Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the prospect of African power

Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the prospect of African power
By Chinweizu
Copyright © Chinweizu 2006

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In a nutshell, my presentation today argues that:

1] The 20th century has been the most disastrous century, so far, for Black Africa. It was the century in which, under colonialism, Black Africa was subjected to culturecide at the hands of White Power. That culturecide destroyed our ability to resist the genocide that is now taking place. As a result, this 21st century is likely to see the physical extermination of Black Africans, unless those now under 30 organize and defeat the extermination campaign that white power has already unleashed on Black Africa. Therefore,

2] The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity.

3] We should particularly note that Lugardism is a false framework, and these Lugardist states, Nigeria included, are the wrong foundation for building African Power

Introduction:

I just want to get us started on an examination of the awful situation in which we find ourselves in Nigeria, and in Africa, at the start of the 21st century, after some 50 years of fake independence, and more than 500 years of race war. We, Nigerians and Black Africans as a whole, have been in a race war for 500years or more, and we have no chance of surviving it if we refuse to recognize that fact and act on it.

Since 1960, many attempts have been made to diagnose the trouble with Nigeria. Chief among the usual suspects have been, “tribalism,” corruption, and bad leadership. May I submit that these are symptoms, not the underlying causes; the fevers, not the malaria or typhoid parasites. Our problems are much more serious than corruption & co. They include identity crises of various kinds, a lunatic elite, cultural schizophrenia, Eurotoxification and the fact that Nigeria is not a nation but a noyau—i.e., a society of inward antagonism, one held together by mutual internal antagonism, one which could not carry on if its members had no fellow members to hate. And if we want to end the troubles of the Nigerians, we must dig deeper to find the fundamental causes. And I would like, today, to draw your attention to some of the systemic causes that do not usually appear on our radar.

1] First of all is Nigeria itself: The fundamental trouble with Nigeria is Nigeria itself—the Nigerian state. This Lugardist state, by which Nigeria was invented and is maintained, has been a disaster for the Nigerian peoples/nationalities and their society.

2] Second, is the refusal by Nigerians to recognize the race war in which Lugardism is a key weapon that white power is using against Black Africans.

3] Third is our failure, in Nigeria and in Black Africa as a whole, to study the Haitian experience and learn from it.

I, now, invite you to examine the following theses:

1. The Lugardist state is an enemy to the Nigerian population;
2. Black Africans, including Nigerians, are in the semi-final phase of a race war with the European and the Arab branches of White Power.
3. Nigeria has been Haitified--Turning Nigeria into a Haiti has been a way to totally defeat its people and all of Black Africa in this semi-final phase of the race war. For, just as Haiti in 1804 was the hope of the Black race, even so, in 1960, was Nigeria the hope of Black Africa. And, for your information, the Haitification of Nigeria is almost completed by now.
4. The key enemy weapons in the race war today include the AU, NEPAD, and the organs of the New World Order, especially the UN and its agencies.
5. If Africans do not build African Power now, and use it to prevent their final defeat in the race war, Africans will be exterminated in this 21st century. This, therefore, is the do-or-die century for Africans.

Recognition of these facts is the first step on the road to liberation and survival for the Nigerian peoples/nationalities. I shall say a little to introduce each thesis, and we can then together explore and illuminate them through questions and answers that, I hope, will continue long after we leave this hall.

Thesis #1: Lugardism and the Lugardist state

In a broadcast on January 15, 1970, General Yakubu Gowon, the then Head of the Lugardist state of Nigeria, proclaimed the Lugardist doctrine that justifies the continued existence of the Nigerian state. He said:

“ "Our objectives in fighting the war to crush Ojukwu’s rebellion were always clear. We desired to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria. For, as one country, we would be able to maintain lasting peace amongst our various communities; achieve rapid economic development to improve the lot of our people; guarantee a dignified future and respect in the world, for our posterity and contribute to African unity and modernization. On the other hand, the small successor states in a disintegrated Nigeria would be victims of perpetual war and misery and neocolonialism. Our duty was clear, and we are today vindicated." ”

--Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Excerpt from his speech on Jan. 15, 1970 formally accepting the declared Biafran surrender and the end of the civil war.

This doctrine states the reasons for the continued existence and public toleration of this Lugardist contraption called the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I think we are all living witnesses to the fact, which our newspapers daily confirm, that none of these claims is true and that none has been vindicated. Has the Lugardist state preserved the territorial integrity and unity of Nigeria? No! Just think of Bakassi. Has it maintained lasting peace amongst our various communities? No! Just think of the inter-communal clashes reported periodically from Plateau, Kano, Taraba, Benue, Delta states and elsewhere. Has it achieved economic development, let alone ‘rapid economic development’ or improved the lot of our people? No! Just think of the daily deterioration in the condition of life of our people, and recall the coup-day rhetoric we heard regularly for the past 40 years, denouncing each ousted regime for its failures in this regard. Has it guaranteed a dignified future and respect in the world for our posterity? No! Unless it counts as earning the respect of the world Nigeria’s appearing, year after year, on the list of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world? Have we escaped neo-colonialism? If so, why are we still in the debt trap where we are being robbed by the Paris Club and the transnational corporations? And what are the agents of the IMF, the World Bank and other imperialist organs doing in the offices and corridors of power in Nigeria?

What has the Lugardist state actually accomplished in its century of existence? It has destroyed our sense of community and atomized us into the Hobbesian condition of a ‘war of everyone against everyone’ in the ruthless struggle for money to buy what it has brainwashed us to consider ‘the good life’; a condition of chronic insecurity, of ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’—as from ‘accidental discharge’ from the guns of its policemen; or from its rampaging soldiers, like at Odi, or Zaki-Biam and other places, or from assassin’s bullets targeted even at such big winners in its system as Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane, Alex Ibru, Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, A.K. Dikibo, etc in the last decade; a condition where life has been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ for everyone—even for Generals like Bisalla, Vatsa, Shehu Musa Yar Adua, and Chief MKO Abiola, let alone for the APO Six and countless ordinary victims of the police and armed robbers. Thus, even without Nigeria’s disintegration, we have been victims of misery, neocolonialism and perpetual war inflicted on us by the Lugardist state itself.

From the foregoing, we can see that each and every one of the itemized claims of Lugardist doctrine is demonstrably false. The Nigerian state has failed to satisfy any of its own advertised justifications for its continued existence. This goes to show that Lugardism is a hoax, and Nigeria is a failed state even by its own criteria.

In 45 years, under local comprador management, this Lugardist state has reduced Nigeria to a shanty country, a refugee camp where there is no order or authority; where social anarchy reigns, since government has abdicated its responsibilities and anyone can, with impunity, disturb the peace and, with noisy loudspeakers blaring songs and drums and prayers all night long, keep others from sleeping.

“Development” has been so successful that we now have industries everywhere: the 419 industry; the ‘wetin-you-carry’ industry that recently yielded N17billion to its Chairman of the Board; the lootocrat or Authority-stealing industry that has piled up billions of dollars in the foreign bank accounts of high state officials; and the gospel and miracles industry on every street; the thugs and ethnic militia industry that provide “jobs” for the tens of millions of the unemployed and lets them extort their livelihood from people on the roads. We have all these strange industries, but no iron-and-steel or machine tools or aerospace industries. It seems that the comprador managers of the Nigerian state overheard that a STEEL industry was vital for development and have built a STEAL industry instead. That’s probably their best understanding of what a steel industry means!

This Lugardist state has, within a century, destroyed every society and killed every culture it trapped in its prison, and has reduced its traumatized captives to a 100 million mob of Hobbesian idiots who have lost all sense of community and solidarity with one another. Nigeria is now a place where the unspeakable is routine news. With the decay of both the state and social authority structures for arbitrating disputes, neighbours resort to do-it-yourself justice using privatized violence—hence the spate of acid and machete attacks by people on their neighbours. Nigeria has been reduced to an amoral land where greedy people think nothing of kidnapping their neighbour’s children and selling them to be killed for fresh body parts to be sold abroad for organ transplants. That’s the racket being covered up by the epidemic of so-called ritual murder we read about these days. It used to be that, in Lagos, if you were attacked by robbers and you shouted Ole! Ole! ( i.e. ‘Thief! Thief!’) your neighbours would assemble and lynch the thief in solidarity with you. Not anymore! Now, the people around will run away and leave you to the mercy of your attackers. Fear, acute individualism and deep insecurity have killed the community spirit.

