I’m writing a novel on a blog, called Doc Ouagadougou and Young Dessalines. It is a Pan-Africanist literary project. Reach it here at http://doyd.wordpress.com/. I’ll be updating it at least twice a month, and in practice much more often. The project should last up to a year. The first chapter is finally up. Check it out, comment and follow. Chapter 2 is already in progress.
The Novel
Posted in African Internationalism, african nationalism, african revolution, art and revolution, pan-africanism, third world on February 9, 2010 by The Precision AfrikanLe Problème
Posted in Haitians, african unity, africans, afrikan revolution, afrikans, autonomy, ayiti, haiti, haiti earthquake, imperialism, lavalas, lespwa, pan-africanism, rené préval, self-determination on January 17, 2010 by The Precision Afrikan
I am quite uncomfortable with the nature of relief efforts in our beloved Haiti, where the airport is occupied by the US military, who control who can land in the country. That what is left of Préval’s government has essentially surrendered control of the country (for those who control the ports and airports control the country effectively) to the US imperialists is rather neocolonial. I mainly say this not to overlook who the obvious power in this hemisphere is, with a great capacity to offer legitimate assistance if it wanted to, but rather to point out that the US military is militarizing the aid situation and instituting an occupation, along with the UN troops who’ve already been there for some time. This is not a situation requiring guns and 8,000 American professional killers. This is a situation that requires international outreach that respects the dignity of our family in Haiti, not assuming they are suspect or infantile like the system tends to assume of all black people.
I would like to see the aid process being democratized. Allow international aid in and out as it is necessary, and don’t prioritize US troops who will mainly march with their guns and yell disperse orders at an already traumatized population. I would have preferred if Preval more emphatically called in help from Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Jamaica, even the Dominican Republic, and other of its neighbors in our Americas. The Cubans have ’nuff experience dealing with natural disasters in an organized, disciplined, and humane fashion, regardless of magnitude, and their doctors are world renowned. There is no perfect solution, but we have to acknowledge that the US practices imperialism, meaning despite its power to offer overwhelmingly positive assistance, it is more likely to take advantage of the power vaccuum in Haiti to institute effective control over the country (to the exclusion of even aid from other countries) and keep up the old game. I’m sorry to be cynical but just watch the two videos in this post to see my point being bolstered by the evidence. The US has occupied Haiti, overthrown its legitimate presidents, and supported its dictators in the past.
We’ve already seen how, in response to Africans facing natural disaster in New Orleans four and a half years ago, the US government sent in a militarized response, and has yet to effectively help our people rebuild their lives down there. A paternalistic, militarized response in service of imperialism is not the answer here in Haiti. We are not animals, we are not savages or beasts, and we are not children. We are traumatized and need sincere and dignified assistance that respects our sovereignty and gets aid to those who need it, from whomever wants to offer it. Let the Cubans land. Let the Chinese land. Let the Mexicans land. Don’t turn this into another bullying project. I am not happy with how liberal you are allowing the imperialists to be, Préval. Shame on your ongoing neocolonial ways. It is exactly in such emergency situations as these when we cannot surrender our sovereignty, allow our dignity to be spat upon, or jettison our historical memory.
Mercedes Sosa – Rest in Uhuru!
Posted in America, africa, canción con todos, immortal technique, mercedes sosa, pan americanism, pan-africanism, revolution, south america, the third world on October 5, 2009 by The Precision AfrikanIt’s about Afrika, the Americas and the third world beyond for me, against the oppression system of capitalism, the anti-human exploitation of all those aspiring for liberation and self-determination all over planet Earth. Naxalites and “scheduled” castes and tribes in India, the landless indigenous and Afrikan peoples in the Amazon, the brown and black Garifunas in Honduras fighting fascism and golpe de estado, my Ijaw brothers and sisters in the Niger Delta declaring oil war against a fully evil regime – the victories of these strugglers are the main subjects of my plans and visions. To this fiber in me Mercedes Sosa has spoken directly, through such songs as “Canión Con Todos” (originally composed by Armando Tejada Gómez and César Isella) whose lyrics read and translate thus:
Salgo a caminar
Por la cintura cósmica del sur
Piso en la región
Más vegetal del tiempo y de la luz
Siento al caminar
Toda la piel de América en mi piel
Y anda en mi sangre un río
Que libera en mi voz
Su caudal.
