PREFACE
FOUNDATIONS OF THE BLACK NATION
In 1517, 25 years almost to the day after Columbus arrived in the New World, Charles I of Spain authorized the exporting of 15,000 slaves from Africa to his Caribbean colony of San Domingo. Two years later the first African slave revolt in the New World occurred. That moment marked the beginning of the struggle of Africans in the Americas for land. This struggle has lasted 455 years, has seen some hard-won successes, and is not yet over.
It is a mistake, however, to believe (as We are taught in white controlled schools) that the degradation of Africa and the supremacy of whites over the rest of the world is therefore 455 years ancient. King Charles and the ruling families of Portugal, Holland, France, England, Sweden, and Denmark would build their forts along the Guinea Coast, but, for most of 300 years of trading and raiding, they would deal mainly with the country folk on the periphery of greater Africa and with the near-coast Kingdoms—although by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, by time of the American Civil War, raiding by Christians in the West and Arabs in the East, had penetrated the sacrosanct interior.
Yet at the moment King Charles called for the enslavement of 15,000 Africans, black physicians at the University of Sankore in Timbuktu—some 800 miles inland from the Coast—were still performing cataract operations on the eye and black Askias of Songhay were still ruling a rich and enlightened empire that stretched 2,000 miles across the Western Sudan.
One hundred years later when the first black slaves arrived in the Thirteen Colonies in 1619, Timbuktu had three decades earlier suffered its greatest devastation under the onslaught of Judar Pasha’s mustket-equipped Spanish-renegade army, in the service of the Moroccan king. Her libraries were burned, her scholars executed and taken off into slavery. Nevertheless the University was attempting 4 revival of learning. As the first slaves landed in Virginia, the King of the Congo—a sophisticated and progressive man—had opened diplomatic relations with Portugal on a basis of equality and had sent his sons to Portugal to study. A few hundred miles closer to the Guinea Coast than Songhay, the Ashanti Kingdom had taken its distinguished rise, flourishing on gold and traditional trade, even while farther South on the Guinea Coast the slave trade would soon reach devastating proportions, and nations such as old Dahomey and Benin would be debased and (temporarily) empowered by it.
When Thomas Jefferson became President of the United States in 1801, the United States was still paying tribute to the African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (the sum paid by the new nation had reached two million dollars), and the Moors had not long stopped raiding the coasts of England. In the interior the Bushongo Kingdom and many other small states still retained their independence, culture, and pacific way of life—and would do so for nearly three-quarters of a century more. Two decades after the Civil War, 1owever, Stanley and Rhodes penetrated Central and Southern Africa, respectively, finally opening Bushongo and Kwazulu to European conquest. But in the west, north of the Gulf of Guinea, the Ashanti resolutely fought off British conquest until 1901, and in the African northeast Ethiopia would retain her independence right down to the eve of World War II, when, in 1935, Mussolini over-ran 1er. (This occupation lasted only six years.)
Thus, considering that Chinese resistance was not crushed until the end of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, European world conquest lasted barely 50 years. The Chinese freed themselves of European domination in 1950, when the People’s Republic drove the forces of the Kuomintang into the sea. And Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, ended European domination in 1957.
Meanwhile, in the New World, in contrast to Africa, the history of the transplanted African is a history of domination and degradation by whites for 455 years—and, at the same time, a history of African struggle against that domination and degradation and for land.
Thomas Jefferson was elected third President of the United States in 1800. Before his first term had expired Africans in the New World
—in Haiti—had gone through 12 years of revolution, defeating the local whites, a Spanish invasion, a British expeditionary force, and scores of thousands of Napoleon’s best troops, and won land and independence in 1803. That control over their land, that independence, though crassly violated by United States Marines and customs officials between 1905 and 1941, is theirs down to today.
Yet the Haitian success—if the most enduring—was by no means the first for African state building in the New World. The nearly 300-year history of slave revolt prior to the Haitian victory over Napoleon is replete with accounts of slaves who successfully fled to the jungles and hills—in Jamaica, in San Domingo, in Brazil—and set up and maintained their own independent communities. The Palmares Republic in Brazi] lasted 50 years. But the so-called Bush Negroes of Surinam (formerly Dutch Guyana) maintained their autonomy into the late 1930’s—nearly 300 years.