In the 35 years since Gowon propounded his doctrine, this Lugardist state has been unable to do those things that, it claimed it exists to do; and it has done terrible things that it ought not to do to the society. It has inflicted cultural schizophrenia and social decay; it has fostered an ethos of greedy incompetence; it has replaced the work ethic with a criminal instant-riches mentality, and it has turned governance into brazen gangsterism and enthroned Al Capone on Aso Rock [the Presidential palace in Abuja]. It has thereby been an instrument of large scale culturecide.

How did this Lugardist state achieve this feat of social destruction and culturecide? The chief instruments were economic: principally, [1] the commoditization of land and the introduction of individualist land tenure a century ago, which slowly dissolved the communal holdings; [2] the emergence, with the discovery of oil, of a rentier state which dominates the economy with its huge rent revenues derived from foreign concessionaries-- this has turned the economy upside down, and made everyone dependent on state favours instead of keeping the state dependent on taxing the economically active population for its revenues; [3] the Land Thief Decree, a.k.a. Land Use Decree, which robbed communities of their ancestral land, thereby quietly turning the population into a vast rootless proletariat with no landed communal interest to sustain their local structure and cohesion; [4] the ravages of SAP and other economic policies which have impoverished most people and left them without financial stamina; [5] a culturally alienating, white supremacist education system that inculcates possessive individualism and trains people for non-existent bureaucratic jobs, which makes its products unfit for self-employment in productive activities. By such measures, imposed in the course of a century, this Lugardist state destroyed the communitarian foundations of the African societies it trapped in its cage.

This Lugardist state nowadays parades itself as a federal republic and a democracy. But it is neither federal nor republic. And its democracy is all fake. So, what is Nigeria actually?

Nigeria is a prison camp into which British soldiers, merchants, missionaries and political agents herded the peoples of the assorted villages, towns, statelets, kingdoms and empires they had, between 1850 and 1914, conquered by force or fraudulently dispossessed of sovereignty. The herding process was begun by Sir George Goldie, and was finalized by Sir Frederick Lugard in 1914 when he set up this Lugardist state apparatus to control the prisoner-of-war camp which he named Nigger Area, or Nigeria. What Lugard, the founding father of Nigeria, set up was a despotism to serve British interests, an instrument of the British monarch, for the subjugation, exploitation and control by terrorism of the captive population, for the profit of the British. This despotism of the British monarch was handed over, in 1960, to comprador agents recruited from among the black inmates of the prison camp. The original state imposed by Lugard has never been disbanded and reconstituted by the population. It lives on under black management, and has continued to behave despotically towards the population it got into its absolute power long ago. After all, none of its so-called constitutions has been submitted to the population for approval. As John Locke stated in his “Second Treatise of Government” (1690):

“ "He who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life." ”

We can, therefore, see that this Lugardist state contraption has been making war on us, the victim population which it got into its absolute power a century ago.

It should not, therefore, surprise us that, since its agents see us as prisoners of war, they extort from us and plunder us at every opportunity. And they kill us with impunity whenever they feel the itch to shoot. And to keep us cowed and discourage rebellion they go on pacification sprees in which they massacre whole towns and villages. So, you see, there is a method to the madness of the ‘mad dogs’ at Odi and Zaki-Biam, and to the accidental discharges at Apo and countless checkpoints. These are random acts of state terrorism that are calculated to instil fear in the population and keep us insecure and passive.

This despotic, Lugardist state apparatus has never been reconstituted as a republic by the people. The Nigerian state is not an instrument or agent of the Nigerian people. It is not under their control, or answerable to them, and never has been. For the first half of its existence, i.e, 1914-1960, that was clearly the case. Since then, it has remained the case, the so-called independence notwithstanding. Whenever the Nigerian people have tried to actualise their nominal sovereign control, tried to become the masters of what claims to be their state, the state has rebuffed them. It has been a case of a novice horseman trying to mount his new and wild horse, and getting thrown off each time. The coups of 1966 aborted the initial attempts by the people’s elected representatives to sit securely in the saddle into which the departing British had lifted them. The coup of 1983 ended the second attempt. The June 12 annulment in 1993 aborted the third attempt. The emasculation of the National Assembly by the executive branch since 1999, together with the flagrant rigging of the 2003 elections has killed off the fourth attempt. The claim that Nigeria is now a democracy, or, as some prefer, a “nascent democracy,” is false. Nigeria is no democracy at all! Never has been. And is not likely ever to be. The Lugardist state will not permit it. It continues to do as it pleases, regardless of what the people say or wish. And the Nigerian people have yet to find enough courage and skill to make and enforce demands on the untameable state apparatus.

Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that, as Frederick Douglass said “power concedes nothing without a demand.” We resignedly think that some day God-- that imaginary big-man-in-the-sky who is part Santa Claus and part Ojuju Calabar-- will intervene and solve our socio-economic problems and rescue us from the despotism of the VIPs—the Vampires In Power. We forget or haven’t heard Martin Luther King’s remark that, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.” “Shuffering and shmiling”, we wait and hope that things cannot get worse, yet they get worse with each regime. We forget or haven’t heard that there is no limit to which tyranny will not go if unopposed. We haven’t heard what Frederick Douglass said: “If you want to know how much a tyrant will impose on a people, find out how much they will take.”

And the Lugardists keep proclaiming that we should accept this prisoner-of-war camp as a blessing, as a gift from those British who said they came to civilize us by enslaving, terrorizing and robbing us. Well, that’s like the guards at the Nazi concentration camps claiming that the camps were a blessing and should be preserved at whatever cost; that remaining obediently in it is the duty of the prisoners. But the guards would say that, wouldn’t they? But do the inmates have to accept the guards’ doctrine? Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that Nigeria is going nowhere because, Nigeria is like an elephant with two heads, one in front and one behind, with each head pulling in the opposite direction from the other. Clearly, for any two-headed elephant to move properly, one of its two heads must vanish. In Nigeria's case, one head is incorrigibly nostalgic for the ways of seventh-century Arabia; the other head lusts for the conspicuous capitalist consumerism of the European world. Note that I have not accused it of lusting after capitalist producerism -- which it passionately abhors. Now, since neither of these two heads on the Nigerian elephant is appropriate for national survival, there is a need to chop off, not one, but both heads, and to graft on a new head -- a single head that is passionate for production, that is indoctrinated with producer values and nationalism.

By the way, I must stress that Lugardism is not peculiar to Nigeria. All the states now in Africa are Lugardist. They were founded by white imperialist invaders from Europe for the exploitation of Africans to the benefit of Europe; every one of them in the AU is Lugardist. Lugardism is the doctrine that they are sacrosanct and should be preserved, that they should continue to exist even if they destroy the societies they hold prisoner.

Thesis #2: Race War

Mention race war to Africans and they react as if it is some future danger that must be avoided at any price, even at the price of voluntary enslavement. They refuse to realize that we already are in it, and have been in it for at least five centuries. I shall try to show, as briefly as possible, that such is, indeed, our situation.

Two initial points of clarification: first of all, just because bullets are not flying about and swords are not flashing around us does not mean there is no war going on; there are other modes of warfare, including economic, political, psychological and intellectual warfare. For example, the Cold War, in the 20th century, between the capitalist and communist power blocs was mostly a non-military affair. It was mostly a propaganda and economic war, with occasional military flashpoints. Secondly, when the aggressor identifies the target of its attack on the basis of skin colour, the war is a race war. Black Africa is in the throes of two simultaneous race wars. It is being attacked from two fronts: The European front and the Arab front. Lets consider them one by one. First ,

The Euro-African Race War

When did it start and why?

Europe’s race war on sub-Sahara Africans may be said to have begun when

The captains of two of Prince Henry [of Portugal’s] exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed.

Not long after that, Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) spelt out and blessed a war, in the name of Christ, on the world’s non-Christian peoples:

“ "We, after scrupulous reflection, are granting by our Bull full and entire freedom to King Alphonso [of Spain] to conquer, to besiege, to fight, and to submit all the Saracens, Pagans, and other enemies of Christ, wherever they may be; and to seize the kingdoms, the dukedoms, the princedoms, the lordships, personal properties, landed properties, and all the wealth they withhold and possess; and to submit these persons to a perpetual slavery; to appropriate these kingdoms, duchies, principalities, counties, lordships, properties and wealth; to transmit them to their successors; to take advantage and make use of them personally and with their offspring. ”

As Jordan Ngubane pointed out “The Pope thus authorized the commitment of crimes and sins against all and linked the division of the world into Portuguese and Spanish spheres with slavery, colonialism, racism and apartheid….”

