans into Arabophiles, as well as the dissipation of the dream of black unity through the fostering of religious divisiveness among African populations.      

The antithesis between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism emer- ges clearly in present and past relations between the two races. As far as the future is concerned, should Pan-Africanism, now dormant and languishing, become rejuvenated by some future generation of African leaders bent on restoring the dignity of the African people, there is no question that this would trigger a massive reaction, not only by the Boers, but also by Arabs who would reason that an Africa able to deal with the territorial encroachments and the racist brutality of the Boers would logically also deal with the territorial usurpations and the historic and continuing crimes of the Arabs. Herein lies the essential opposition between the two movements.      

It is to be noted that this African-Arab antagonism is not in any way diminished by class considerations. When all is said and done, there is no question that the "socialist" parties in the Arab world have promoted Arab imperialism in Africa. Sadat's "socialist" Egypt fought alongside the USA and France against the African patriots in Zaire in 1977 and 1978. Not to be outdone, the Moroccan Communist Party and the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (USFP) of the same country supported the Moroccan government's involvement in the same anti-African adventurism in Zaire. Nor has the expansionist ambition of Gaddafi been at all affected by Libya's claim to being an "Arab People's Socialist Jamahahiriya."      

Over the years, without question, the Arabs have been more  committed to the practice of Pan-Arabism than the Africans have  been to the practice of Pan-Africanism. While it is true that the  Arabs have often been torn by disputations, it is the case that, even  in disarray, individual Arab states have made strenuous efforts  toward the attainment of the objectives of Pan-Arabism. With the  Africans, the story has been different. The fact of the matter is that,  since the demise of Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, in the sense of any  practical application, has fallen into desuetude. Under normal cir-  cumstances, a memory of the agonies of African history, and a  mature awareness of the ignoble contemporary realities of Africans,  should be enough to keep the movement alive, and give it urgent  relevance and application.      

Such "normal circumstances" refer to an average human capacity  for discernment, calculation and identification of one's vital inter-  ests in the universe. Unfortunately, such a capacity is in very short  supply in the African world. The African presumption, in the face  of the contrary realities, of a "solidarity," "alliance," and "brother-  hood" with the Arabs, is an instance of the African eccentricity which  makes it impossible for Africans to be Afrocentric in thought and  action. As Chinweizu, has elaborated: 

    Having lost a clear and detailed sense of our identity, we have

    naturally also lost our ability to create a point of view of the world 

    strictly our own. With our scrambled sense of reality we have 

    forgotten how to see things in terms of our separate and concrete 

    interests. . . . Worse still we behave as if it were some sort of 

    betrayal to discover and insist on our own point of viewing the 

    world.153 
     

==Notes==

1.    Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 BC to 2000AD. Chicago: Third World Press, 1976, p.23.

2.    Cited in O. Aguda, "Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," The Journal of Modem African Studies, Vol. II. No. 2.1973, p. 180.

    C. Williams, op. cit., p. 24. 


4.  Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, New York: International Publishers, 1963, p. xvii.

5.    Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p. 494.

6.   Broadcast over Radio Cairo and Radio Voice of the Arabs, April 18,1959; cited in W.A. Beling, Pan-Arabism and Labor, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 1960, p. 28.

7.    Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, Washington, DC:

Public Affairs Press, 1955, p. 111.

8.    W.A. Beling, op. cit., p. iii.  

9.   The "Prophet" Muhammad's French biographer, Maxime Rodinson, makes the point which is

  cited in Time, April 16,1979, p.49.

10.  The view of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Arab historian, cited in W. Rodney, How Europe

  Underdeveloped Africa, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972, pp. 62-63.

11.   See C. Williams, op. cit., pp. 215-216; and W. Rodney, op. cit., p.63.

12. Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 53. No. 4, July 1975. p. 725.

13. C. Williams, op. cit., p. 222.

14. G. A. Nasser, op. cit., p. 113.

15. Ibid., pp. 109-110.

16. B. Lewis, The Middle East and the West, New York: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 94.

17.Chinweizu, op. cit., p. 494.

18.   Ibid., p. 23.

19.  Kwame Nkrumah, Address to the National Assembly, June 12,1965.

20.  The words of an Egyptian army colonel, cited in Fareq Y. Ismael, The UAR in Africa: Egypt's

  Policy Under Nasser, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971, pp. 163-164.

21.  Statement on September 22,1966, during a State Visit to Tanzania. See The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), September 23,1966.

22.  See The New York Times, June 6, 1980, p. A3.

23.   Cited in Ali Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p. 62.

24.   Allan Reed, “The Anya-nya: Ten Months' Travel with His Forces Inside the Southern Sudan," Munger Africana Library Notes, Issue No. 11, California Institute-of Technology, Pasadena, California, February 1972, p. 3.