In our own day Africans in the New World have achieved land and independence in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana (where it is shared with East Indians). Cuba also achieved land and independence in our day, and while Cuba is not strictly an African nation, having more white Spanish blood than African, Afro-Cubans played important roles in liberation and are contributing their share to nation-building.
In the United States, however, because of the racial possessiveness of the dominant whites and the religiously enforced pattern of military and civil policing of the slave, no attempt at state-building by the African has enjoyed even the relative longevity of the Palmares Republic. Prior to the Civil War free communities set up by escaped African slaves in Florida, in Georgia, and elsewhere in the United
States were continuously sought out and ruthlessly destroyed. Immediately after the Civil War, the freed African in the United States had to concern himself with a struggle against rampant murder and starvation, a struggle merely to breathe and live, and he sought an alliance with Union whites of the North in order to win this necessary respite, this space to consider what his political course would be.
Among these whites, who nation-wide outnumbered him six to one and who for 250 years had shown a single-mindedness in dehumanizing and possessing him unparalleled in world history, the African moved with great caution. Even so, the drive for land and independence was pushed in two characteristic ways. On the one hand Tunis Campbell in 1865 boldly established an independent government among freed Africans on an island off the coast of Savannah. But this lasted less than a year before being broken by U.S. military force.
On the other hand—outgunned, outnumbered, and confronted by a Satan-like people who have had all the instrumentalities of well established state power in their hands and who, north and south, unhesitatingly presume at all times to think and speak for the African—the African in the United States has had recourse mainly to appeals and petitions. These were of two types: first, appeals for land and the vote, meaning land from which to raise subsistence and a vote to participate in the state power to which he was subject; and, second, for land to build an independent black state.
Whenever the whites thought of separate land for the blacks~as Abraham Lincoln did and as U.S. President Andrew Johnson, who presided over the first four years of Reconstruction, did—it was seldom independent land. Liberia was too far to be feasible, when to be considered were nearly five million blacks. Most often Haiti, which was willing but too often troubled, and South America—which was largely unwilling—were the subjects of consideration. Where South America was concerned it was never thought by Lincoln or Johnson that an independent African state would be established but that the blacks would merely settle under existing flags.
Yet one must wonder what was in our minds, the minds of the Africans, just before the end of the Civil War, and in the minds of the white Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, when, after consultation between him and the Africans, the General talked of “self determination” and settled our people on South Carolina’s Sea Islands and along the rivers for 30 miles under semi-autonomous black governments.
What was in our minds and the mind of General Ulysses Grant’s man John Eaton when a similar experiment was instituted around Davis Bend, Mississippi? Both experiments were vetoed by the Negro hating President Andrew Johnson, and this veto, stripping the freedmen of the lands, was given the force of law by—of all things—the third Freedmen’s Bureau act. Because of this, “thousands of Negroes migrated to Florida during 1866-1867,’ W. E. B. DuBois assures us in Black Reconstruction, and “‘2,500 migrated to Liberia.” It seems clear what was in their minds. :
The mind of the ex-slave and Louisiana mass movement leader Henry Adams, testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1880 and explaining the petitions of 1874-1876 to the United States, is even clearer: “Well, in that petition We appealed there, if nothing could be done to stop the turmoil and strife, and give us our rights in the South, We appealed then, at that time, for a territory to be set apart for us to which We could go and take our families and live in peace and quiet.” ;
In this way the pattern of parliamentary appeal by Africans in the United States, for land and independence, as opposed to revolutionary warfare or the politics of majorities, has been set and more or less faithfully followed for over 90 years. Because oppressed people who have been de-culturized by their oppressor tend to seek the path of least resistance in their struggle against oppression—because, indeed, the African in America exists as a de-culturized minority in the midst of a land-possessive, racist, white majority who brook for us no ideal except assimilation (and who steadfastly make the realization of this ideal impossible)—it is difficult to gauge the actual appeal of the concept of land and independence to the black masses. The appeal was probably strongest in the late 1870’s in the South, when freedom from slavery had brought us broken promises and a living hell. It was probably weakest during and just after World War II when the hope fanned by Franklin Roosevelt and the integrationist philosophy
and legal victories of the NAACP dominated our political vision. But the race in America has never been without those voices who have
appealed for land and independence.