Pope Alexander’s Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 divided all the “heathens” of the world with their resources between Portugal and Spain. And then, Pope Clement VI in Intra Arcana, the Bull he issued on May 8, 1529, and addressed to Charles V [of Spain] urged him on to the war:

“ "We trust that, as long as you are on earth, you will compel and with all zeal cause the barbarian nations to come to the knowledge of God, the maker and founder of all things, not only by edicts and admonitions, but also by force and arms, if needful, in order that their souls may partake of the heavenly kingdom." ”

That global war, declared by Europe in the 15th century in religious terms, is still going on, in different transformations. The most prominent version today is Bush’s “War on Terror”, which was initially announced as a Christian “crusade” against the Jihadeers of Islamic Fundamentalism. Another version is imperialism. We particularly must note that imperialism is war, and the imperialism of whites over blacks is race war.

What have been the signs of this Euro-African race war?

The branch of this European war upon the world that most concerns us, has been waged on the African race mainly in the guises of what Europeans call the Slave Trade, The Scramble for Africa, Colonialism, Neo-colonialism and Racism. If we examine each of them, we will uncover its race war character.

1. Slave Trade When the era of the so-called Slave Trade is examined, what do we find? Its main features were interminable wars, forced labour and terrorism; and the targets of all were the Black/African Race; and the entire thing was organized by Whites of European stock, and they were its prime beneficiaries. It was a system of war and violence on four continents and on their interconnecting seas. This war system operated in three zones:

1. Zone A: Africa, the war front, the zone of daily battles, skirmishes, raids, kidnappings and ambushes, which yielded war prisoners for carrying off into slavery.
2. Zone B: the Diaspora zone, the rear area of the Europeans, made up of the transit waters (the Atlantic and Indian Oceans), together with the territories of the Americas as well as the plantation islands in the Indian Ocean, off shore from East Africa (Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, Zanzibar, etc). For the Black war captives, this was the zone of permanent martial law and terrorism (especially on the plantations, mines and slave-holding towns); the zone of deadly forced labour (the super-Gulags and Siberias of their time. For example, “In French Saint Domingue, now called Haiti, slaves were literally worked to death. The average life span after being sold into slavery was about seven years”; This was the zone of daily resistance by the captives, and of their periodic escapes, mutinies and revolts, and of the brutal suppression thereof (there were some 250 recorded revolts in the USA alone, an average of one a year for the era before Emancipation); This was the zone of guerrilla wars between the Maroon communities (hundreds of which existed at any one time all over the Americas) and the slave-owner communities around them which sought to re-enslave them; and the zone of full-scale wars between the slave-owner states and the liberation movements, as between France and its slaves in Haiti, or between the USA and the Black Seminoles. And then there was
3. Zone C: Europe, the headquarters from where the entire far-flung system of daily warfare was masterminded, stimulated, coordinated, armed and financed, and to which the bulk of the resulting riches was taken.

Seen in its totality, this was a vast war on the Black/African Race that was most cunning in its grand strategy. In Africa, the first zone, Europeans made war on Blacks by inducing Blacks to make war on one another. It was “divide and conquer” at its devilish worst, applied to an entire Black race on the vast African continent, by a well-disguised white European hand manipulating from afar. For the kidnap victims and the war prisoners who were carried off into captivity, there was a second zone, a zone of total war -- military, cultural, economic, psychological, ideological; a total war waged against them by whites, clearly and visibly by whites, and designed to break each of them into an obedient workhorse for the rest of life. When taken altogether, this was the most devious and satanic of war systems ever contrived: Europe was the headquarters, Africa was the war front, the Americas were the prisoners-of-war camp, chattel-slavery was the kind of forced labour to which the prisoners-of-war were subjected in that camp, the produce and profits which went to Europe were the peculiar booty from this most peculiar of wars. As for all the Blacks caught up in it, the overwhelming majority, probably as much as 99.9%, were victims of different kinds and to different degrees: the war captives shipped abroad, the war dead and the war survivors left back in Africa, all those who resisted the pressure to collaborate, and even those among the Black procurers, far from the coast, who never made contact with the Whites but unwittingly served the interest of the European war fomenters. All were caught in the toils of a devilish system whose totality they were in no position to see or guess; all were driven by overpowering forces beamed and controlled from outside their societies, forces which crushed all resistance, even those put up by African kings and queens, such as Affonso of the BaKongo and Nzinga of the N’gola. They were, one and all, victims of a satanic European bourgeoisie, which devised the entire thing and kept it going for its own profit.

Conquest and colonialism

That centuries-long slaving phase of this race war was followed by the phase of undisguised military conquest and colonization, i.e. a phase of conquest of black Africans by white Europeans and of foreign white rule over blacks. The conquest phase, principally between 1884 and 1914, is Eurocentrically called “The scramble for Africa”. In this phase, Blacks would now be conquered, Christianized (See Appendix 8 at pp.57-60) and prepared for civilization [i.e. Europeanization] in Africa itself, and the job of doing that was dubbed the “White Man’s Burden”. In furtherance of the project of Christianizing and Europeanizing Africans, (i.e. of treating them to culturecide), Black Africans were subjected to genocide, terrorism, land expropriation, property confiscation, forced labour, and taxation by the implanted Lugardist states. The starkest and best-documented varieties of this were in King Leopold’s Congo Free State (formerly Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo), France’s Congo (now Congo-Brazzaville), Portugal’s Angola, Germany’s South-West Africa (now Namibia), Britain’s Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the British-Boer Republic of South Africa. In the Belgian example, a “System” was devised to terrorize and exploit the Blacks to the point of utter ruin. (The book to read is The Black Man’s Burden by E.D. Morel) Colonialism, thereby, was the worst disaster to have ever struck Black Africa thus far. The culturecide it accomplished has left Africa so demented that it still can’t get its act together even today.

Neocolonialism or the race war today

Since the mid-20th century, following the withdrawal of European expatriates from formal and visible political control of their African colonies, Europeans have prosecuted the race war using Black Africans as their agents, much like during the slaving phase of the Euro-African race war. This current phase is what is called Neocolonialism, in its various forms-- economic, political, ideological, cultural etc.

Let me briefly indicate a few of its features.

When the IMF, World Bank etc lure African countries into their Debt Trap and saddle them with the debt burden -- that is economic warfare. When the WTO enforces “free trade” rules that prevent fair trade, and ensure that trade results in resource and financial drain from Africa to Europe and America -- that’s economic warfare. And when the WTO insists that Africa must accept genetically modified (GM) crops that are engineered to be infertile and so destroy our food independence and food security, that’s economic warfare. It is warfare by induced and premeditated starvation. [see Appendix 7 on GMO crops at p. 55]

When African governments are conned into implementing NEPAD policies that block the industrialization of Africa -- that’s an economic side of the race war. The net effect of such measures is to keep the African race poor and weak, so it cannot defend itself from white power.

When the US Government invents AIDS for the declared purpose of global depopulation (through its Special Virus Cancer Program that spent 15years, 1962-1977, and $550 million, and on which Dr Robert Gallo was a Project Officer); and when the World Health Organization (WHO) vaccinates 97 million Africans with smallpox vaccines that were secretly infected with the AIDS virus, that’s biological warfare on the African race. And when there is a US Patented cure for AIDS (US Patent #5676977 granted on Oct. 14, 1997), and the Government of the USA still does not publicize it, but instead allows ineffective remedies to continue to be deployed in Africa, that act of malign neglect is an act of war, and a part of the race war on Africans. AIDS is a New World Order bioweapon for global genocide.

[On the origin of AIDS, the book to read is State Origin: The Evidence of the Laboratory Birth of AIDS, by Boyd E. Graves, J.D.; see also

AIDS: 'The Manufactured Virus'

From the Official U.S. Govt. Documents House of Rep.

American Masses Hoodwinked [1]

Proof: Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970 H.B. 15090 [2]

On the World Health Organization (WHO) role in bombing Africa with AIDS through vaccines [See “Smallpox Vaccine ‘triggered AIDS virus’ ” by Pearce Wright, London Times May 11, 1987, p.1; also Who Murdered Africa? By Dr. William Campbell Douglas]

On the US Patented cure for AIDS [To see the patent, go to: [www.google.com|Google] , type in US patent 5676977 to read all about it.]

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For more on all aspects of AIDS visit [www.boydgraves.com|Bodygraves website]

Or contact Boyd Graves thru [[email protected]] or [[email protected]]

or contact Dr. Len Horowitz for his "Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?" (Tetrahedron, LLC., 1997; ISBN:092355012-7;$29.95) It may be ordered toll free by calling 1-888-508-4787). To invite Dr. Horowitz to speak to your group, please contact:

Tetrahedron, LLC PO Box 2033 Sandpoint, ID 83864 Toll free order line: 888-508-4787 e-mail: [email protected].