25.  ibid., p. 14.

26.  For additional details on the different economic fortunes of Africans and Arabs in the Sudan,

  see 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 199.

27.   Dunstan M. Wai, "Revolution, Rhetoric, and Reality in the Sudan," The Journal of Modem

  African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1,1979, p. 73.

    Interview with the Cairo weekly, Al Mussawar, March 29,1968. 

29.   See, for instance, All Mazrui, "Is the Nile Valley Turning into a New System?", Makarere

  University, Kampala, 1971, Mimeo, p. 25.

30.   D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 83.

31.   0. Aguda, op. cit., pp. 177-178.

32.   Ibid., p. 128.

33.   See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 27.

34.   D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.

35.   0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 183. See also D. M. Wai, op. cit., pp. 72-73.   .

36.   See Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 12.

37.   Ibid., p. 13.

38.   Daily Nation (Nairobi), July 22, 1968, Editorial, “The Sudan Question."

39.   For the essentially Pan-Africanist ideology of SANU and its military wing, the "Anya-nya", see Allan Reed, op. cit., p. 26.

40.   Interview in Playboy (London), April 1968, cited in D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.

41.   D.M. Wai, ibid., p. 88.

42.   Ibid., pp. 88n, 89.

43.   0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 177.

44. D. M. Wai, op. cit., p. 73.

45. See B. Lewis, Race and Color in Islam, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970, p. 85. Also

      Leda Farrant, Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade, New York: St. Martin's Press,

      1975, p. 2.

46. B. Lewis, ibid., pp. 69, 70, 72, 77.

47. Ibid., p. 82.

48. See Tribune de Geneve, April 30,1973.

49: B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 81; E. P. Alexandrov, Political Economy of Capitalism, Moscow, p. 60.

50.   Edward A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade, Historical Association of Tanzania, Paper No. 3, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 10.

51.   B. Lewis, op. cit., p. 7.

52.   L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 9.

53.   J. Okello, Revolution in Zanzibar, Nairobi: EAPH, 1967, p. 108.

54.   L. Farrant, op. cit., p. 16.

55.   Ibid., p. 15.

56.   J. Okello, op. cit., p. 88.

57.   Ibid., p. 95.

58.   Confidential Newsletter, July 15,1960.

59.  Daily News (Dar es Salaam), November 6,1972.

60.   Anti-Slavery Reporter, The Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights, Series VII, Vol. 13, No. 1, December 1981. p. 16.

61.  West Africa, No. 2947, December 3,1973, p. 1711.

62.   Confidential Newsletter, February 28,1979.

63.   Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 17.

64.   Ibid.

65.   Cited in Africa News, August 4,1980, pp. 2,11.

66.   B. D. Nossiter, "UN Gets a Report on Slaves," The New York Times, August 26,1981, p. All.

67.   Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. I7.

68.   Ibid., p. 18.

69.   Ibid., p. 16.

70.   Ibid., p. 17.

71.   Cited in Anti-Slavery Reporter, p. 20.

72    Ibid.

73. See Tribune de Geneve, April 4,1973.

74. Weekly Spectator (Accra), February 17,1973 and March 3,1973.

75. Ibid., February 17,1973.

76.   West Africa, No. 2743. December 27. 1969.

77.   David Caute, Frantz Fanon, New York: Viking Press, 1970, p. 3.

78.   Observation by Simone de Beauvoir, cited in David Caute, ibid., p. 4

79.   F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, pp. 102-103.

80.  See Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, pp. xii, 188; F. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press, 1967, p. 177.

81.   I. L. Gendzier, ibid., pp. 190-191.

82.   Ibid.. p. 223.

83.   Ibid., p. 243.

84.   Ibid., pp. 243,244.

85.   Cited in ibid.. p. 247.

86.  Ibid., p. 246.

87.   Edward A. Alpers. op. cit., pp. 23-25.

88.   Cited in ibid., p. 25.

89.   Ali Mazrui, Violence and Thought, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. 1969. p. 237.

90.   See D. Ottaway. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. pp. 10-11.

91.. See The New York Times, November 12.1981. p. A7.

92.   See David Laitin, "Somalia's Military Government and Scientific Socialism”, in Carl G. Rosberg and Thomas M. Callaghy, Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 194-195.

93.   See Daily News (Dar es Salaam), July 8,1977 and The New York Times, June 12,1980. p. A14, for details of Arab neocolonisation of Djibouti since its independence from France in 1977.

94.   Ali Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs. Vol. 53, No. 4, July 1975, p. 740.

95.   See ibid.

96. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), July 28, 1975.