Given our context in the United States, the appeals would necessarily deploy in various garb. From 1889 until about 1907 Edward P. McCabe, a talented and distinguished black from Kansas, led a serious movement to have blacks populate those sections of Oklahoma territory which the United States had thrown open to settlement. The idea was to create a black state, within the U.S. federal union, and McCabe himself was promoted for the post of territorial governor by several prominent white U.S. Senators. Several thousand blacks went to Oklahoma under the McCabe movement, but never in sufficient numbers to out-populate the whites. Here, again, recalling the natural guardedness with which the African in America has had to dress his petitions for land and independence, one is permitted to wonder what future construction did the McCabe Movement foresee
for the black state. To be sure McCabe talked of Africans as “‘loyal Americans,” but
his language was the same as others then and now who seek repatriation to Africa or independent land here: “‘We desire to get away from the associations that cluster about us in the Southern states. We wish to remove any disgraceful surroundings that so degrade my people, and in the new territory in Oklahoma, show the people of the United States and of the world that We are not only loyal citizens but that We are capable of advancement. We are willing to abide by that decision, but in a new country, on new lands, with a climate suited to our race. We desire to show you that We are men and women capable of self-government.”
In the 1930’s some influential blacks, in the McCabe tradition, talked of Texas as a black ‘‘49th State,’ but never inspired the actual immigration that accompanied the McCabe movement.
The next most explicit, consistent petition for land-supported by 4 movement of people—arose from Elijah Muhammad in the 1960's with the publication of his newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, which week after week places the demand on the U.S. government for “2 separate state or territory of [our] own—either on this continent of
elsewhere.” In 1968, under influence of Elijah’s disaffected and slain apostle £1 Hajj Malik El] Shabazz (Malcolm X), the provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa came into being and again, like McCabe, particularized the petition for territory. The New Africans claim, by rights of heritage and reparations, five states of the Deep South: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
In this area Africans are outnumbered two-to-one, but, significantly, in many counties~unlike the situation in Oklahoma—blacks already constitute a numerical majority. One set of these counties lies along the Mississippi River from Memphis to the Louisiana border and constitutes a contiguous territory containing more than 15,000 square miles~—a territory, which We call the Kush District, almost twice as large as the state of Israel. It is here that the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa has opened its struggle for land and independence.
Although cast in the traditional pattern of appeal to the white majority U.S. Government, the new Movement clearly accepts the likelihood of revolutionary warfare as a nearly inevitable element in the struggle. Thus, in an important respect, New Africa breaks with the post-Civil War pattern and re-establishes roots in the revolutionary past represented by those blacks who, just before the Civil War, joined with John, Brown (a white) in the attempt to set up a New Africa in Appalachia, with those blacks who struggled through blood and pain in Florida and the South during slavery to establish free communities in the woods, by the blacks of Haiti, of Palmares indeed, of the whole Caribbean and South American world—who slew the oppressor in order to seize land and power and get on with nation-building.
In two small books issued by me in 1968 and 1970—War In America and Revolution And Nation-Building—i detailed the theory to be applied by Africans in the United States in liberating a land mass for our national home. Today We are applying those theories in the Kush District of Mississippi.
The present book covers the period immediately following theory. It brings together letters and articles that have emerged during the first two years of the campaign in Kush as the Provisional Government seeks (1) to inform and organize the people on the land for a plebiscite and for revolutionary resistance, (2) to generate support among blacks throughout America for the struggle in Kush, (3) to engineer acceptance of black independence by the U.S. Government, and (4) to use attacks upon the RNA Provisional Government—such as the FBI/police armed assault on and prosecution of the RNA.
11—to accomplish the other three alms. Because of this, FOUNDATIONS represents a textbook in living political science.
IMARI ABUBAKARI OBADELE, I Hinds County Jail
Jackson, Mississippi