For a brief introduction to the data on AIDS, see the Appendices attached at the end of this essay at pp. 40-51}

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Thus, through measures like the Debt Trap, unfair WTO rules, genetically modified/ GM-crops and the AIDS bomb, white European powers continue to wage race war on Africans even as we speak today.

There is one last aspect that needs to be touched on, the aspect which has featured in every phase, that widely-misunderstood thing called racism. So,

What exactly is racism?

Nowadays, it has become fashionable to reduce racism to color discrimination; to say, as was done at FESTAC 77, that:

By racism we mean ethnocentric pride in one’s own racial group and preference for the distinctive characteristics of that group; belief that these characteristics are fundamentally biological in nature and are thus transmitted to succeeding generations; strong negative feeling towards other groups who do not share these characteristics coupled with the thrust to discriminate against and exclude the outgroup from full participation in the life of the community.

Contrary to such fashionable and ‘politically correct’ misdefinitions, racism is far more than mere ethnocentrism or mindless color prejudice or color discrimination. It is, in fact, the white supremacist color-caste mechanism of the Eurocentric Global System wherein status is assigned, and functions, opportunities and privileges are apportioned on the basis of skin color. It might, alternatively, be called colorism. The system is justified, legitimized and defended by the superstition of racial hierarchy and by the dogma which posits, contrary to evidence, that the white skinned are thereby inherently superior to all others and that the black skinned are thereby inherently inferior to all others. Though unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that is the status ranking which European power self-servingly chose, back in the 15th century, to impose on humanity, by force and fraud.

For those who have forgotten, or who are confused, let me here define racism clearly and firmly:

RACISM is a system of domination, of one race by another, which combines a superstition of racial hierarchy with a structure of domination and exploitation, and which is instituted and maintained by the violent practices of conquest and suppression, including torture, lynching and mass murder.

And, it must be stressed, the only case of racism on the historical record is that instituted by white supremacists.

There are many other aspects of this war today, but these, I hope, are enough to help you recognize it. “Slave Trade” was race war; Colonialism was race war; Neo-colonialism is race war; Racism is race war; AIDS in Africa is Race war; GM crops for Africa is race war! Yes, European white power has for centuries been waging race war on the Black race as part of its global war on all non-Europeans. And this race war is still going on, even though most Africans foolishly refuse to recognize it for what it is.

The Arab-African Race War

The Arab-African Race War began with the invasion which led to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 AD. By 700 AD, the Arab invaders had seized all the lands as far west as the Atlantic coast of North Africa. But well before that, indeed soon after taking Egypt, they turned their aggression southward to Nubia and the rest of the Nile Valley. Here are some highlights of this other race war on the Blacks of sub-Sahara Africa:

Nubia 7th to 14th centuries AD In 652 AD, Arabs invaded from Egypt into Nubia but got no further south than Dongola. The Egypt-Dongola treaty of 652 AD required 400 slaves to be sent to Egypt each year. It lasted till 1315AD, when a muslim was installed King of Dongola. With that, the tribute was abolished but the Arabs resumed their penetration up the Nile. By the end of the 14th century, Arab tribes were pouring into the Sudan to settle.

Ancient Ghana, 11th century AD In 1076, the Almoravids, a group of Arabs and Arabized Berbers from Morocco, attacked and overran Koumbi Saleh, the capital of Ancient Ghana, in present day Mauritania, and broke its power and converted its people to Islam. Ghana regained its independence sometime after 1087, but never recovered its power or its empire.

Ethiopia, 14th -16th century AD From the 13th century, immigrant Arabs established various sultanates on the Red Sea coast of eastern and southern Ethiopia. These recognized the leadership of a dynasty at Shoa, which traced its genealogy to the Arab tribe of the Makhzumi. In 1332, the Sultan of Ifat, Sabr al-din attacked the Ethiopian King Amda Seyon but was defeated. Other muslim princes renewed the war on Christian Ethiopia for the next two centuries. But not until 1530, under their leader Mohammed ibn Ibrahim, nicknamed Gran by the Ethiopians, did these invaders conquer a great part of the Ethiopian plateau and convert the people to Islam.

Bornu, 14th century AD In 1391, the muslim King of the black African kingdom of Bornu, Uthman Biri ibn Idris sent a protest letter to the King of Egypt asking for the return of those already captured, including his own brother. He wrote:

The Arabs who are called Judham and others have taken captive our free subjects—women and children and old people, and our relatives, and other muslims. Among these Arabs are polytheists and apostates: they have raided the Muslims and killed a great many of them in a war which broke out between us and our enemies. . . . These Arabs have harmed our land, the land of Bornu, continually up to the present, and have captured our free subjects and relatives, who are Muslims, and are selling them to the slave-dealers in Egypt and Syria and elsewhere, and some they keep for themselves.

Thus, being Muslim did not protect Blacks from enslavement by the Arabs, for when it comes to enslaving blacks, Arabs are quick to disregard their own Islamic law.

Songhay, 16th century AD In 1591, a Moroccan expedition crossed the Sahara and attacked the Black African Empire of Songhay. It defeated the Songhay army at the battle of Tondibi, seized Gao, Timbuktu and Jenne and looted them; many of Songhay’s scholars were taken in chains to Morocco. The empire and people of Songhay were ruined by the wars, famine and pestilence which the Moroccans unleashed on them.

Zanzibar, 17th century AD In 1698, Omani Arabs captured Mombasa and extended their rule to Zanzibar. Their white-minority Sultanate of Zanzibar lasted till 1964 when it was ended by an African rebellion, led by John Okello.

Sudan 19th century In 1820, Muhammed Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt, decided to conquer Sudan, primarily to recruit black slaves and to bring the sources of the Nile under Arab control. In the subsequent raids on the hinterlands of the White Nile and the Nuba Mountains, some 10,000 Negro slaves were annually exported to Egypt, where the able-bodied males were pressed into the army and the rest were taken into domestic slavery. These slave raids went on for decades, in the course of which an estimated one million blacks were enslaved or destroyed.

20th century: The Arab-African race war continued in the Afro-Arab borderlands—in such places as Sudan, Mauritania, and Chad, flashing into bloody battles when it met African resistance, like the Anya Nya War (1956-1972) and the SPLA War (since 1983) in Sudan. The only clear African victory against the Arabs was in Zanzibar where, in 1964, the Africans overthrew the Arab white-settler minority rule and ended its regimen of black slavery.

In Chad, Libya’s Gaddafi annexed the uranium rich Auzou strip and tried to install his Chadian puppets in power.

Somalia and Djibouti were induced to join the Arab League and to Arabize themselves culturally, despite their non-Arab populations. Joining the Arab League requires that Arabic be made the official language of a country, so that Arabic becomes the mother tongue of its citizens, thus converting them into Arabs.

In Ethiopia, the Islamized province of Eritrea was given substantial Arab support in its war of secession from Black, Christian Ethiopia.

Beyond the borderlands, in Uganda, Central African Republic, etc, Arabs made proxy war on Africans through their local black agents.

In the Central African Republic, Gaddafi propped President Patasse in power in exchange for a concession to exploit the country’s diamonds and oil for 99 years.

In Uganda in the 1970s, using Idi Amin as his local agent, Gaddafi pursued a project of bloody Islamization and Arabization until Tanzania intervened militarily and drove out Idi Amin in 1979. Idi Amin then went into luxuried exile in the land of his Arab masters, first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia where he died in 2003.

The OAU/AU in the Arab-African Race War

From its formation in 1963 until its demise, the OAU [Organization of African Unseriousness], was consciously used by its Arab members as an instrument for their race war on the Africans. They used it primarily to inhibit the Black African countries from giving organized support to those Africans who were being attacked by local Arab settlers, such as in Sudan and Mauritania. In the OAU, the Black African leaders conspicuously failed to define and defend the Pan-African interest. They, in effect, served as sell-outs, fifth columnists and fellow-travelers of the Arab expansionists. The switch from OAU to AU has merely been an anti-African switch from a smothering alliance, the OAU, to a suicidal union the AU [Africa Unmanned, i.e. castrated].

(The work to read on the Arab use of the OAU to pursue their race war on Africans is “Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism” by Opoku Agyeman, Black Renaissance 1 (1), January 1994, pp.30-72, See Appendix 9 at pp.60-101)

The 21st century Today in Sudan, the Janjaweed Arab militias, sponsored by the white minority Arab government of Sudan, are still busy, looting, raping, destroying and enslaving the Black Africans in Sudan’s Darfur province in an ethnic cleansing campaign to seize lands from Africans and settle Arabs there. According to one report in THE GUARDIAN, NAIROBI, Wednesday, Jul 21, 2004,Page 6:

During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang in praise of the government and scorning black villagers. According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: "The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. "The power of Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God." The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village, saying: "You are gorillas, you are black and you are badly dressed." The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said. The militiamen "are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish," a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based on over 100 statements from women in the refugee camps in neighboring Chad.