97. See, for instance, The Weekly Review (Nairobi), August 11, 1978.

98. Newsweek, June 12, 1979, p. 39.

99. The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), May 28, 1973.

100. See The New York Junes, March 5, 1981, p. A23.

101. For a Ugandan accusation, see The New York Times. February 25, 1982, p. A9 and February 26, 1982, p. A7; for a similar charge from Ghana, see Daily News (Dar es Salaam), October 12, 1977, p.2; for the accusations from Senegal and Gambia, see West Africa, November 10, 1980; and for a more general treatment of the subject, see West Africa, January 19, 1981. p. 98.

102. See West Africa, January 19, 1981, p. 97.

103. See ibid., pp. 98-99; The New York Times. March 4,1981, p. A3; December 14, 1981, p.  A27: and January 4,1982, p. A3; Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 93.

104. See The New York Times. November 26, 1982. p. A4.

105. See Julian Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, London: Macmillan, 1951, pp. 262-265.

106. Golda Meir, My Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975, pp. 263-290.

107. Cited in ibid., p. 266.

108. E. A. Nadelmann, "Israel and Black Africa: A Rapproachement?", The Journal of Modem

  African Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2,1981, p. 213.

109. Ibid., p. 212.

110. Ibid., p. 195.

111. See West Africa, No. 2610, June 10, 1967; No. 2612, June 24,1967; No. 2614, July 8, 1967; No. 2618, August 5,1967; No. 2648, March 2,1968; No. 2625, September 23,1967.

112. Cited in West Africa, No. 2648, March 2,1968, p. 266.

113. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 736.

114. E. Feit, "Community in a Quandary. The South African Jewish Community and Apartheid,"

  Race, April 1967, pp. 398-399.

115. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit., pp. 212-213.

116. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 742.

117.  West Africa, No. 2950, December 24/31, 1973, p. 1812.

118.  West Africa, No. 2946, November 26, 1973. p. 1677.

119.  See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 738.

120.  See C. Cervenka, “The Afro-Arab Alliance," Africa, No. 31, March 1974. p. 79.

121.  See The Weekly Review (Nairobi), March 14, 1977, p. 24.

122. Cited in a confidential newsletter.

123. See, for instance, Robert Whitehill, "Apartheid's Oil," The New Republic, February 10,

            1986. pp. 10-11.

124. Thomas Land, "Black Africa and Israel," The New York Times, February 11. 1980. p. A19.

125. See Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 738-739.

126. See E. A. Nadelmann.op. cil., p. 204.

127. John Henrik Clarke ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa. New York: Random House,

  1974. pp. 381-382.

128. See K. A. Busia, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti, London: Frank Cass, 1968; W. Tordoff, Ashanti Under the Prempehs: 1888-1939, London:OUP,1965.

129. A. Jacques Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Vol. I. New York: Atheneum, 1977, p.44.

130. Ibid.. p. 43.

131. See Alan Cowell, "Christians Are Torn in the Land of Dr. Livingstone," the New York Times, December 28, 1982, p. A2.

132. Cited in A. R. M. Babu, African Socialism or Socialist Africa?, London: Zed Press, 1981, p. 120.

133. Cited in 0. Aguda, op. cit., p. 135.

134. E. A. Nadelmann, op. cit. p. 210. See Also Lansine Kaba, "Islam's Advance in Tropical

            Africa,” Africa Report, March-April I976, p. 39.

135. Ali Mazrui, op. cit., p. 737.

136. Ibid.

137. Confidential Newsletter, June 10, 1977.

    Ali Mazrui, op. cit., pp. 737-738. 

139. See The Arab World, No. 101, 1959.

140. Daily Nation (Nairobi), October 17,1973.

141. West Africa, No. 2943, November 5,1973, p. 1556.

142. The Weekly Review (Nairobi), September 26, 1977, p. 7; August 11, 1978. pp. 11, 14.

143. See Ali Mazrui, "Religious Strangers in Uganda: From Emin Pasha to Amin Dada," African

Affairs, Vol. 76. No. 302, January 1977, p. 21.

144. O. Aguda. op. cit., p. 180.

145. B. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 9,14.

146. See ibid., pp. 91-92.

147. Ibid., p. 5.

148. See ibid.. p. 101.

149. Ibid., p. 23.

150. Louis Farrakhan. Speech at "Welcome Home Brother Farrakhan" rally, cited in L. H. Mamiya, "Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Final Call: Schism in the Muslim Movement," Mimeo, 1980, p. 7.

151. Dr. Ali Treike, Foreign Minister of Libya's address at the Eighth Conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Tripoli, May, 1977.

152. Muammar Al Gaddafi, The Green Book: The Solution of the Problem of Democracy, Tripoli.

  undated, p. 45.

153. Chinweizu, op. cit., p. 495.