As this story makes clear, the Janjaweed are quite explicit about the race war and genocidal character of their activities. Yes, the conflict in Sudan is race war!

Thus have Arab invaders, century after century, pressed their war of aggression on Africans, and seized more and more of African lands and killed or carried off millions of Africans into slavery in Arab countries and beyond. By now, they are not only in possession of all of supra-Sahara Africa, but also of much of the Sahelian borderlands, and are thrusting deeper up the Nile to take over the entire Nile Valley, all the way to Uganda on the equator. Despite that relentless aggression, the governments of Black Africa refuse to acknowledge what is happening, let alone that a race war demands effective and concerted opposition from them. It will be a disgrace to the entire African race if, having barely survived European aggression, we succumb to Arab aggression, especially through our own leaders collaborating with the Arab enemy.

Thesis #3:The New World Order, UN Imperialism etc

About 10 years ago, in the early 1990s, there was public discussion in the imperialist press about their need to recolonize Africa. Some of us protested against the idea and tried, with little success, to alert the African intelligentsia and governments on the need to prevent such a thing. You may be surprised and shocked to learn that that Recolonization has been accomplished and most Africans have failed to even notice. They even welcome the instruments and institutions of their own recolonization. Chief among these are the AU [Gadafi’s Arabist Underwear], NEPAD [the New European Practical-joke for Africa’s Destruction], and the New World Order instruments of UN Imperialism, namely the IMF [Imperialist Ministry of Finance], World Bank/ officially the IBRD [Infrastructure Bank for Robbery and Destruction], WTO [Wealth Thieving Outfit], The World Court, the War Crimes Tribunals (for Rwanda, Sierra Leone etc), the UN Peace Keeping and Peace Enforcing Missions, and the ideological package of globalization, democratization, privatization, marketization etc.

Why do I say that Africa has been recolonized and that the New World Order’s UN, AU and NEPAD are all part of it? Is the UN an imperialist outfit? Yes, it is. This UN that is, allegedly, being reformed, and on whose Security Council Nigeria is campaigning to get a Veto seat? Yes, it is. And is the AU an imperialist outfit? And NEPAD too? Yes, they are. Let me indicate just how these organs and institutions are carrying on the imperialist project.

The AU is a joint instrument of the Arabs and Europeans for waging race war on Black Africa. Its NEPAD policies serve European power, while its use as a political/diplomatic inhibitor of organized African resistance to Arab aggression serves Arab power.

The AU was formed at the initiative of Libya’s Gaddafi. It was part of his offering to appease the West so it would end its sanctions against Libya and resume non-hostile relations. Another item in that package of offerings was his surrender of two Libyans to be tried for the Lockerbee bombing. He roped the African countries into his AU [Arabist Underwear] for easier imperialist control. And the West proceeded to con them to implement its NEPAD recipe for Africa’s economic destruction.

As for the New World Order, it is actually not as new as it is made to appear. It is simply the UN Global Order of 1945 as it enters the final stages of its construction. What was made possible in the 1990s, by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the ending of the Cold War, is the final plastering and painting and furnishing of what was organized in Bretton Woods in 1944 and in San Francisco in 1945. Among these final steps is the creating of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to replace the stop-gap institution GATT; the establishment of an International War Crimes Tribunal with headquarters at The Hague; the move of the UN from peace-keeping to peace-enforcement, as attempted in Somalia and Bosnia; and the clear emergence of NATO as the enforcer of last resort for the UN Security Council – as in the former Yugoslavia.

This so-called New World Order is simply the collective phase of capitalist imperialism; the institutional arrangement for the collaborative imperialism of those great powers, now known as the G-8, whose rivalries inflicted the carnage of two World Wars on all of humanity during the first half of the 20th century. Their paramount objective now is to ensure that, after five centuries of unrestrained rivalries and warfare, these great winners shall no longer make war on one another as they compete for the labor and resources of the rest of the members of the UN. Their second objective is to ensure that rebellion against their collective imperialism, by any of its victim peoples, shall be collectively crushed. This collective imperialism, whose slogan is “World Order”, is upheld, not, as in the 15th century, by the fiat of the Pope, but by the economic, diplomatic, military, cultural and propaganda might of the G-8 imperialist alliance against the rest of humanity. The only thing new about this 1945 edition of the Eurocentric Global System is this: after fifty years of delays in its construction, it is at last emerging fully in the form designed originally by the U.S. and U.K. --its main planners and beneficiaries.

As the UN Charter is the blueprint for this current edition of the Eurocentric Global System, it is imperative to ask: What really is the UN and what manner of imperialist beast is this UN Global Order? At the level of the utopian chatter of the UN Charter, and of the sales rhetoric of its propagandists, the UN is a dream scheme that shall save humanity from the scourge of war, promote social progress and better standards of life, develop respect for the equal rights and self-determination of peoples, reaffirm faith in the dignity and worth of the human person, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah! So claims the UN Charter. As for the New World Order, it is “a new just order that permits fair competition and protection of the weak from the strong . . . a joint undertaking of realizing the common aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law . . . an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony” (so said George H. W. Bush ). It is “a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace . . . under . . . free institutions” (Bill Clinton); with the UN there “to protect human rights, maintain peace and security for all and to deter aggression” (George H. W. Bush ). What glorious and inspiring images these are: peace, prosperity, just order, security, freedom, democracy, cooperation, social progress, equal rights, self-determination, fair competition, harmony, human dignity, world without war, protection of the weak from the strong, etc., etc.!

All this New World Order rhetoric touting Freedom, Democracy, Peace, Development, etc is quite attractive. But is what is preached anything like what is meant, let alone what is practiced? Let us go, for illumination, to those who have closely studied the details of the matter. And let’s consider just three revealing examples: Freedom, Democracy and Development Aid.

In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the Allies were fighting for Four Freedoms—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. But Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

“ "Roosevelt spoke of Four Freedoms, but not of the Fifth and most important: the freedom to rob and to exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the only one that really counts. A careful look at history and the internal record of planning reveals a guiding geopolitical conception: preservation of the Fifth Freedom, by whatever means are feasible. Much of what US governments do in the world can be readily understood in terms of this principle, while if it remains obscured, acts and events will appear incomprehensible, a maze of confusion, random error and accident." ”

So much for their freedom rhetoric. By the way, contrary to official propaganda, America grew rich and powerful, not because of the four official freedoms, but because of the Fifth Freedom: its freedom to rob and exploit, starting with the land of the exterminated Native Americans and the forced and unpaid labor of the enslaved Black Africans.

Chomsky also has cast light on the peculiar American usage of the term democracy. Commenting on the situation in the 1980s, he said:

“ "Take the idea that the United States is supporting “democracy” all over the world. Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true. But what does it mean? When we support “democracy,” what do we support? I mean, is “democracy” something where the population takes part in running the country? Well, obviously not. For instance, why are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic,” but Nicaragua [i.e. under the Sandinista Party] not “democratic”? Why? Is it because two of them had elections and the other one didn’t? No. In fact, Nicaragua’s election [in 1984] was a hundred times as good as any election in El Salvador. Is it because there’s a lack of popular political participation in Nicaragua? No. Is it because the political opposition can’t survive there? No, the political opposition is barely harassed in Nicaragua; in El Salvador and Guatemala it’s just murdered. Is it that there can’t be an independent press in Nicaragua? No, the Nicaraguan press is one of the freest presses in the world, much more so than the American press has ever been—the United States has never tolerated a newspaper even remotely like La Prensa in Nicaragua [opposition paper supported by the U.S. during the contra war], not even close: in any time of crisis here, the American government has shut down even tiny dissident newspapers, forget a major newspaper funded by the foreign power that’s attacking the country and which is openly calling for the overthrow of the government. That degree of freedom of the press is absolutely inconceivable here. In El Salvador, there was an independent press at one time—it was wiped out by the U.S.-backed security forces, who just murdered the editor of one newspaper and blew up the premises of the other. Okay, that takes care of that independent press.

So you know, by what criteria are El Salvador and Guatemala “democratic” and Nicaragua not? Well, there is a criterion: in Nicaragua [under the Sandinistas] business elements are not represented in dominating the state much beyond their numbers, so it’s not a “democracy.” In El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments are run by the military for the benefit of the local oligarchies—the landowners, rich businessmen, and rising professionals—and those people are tied up with the United States, so therefore those countries are “democracies.” It doesn’t matter if they blow up the independent press, and kill off the political opposition, and slaughter tens of thousands of people, and never run anything remotely like a free election—all of that is totally irrelevant. They’re “democracies,” because the right people are running them; if the right people aren’t running them, then they’re not “democracies.”"

”

In Americanese, a government is “democratic” if it is run by people who serve U.S. interests, and “undemocratic” if it is not. American rhetoric gives the impression that the U.S. supports democracy around the globe whereas in fact it has a long record of blocking democracy and overthrowing democratically elected governments or assassinating their leaders. Here are just a few notorious examples: Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Ecuador 1981, Grenada 1983, Haiti 1991, Venezuela 2003. And an example happening right now is the case of Palestine, where the U.S. is unwilling to accept Hamas as the party democratically elected by the Palestinians to govern them. Because Hamas is committed to serving the Palestinians and protecting them from Israeli armed attacks, the U.S., Britain and Israel have threatened to not accept or work with it. It is as if Bush, Blair and Natanyahu are Palestinians and as if their three non-votes should veto the votes of all the real Palestinian voters who overwhelmingly elected Hamas. So much for the rhetoric that America supports democracy around the world

Now, let’s consider Development AID. The best guide on the rhetoric and practice of foreign AID is probably John Perkins. In the 1970s [1971-1980] he worked as one of America’s Economic Hit Men (EHM)—consultants who are paid, “well paid--to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars” and to ensnare them “in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty.” In his recent (2004) book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins says:

“ "Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs. extortion, sex, and murder. I should know; I was an EHM,” he adds. " ”

He goes on to say:

“ "Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard comments like, “If they’re going to burn the U.S. flag and demonstrate against our embassy, why don’t we just get out of their damn country and let them wallow in their own poverty?” People who say such things often hold diplomas certifying that they are well educated. However, these people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant turning the American republic into a global empire. Despite credentials, such people are as uneducated as those eighteenth-century colonists who believed that the [American] Indians fighting to defend their lands were servants of the devil.” ”

He goes on to set the record straight:

“ "Claudine [his clandestine NSA trainer for his undercover work as an EHM] told me there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to . . . U.S. companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans . . . so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources. . . . the unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors, and to make a handful of wealthy and influential families in the receiving countries very happy, while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world. The larger the loan, the better. The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health, education, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration. . . .The loans of foreign aid ensure that today’s children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back." ”

So, that’s that, as it were, from the horse’s own mouth, from one who worked to lure countries into the debt trap. He further tells us that “we make loans to countries with the full knowledge that they will never repay them; in fact, we do not want them to honor their debt, since the non-payment is what gives us our leverage, our pound of flesh.” Incidentally, you can now see why imperialism will not allow Nigeria to escape the debt trap, even after OBJ hands over your foreign reserves to the Paris Club.

With the advantage of such expert insights, we can better appreciate what the World Order, whether the Old or the New, is really all about: Plunder of the weak. Or as Chomsky says:

“ "The basic rules of world order remain as they have always been: the rule of law for the weak, the rule of force for the strong; the principles of “economic rationality” for the weak, state power and intervention for the strong. As in the past, privilege and power do not willingly submit to popular control or market discipline, and therefore seek to undermine meaningful democracy and to bend market principles to their special needs." ”

(The key books to read for basic education on Imperialism since 1492, the New World Order, American power etc are On Power and Ideology: the Managua Lectures, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Turning the Tide, Understanding Power, World Orders Old and New, all by Noam Chomsky; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins; Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney; The West and the rest of Us, by Chinweizu; and The Black Man’s Burden, by E. D. Morel)

Thesis #4: The Haitification of Nigeria

Haiti, the first formal black republic, was founded with high hopes in 1804 by self freed ex-slaves who defeated the army that Napoleon had sent to re-enslave or, if necessary, exterminate them. What is the path whereby Haiti has arrived at its present condition of chaos where desperately poor Haitian boat people are fleeing the country as economic and political refugees?

Let us take a look, first at Haiti in 1803-04; then at Haiti in 2000-2005; and then see how the sad decline was inflicted.

Haiti 1803-04 In November 2005, the poets known as The Maroons had this to say in celebrating the birth of Haiti:

“ "On this day [in Nov. 1803], 202 years ago, African slaves on the island of Haiti (then known as St. Domingue) defeated the one and only Napoleon Bonaparte. . . . On this day, 202 years ago, Maroons of the past, African soldiers (former slaves) ripped off the shackles of slavery and spit them into Napoleon's face. Under the command of men like Toussaint Louverture (hailed as the Black Spartacus), Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Petion, Boukman, Biassou, Hyacinthe and Makendal the chains of slavery cried out in pain as West African slaves and the newly rising mulattoes/Afranchi gave birth to an independent nation, the first black republic...Haiti.

202 years ago, Rochembeau bowed down to Dessalines power. He fled with his tail between his legs and returned to Napoleon a defeated general, defeated at the hands of a former slave. On this day, 202 years ago, African cultural continuity played a pivotal role in the outcome of the slave uprising. With their age-old beliefs, history and culture intact, the enslaved Africans were able to forcefully and relentlessly resist the oppression they encountered in St. Domingue. Though largely misunderstood and maligned by Westerners, the Vodun religion our ancestors carried across the Atlantic Ocean infused them with a fiery determination to free themselves from human bondage."

”

Dessalines, at the head of the triumphant indigenous army, entered Cap on Nov. 30, 1803. On December 4, the French also surrendered the northwestern peninsula and Mole St. Nicolas to the victors and the French occupation and control of Haiti ended forever."

27 days later, the first free black nation was born, the first black republic, the originator of freedom,"}}

But now, two centuries later, this is Haiti:

Haiti 2000-2005
Let me quote from a news report datelined Nov. 17, 2005:

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world and getting poorer.

Only parts of sub-Saharan Africa are worse off. The armed rebellion that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide early last year [2004] and the continuing insecurity ever since have steepened the decline. Prices rose 15 percent this year, while most incomes stand still at less than a dollar a day. And many Haitians fear that elections later this year will erupt in violence.

“ "We will never let the election find us in Haiti," ”

said Jippy Hamilton, a 29-year-old mechanic.

For the past eight months, Hamilton and his childhood friend Ricardeau Felix have been scouring the city for scrap, building a 16-foot speedboat for a rare direct shot at Miami.

“ "I have no life here, Even if I die at sea, I have no choice. There is no life for me in Haiti." ”

In this old French colonial port, one sailor plans to smuggle his own family out. A journalist is fleeing political gangs. An unemployed mechanic hopes to be a better father from afar. A single mother prays that she can find a future for her children in Miami, even as she leaves them behind.

They are people whose wrenching personal stories are often lost under the category of economic refugees. They drown, they get robbed, they climb into the most wretched of boat holds, packed body to body in steaming heat, hoping to go anywhere but here.

Haiti's relentless poverty has bred a paralyzing sense of helplessness, with thousands of people concluding that the only way to take control of their lives is to leave - no matter what the risk.

They make news now and then, as in the televised landing of 220 Haitians on Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway in 2002, and the drownings of three women whose bodies washed up in Pompano Beach on Nov. 5. But mostly, they are invisible.

U.S. and Bahamian officials stopped about 3,200 migrants in the last fiscal year [i.e. 2004], fewer than in some years, more than in others. The Coast Guard has clamped down since the 2002 incident, dramatically reducing the number of migrant ships sailing straight into Miami. Smugglers have reacted accordingly. They carry fewer people at a time, charge more and take a circuitous route.

Migrants often make several attempts just to complete the first leg of the journey, to Providenciales in the British colony of Turks and Caicos, 150 miles north of Haiti. From there, they hope to move into the Bahamas and then try to slip into Florida on speedboats.

In the north coast port of Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city, handmade boats with anywhere from 10 to 200 passengers sail into the pipeline every week. Many more leave from the northern town of Port-de-Paix and the offshore island of La Tortue.

Some make it to their destination. Others don't.

Storms sink them or drive them far off course. Winds die and stall them for weeks as passengers run out of food and water. Coast Guard cutters intercept them, destroy their boats and send them home.

Smugglers deceptively loop around and drop them back off in Haiti, or leave them to perish on uninhabited islands. Armed bandits attack them.

Ima Pyrrhon, 23, lost her husband on a trip that left here with 15 people in August. She was told that he and six others drowned when the boat capsized. She says she can barely speak since it happened.

“ "We had three children and another baby on the way.... We made this decision. We had no choice. He was all I ever had." ”

---

How Haiti got there: the Haiti Highway

Now, how did Haiti get from the high achievement of defeating Napoleon, two centuries ago, to this desperate poverty and fleeing boat people of today? As Noam Chomsky put it:

Haiti, in fact, is a parable of Western savagery. That was one of the first places Columbus landed, and he thought it was a paradise—it was the richest place in the world, and also probably the most densely populated place in the world. And in fact, it remained that way: France is a rich country in large measure because it stole Haiti’s resources, and even early in the twentieth century, before Woodrow Wilson sent the U.S. Marines to invade and wreck the country in 1915, American scholarship and government studies on Haiti were still describing it as a major resource center—it just happened to be an extremely rich place. Well, take a look if you fly into Haiti today. The island consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the Dominican Republic we’ve [i.e. the U.S.] also brutalized, but Haiti much more so—and you can just see if you look down from the plane: on one side its brown, on the other side its sort of semi-green. The brown side is Haiti, the [once] richest place in the world. It may not last another couple decades—literally it may become uninhabitable.”

A little chronology of events will help here.

1791-1804: The War of Independence. The Republic of Haiti was founded in 1804 by

Dessalines the conqueror of Napoleon, with a constitution that forbade foreigners from owning land in Haiti.

1825 France exacted reparation of Fr.150m for the loss of its slaves; this was the

condition for recognizing Haiti, and letting it into the global market. This reparations debt led to decades of French domination of Haiti’s finance, with catastrophic effects on the new nation’s economy. This debt was not liquidated till 1887.

1849-1913: In total disregard of Haitian sovereignty, U.S. Navy ships entered Haitian

waters 24 times to “protect American lives and property”.

1915: U.S. Marines invade, occupy and begin administering Haiti on the excuse of

humanitarianism and enforcing America’s Monroe Doctrine.

1916: A “treaty” turned Haiti into a political and financial protectorate of the U.S.A.

1918: A “plebiscite” conducted by the Marines “approved” a U.S. sponsored

constitution that allowed foreigners to own land in Haiti. U.S. investors move in and take large tracts of land for plantations worked by extremely cheap labor. [23¢ per day compared to $3 per day in Panama, in 1926]

1922: the U.S. grants loans to fund Haiti’s national debt.

1934: U.S. Marine rule ends.

1947: Haiti liquidates the 1922 debt to the U.S. ending U.S. control of Haiti’s finance.

1934-1957: A succession of Haitian presidents attempt unsuccessfully to change the

constitution to allow them extra terms in office. Some were blocked. One, Lescot, was overthrown by students and mobs.

1957: Dr Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier elected President; rules Haiti with the help of

the state-sponsored death squads-- the Tonton Macoute.

1964: Papa Doc “elected” President-for-life.

1971: Papa Doc dies. His son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier inherits position of

President-for-life. Under the Duvaliers, in the 1960s and 1970s, US-owned assembly plants move in to exploit labor kept extremely cheap by Tonton Macoute terror. In the early 1980s, Haiti is subjected to the dogmas of IMF Fundamentalism. Under USAID-World Bank programs, 30% of the cultivated land is shifted from food for local consumption to export crops. As tourism booms and poverty deepens, and terror blankets the land, boat people begin to leave in the 1970s. (For an example of USAID destructiveness see Appendix 6 at pp. 51-55)

1986: Baby Doc overthrown

1990: Aristide elected President; inaugurated in Feb. 1991; He tried, against USAID

opposition, to raise the nominal minimum wage from 25¢ to 37¢ an hour; was overthrown seven months later by the Duvalierist military, plunging the country into a political crisis from which it has not fully emerged.

Haiti as a theatre of the race war

It is important to view Haiti properly in the context of the race war. Since Columbus first visited the island, the whites [first the Spanish, then the French, and then the Americans] have attacked and exterminated or enslaved the non-whites they found or brought there.

Phase One: The Spaniards vs the Aboriginal “Indians”

Columbus described the people he found as “lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous,” and their land as rich and bountiful. Hispaniola was “perhaps the most densely populated place in the world,” Las Casas wrote, “a beehive of people, “ who “of all the infinite universe of humanity, . . . are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity.” Driven by “insatiable greed and ambition,” the Spaniards fell upon them “like ravening wild beasts, . . . killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing and destroying the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard before, and to such a degree” that the population is barely 200 persons, he wrote in 1552, “from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed.” “It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel,” he wrote: “not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.” “As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures, . . . [they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked.” . . . The Spanish effort to plunder the island’s riches by enslaving its gentle people were unsuccessful; they died too quickly, if not killed by the “wild beasts” or in mass suicide. African slaves were sent for from the early 1500s, later in a flood as the plantation economy was established.

That was the Spanish war of extermination on the native Indians.

Phase Two: The French vs the Africans

With African slave labor, Saint Domingue, as the French renamed the Island, became the greatest wealth-producing colony in the Americas. By 1789, it was producing three-quarters of the world’s sugar, and was also a leader in the production of coffee, cotton, indigo, and rum. In coercing the labor for this production from 450,000 African slaves, the French

“ "hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars . . ., forced them to eat shit, . . . cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or unto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos, . . .threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup” – when not “flaying them with the lash” to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men’s club." ”

Against such horrors, African rebellions were frequent. These rebellions finally exploded into the liberation war that began in 1791 and that saw the defeat of Napoleon’s army in 1803. That was the first part of the French-African phase of the race war that the whites inflicted on the blacks, and the Africans won it in the end.

The second part of this French-African race war in Haiti began with the indemnity/reparations imposed on Haiti by France in 1825. It was a long economic war and the French won it.

Phase Three: The Americans vs the Africans

This American-African phase of the race war began in 1915 when Woodrow Wilson, --the man famous for his “idealism” [Wilsonian Idealism] who, in his oratory, defended the rights of small nations to self-determination; the apostle of world peace who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919—sent in the U.S. Marines to occupy Haiti. In their 20 years rule, “Wilson’s troops murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery” as Chomsky says. They indulged in “indiscriminate killing of natives” and some of them boasted that they “hunted the Cacos [i.e.Haitians] like pigs.”

The economic side of this race war has continued till today and has produced the exodus of boat people since the 1970s. They are, indeed, refugees from an economic war orchestrated by the World Bank and USAID to produce a situation where “Haitian wages, expressed in U.S. dollars, had fallen 39% from 1983 to 1991; “where assembly workers spent as much as one-quarter of their daily wage, and two hours of time, just getting to and from work”; where, “in 1990, an estimated 70 per cent of the Haitian workforce was either unemployed or underemployed: and where each job in the assembly export sector in Haiti feeds an estimated five to seven people”. “How do seven people survive on a wage of 14 U.S. cents an hour?” Here are two reported examples of how:

1. “An extremely competent looking woman in her late thirties who had worked in the plant for four years as an inspector made H$4 a day. . . . the equivalent of US$1.48 a day. Travel cost her 52 U.S. cents a day and she spent 37 cents a day on food. That leaves 59 U.S. cents. To make H$4.00 she works a nine hour day. She has two sons, eight and ten. She told us, ‘The money goes very fast. Often there is nothing left for the weekend.’. . .
2. A young man had worked in the plant for four years. He was making H$3 a day. He had a wife and two children, aged one and four-and-half. It cost him 41 U.S. cents a day for transportation and he skipped lunch. This meant he could go home with 70 cents a day. He and his family can afford only one meal a day. His home is a one-room straw hut. . . When it rains, the house becomes flooded and everything is drenched. For such a house for his family, he pays US$115 a year rent. What else can you afford on wages of 14 cents an hour?”

When you reflect on these phases, it is clear that despite beating Napoleon in battle, the Africans of Haiti have come full circle in 200 years, from chattel slavery and its physical brutalities back to wage slavery with its economic and physical brutalities today.

(The books to read on Haiti are The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James; The Irritated Genie by Jacob Carruthers; The Haiti Files ed by James Ridgeway; “The tragedy of Haiti”, Chapter 8 of Year 501: The Conquest Continues by Noam Chomsky; AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer)

Now, let us inspect the key spots on the Haiti Highway on which Haiti has been forced to travel since 1804: Haiti was dragged into the Debt Trap in 1825; It was held in the Debt Trap, by trick or by force till 1947; The USA repeatedly violated its sovereignty in the second half of the 19th century and finally invaded it in 1915; occupied it till 1934 and re-organized it for American economic control and exploitation; Haiti has never recovered from the damage inflicted by the American occupation and by IMF fundamentalism with its dogma of a foreignized and export-oriented, open-door economy. In Haiti’s case this means that foreign companies pay no taxes, and can get virtually free labor at less than $2 a day. Hence the exodus of Haiti’s boat people. This journey has taken Haiti 200 years to accomplish.

How Nigeria is almost there too Nigeria has already gotten itself into imperialist economic and political control through the debt trap and the dogmas of IMF fundamentalism; the U.S. Navy is already in physical possession of Nigeria’s off-shore oilfields in the Gulf of Guinea; its economy, through the OBJ foreignization program, is largely in foreign hands; and the number of political assassinations suggests that Nigeria’s equivalent of Haiti’s Tonton Macoute already is active. OBJ is already taking land from Nigerians and settling on it white, racist Rhodesian farmers expelled from Zimbabwe. Blacks who welcome and give land to white refugees to settle ought to note what happened to Lobengula in the 19th century:

On Welcoming Predators (In memory of Lobengula who welcomed in Cecil Rhodes)

With open arms

He welcomed a smiling tiger into his home;

With open jaws

The tiger welcomed him into his belly.

After all, smiled the beast,

One good welcome deserves another.

OBJ has already instigated a shift of farmland from cassava for local consumption to cassava for export. Predictably, this short-sighted policy will lead to mass starvation like the Irish Potato Famine in the 19th century. But what country today can welcome 100 million starving refugees from Nigeria? The economy is already in ruins. All in all, the Haitification of Nigeria is almost completed. The large oil revenue is all that masks the full extent of the economic and social disaster. As for the exodus of desperate Nigerians, it has been on for sometime now: the members of the economically destroyed middle class have been “checking out” to seek employment elsewhere; young women have been escaping to Europe to engage in prostitution; able-bodied young men have been stowing away or paying human trafficking syndicates to smuggle them into Europe. Thus, Nigeria has managed to go very far on the same road, almost reaching, in just 45 years, where it took Haiti 200 years to reach. If OBJnomics persists and gets entrenched, it can’t be long before the exodus of desperate Nigerians reaches Haitian proportions.

So long as we remain trapped on the Haiti Highway, if you want to see Nigeria’s future, just look at Haiti today. The longer Nigeria continues to exist, the greater the disaster it will bring upon the Nigerian population.

Thesis #5: African Power

I have presented a brief picture of where we have arrived after a century in the prisoner-of-war camp that is Nigeria, and of what our prospects are if we stay in it.

I have tried to clarify that

“Slave Trade” was race war;

Colonialism was race war;

Neo-colonialism is race war;

Racism is race war;

AIDS in Africa is Race war;

Pressing GM crops on starving Africa is race war;

Imperialism in Africa is race war;

Arabism in Africa is race war;

the conflict in Sudan is race war; the chaos in Haiti is race war;

Africa in debt trap is race war!

It should be clear that our disasters over the centuries have been caused by African powerlessness. (See The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams; and Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah) Therefore, if we want our disasters to end, we need to build African power. Like Marcus Garvey said: “The only protection against INJUSTICE in man is POWER—physical, financial and scientific.” If we want to survive the race war, we must, like Garvey also told us, “create for ourselves a political superstate, . . . [one] strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.” But where do we start, where do we start? I would say, lets start with awareness of the essentials. (The principal book to read on African Power is Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey).

For a millennium or more, the ultimate source of all our disasters has been the abject and chronic powerlessness of Africa. We must therefore pose the problem of African power, and do so starkly and sharply, without evasions. We must solve the problem of African power with rigor and vigour or we shall be exterminated in this 21st century. We must face up to the fact that the AU, NEPAD, the UN, Liberalism, Humanism, Marxology, Christianity, Islam, etc are antithetical to African Power. We must realize that the development we need is not the development of African consumerism or contractorism, but the development of African Power. And the key to that development is Afro-modernization, the project of putting African culture and societies on an industrialized foundation. And we must accept that, for industrialization, Bourgeois democracy, Sharia, Christianity, Islam, Humanism, Arabization, Europeanization etc., are, at best, wholly irrelevant or decoys. Industrialization is the only key. That’s the secret behind the power today of the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Americans, Russians, Indians etc.

The question now is: If you don’t want to continue to be ground down, and to end up like the people of Haiti in your life time; if you don’t want your children and grand children to be exterminated by the end of this century, like what happened to the Native North Americans in the 19th century, and to the indigenous population of Haiti in the 16th century,

What is to be done?

In bringing about change, the first thing is awareness. Like Noam Chomsky said:

“ "Begin with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there is something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition." ”

But what kind of awareness, specifically, do we most need in Nigeria today? I would suggest we follow the advice of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese sage and master strategist who said: “Know yourself, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.” That’s a good place to start, by educating ourselves about Nigeria, about Africa and its history, its place in the world and how that has come about.

We must especially become fully aware of the aspects of the race war in the 21st century. These include:

1. The AIDS bombing of Africa, by white (European) power, a covert attack that is exterminating Black Africans all over the continent.
2. The wars of ethnic cleansing and extermination to expropriate the Nile basin that the Arab League is waging on Africans.
3. The economic war by debt trap, unfair trade, genetically modified crops, globalization, etc, being inflicted by the European powers.
4. The cultural warfare through Europeanization, Christianization, Arabization and Islamization of Africans.
5. The intra-African proxy wars being orchestrated by white powers from afar, like those in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, the Congo, Uganda etc.
   

But there a few other things we need to know:

1. The fact that most Africans today are Christians or Moslems and culturally schizoid, the fact that we are conducting this lecture in English, are the results of our ancestors’ defeats in the race war; defeats that made possible the culturecide and cultural dementia inflicted on us in the 20th century.
2. Lugardism, the AU, NEPAD etc, are not just irrelevant decoys; they are indeed among the prime obstacles to our building African Power. For instance, what good is a NEPAD development that is preparing you for powerlessness and extermination?
3. The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity. If we are not building African power we are doing worse than nothing, and we might as well be dead already.
4. To learn how African Power can be built, we need to investigate how Japanese power, Chinese power, Soviet power and Indian power were built in the 19th and 20th centuries, against determined opposition from European White power.
5. African membership in the UN, the AU, the Arab League, the British Commonwealth (for former British colonies), l’Organisation Internatinale de la Francophonie or the Organisation of French speaking countries (for former French colonies), and Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa or the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (for the former Portuguese colonies) are symptoms of African powerlessness. They are the problem, not parts of the solution.
6. The development and the culture we need to fashion are those that make African Power possible. For that, Sharia, Anglo-Saxon law, Bourgeois democracy, Humanism, Christianity, Islam, Marxology etc are simply irrelevant.
7. Above all, we must accept that the next 50 years are do-or-die for Africans.

If we don’t build African Power by 2060, we’ll be exterminated by 2100. The few that are not wiped out by AIDS and other black-specific virus bombs, will be hunted down and killed off by the ethnic cleansing militias of the Arabs, like the Janjaweed of Sudan. The very few that escape both AIDS and Arabs, will end up in zoos and reservations, just like the native Indians of North America did in the 19th century.

These Lugardist states that litter the African landscape, with their AU, NEPAD etc, are coffins. Those who fail to get out of them will be buried by them. They are the false frameworks and wrong foundations for building African Power.

No matter how poor or rich you are, the rest of this century will be hell for you if you don’t build African Power. Even if you do a Mobutu or an Abacha, and steal every dollar of your country’s revenue, you’ll live through hell unless there’s African Power to protect you.

Unless you build African Power to prevent it, you’ll be killed off either by AIDS or by Arabs. If you are under 30, you have your life mission spelled out: help to build African Power! It is up to you to decide to fulfil or betray that mission.

Wherever you find yourself each day, the paramount question you should ask yourself is: What can I do from here to help build African power? It doesn’t matter whether you are a cook or a carpenter, a soldier or a shrine attendant, a poet or plumber, a gardener or general, a farmer or trader, a teacher or a singer, an engineer or an economist, a mother or a father, a village head or a head of state. You should ask and answer the same question each and every day.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, what is my message to you today? What should you take away from this talk? If you want Black Africa to survive and thrive and end its litany of woes and humiliations, you should pay attention to three things and act accordingly:

#The 20th century has been the most disastrous century, so far, for Black Africa. It was the century in which, under colonialism, Black Africa was subjected to culturecide at the hands of White Power. That culturecide destroyed our ability to resist the genocide that is now taking place. As a result, this 21st century is likely to see the physical extermination of Black Africans, unless those now under 30 organize and defeat the extermination campaign that white power has already unleashed on Black Africa. Therefore, #The problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power – how to build it, and enough of it, to end the long era of our defeats and disasters in the race war, to prevent our extermination, and to ensure our dignity. #In setting forth to build African power, you must understand that Lugardism is a false framework and the Lugardist states are the wrong foundation for building African Power. Escape from these coffins and start afresh.

Thank you.