Sol de alto Perú
Rostro Bolivia, estaño y soledad
Un verde Brasil besa a mi Chile
Cobre y mineral
Subo desde el sur
Hacia la entraña América y total
Pura raíz de un grito
Destinado a crecer
Y a estallar.
Todas las voces, todas
Todas las manos, todas
Toda la sangre puede
Ser canción en el viento.
¡Canta conmigo, canta
Hermano americano
Libera tu esperanza
Con un grito en la voz!
——–
Rough Google translation:
I take a walk
In the southern belt cosmic
Flat in the region
Over time plant and light
I feel when walking
All the skin on my skin American
And my blood goes into a river
That frees my voice
Flow.
Peru sun high
Face Bolivia, tin and loneliness
A kiss my green Brazil Chile
Copper and mineral
I ascend from the south
America into the heart and total
Following a pure cry
Destined to grow
And burst.
All voices, all
All hands, all
All the blood can
Being in the wind song.
Sing with me, sing
American Brother
Free your hope
With a cry in his voice!
This song is one which a spiritual Mau Mau can agree with. It is about land and freedom. The neoliberal order which seeks privatization of natural resources and social services across Latin America and Afrika does not want us to stand together in solidarity across the third world, across continents, across nations. The Aymara and Quechua in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador have the same struggles against international larceny and aristocratic barbarism and land displacement as the Kalabari-Ijaw, Okrikas and Ogonis in Nigeria. The anti-human dictators don’t want us to, with todas las manos y todas las voces y toda la sangre, liberar nos esperanzas con un grito en la voz! Our aspiration for revolution and freedom, for land and freedom, is the same grito from Brazil and Brooklyn to Baghdad and Congo-Kinshasa, from Sumatra and Borneo and West Papua to Panama and Peru. The similarities of the dimensions of struggle demand a vigorous and practical solidarity across all fronts, towards a truly humanistic practice of revolutionary human liberation.
The specific Pan-American dimension of the struggle is more clear to me now having immersed myself in the music of Mercedes Sosa these past months. As a resident and child of El Norte – the belly of the beast, I dwell in the nation-state largely responsible for the modern and contemporary plunder and unraveling of Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Two coups have occurred in the past five years alone – one in Haiti and the other in Honduras – which to varying degrees bear shades of US support and sponsorship, or at least convenient indifference. The same elitist cabals were behind both. The intertwined history of the Western Hemisphere is something all of its children need to confront if liberation is ever to occur here. Immortal Technique, in the song “The 4th Branch,” asks “how could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave, indigenous holocaust and the home of the slave?” It is the long legacy of these historical traits, which have essentially invented the Americas over these past 500 years, that helps explain the caste systems and geographies and mechanics of oppression which we of the Americas now endure. The Americas includes people from all over the world, and in many ways, in many areas, is a microcosmic reproduction of the whole rest of the planet. If revolution can occur here, its model can be adapted to the old world. In El Norte alone, the vision of Afrikans, Indigenous people of Turtle Island, and Latin Americans collaborating and congealing towards a visionary radical force and bloc, disposing with all the fake “sweet nothing” counterrevolutionary Obamas and Sotomayors, could truly spark the march of revolutionary change. This is, in part, what I imagine as my contribution to the Americas, to Pan-Americanism.
I owe to the late Mercedes Sosa much in opening this vision in me.
Viva Mercedes Sosa! Rest in UHURU!
Viva America!
Viva Afrika!
FORWARD TO REVOLUTION!
Brain Drain – Irreversible Short of Revolutionary Thinking
Posted in africa, african revolution, africans, afrikan revolution, afrikans, autonomy, black nationalism, brain drain, capitalism, collectivism, communalism, comparative advantage, economic migrants, economic migration, economics, emigration, exodus, global migration, health, human development, human freedom, immigration, money, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, neoliberalism, north-south imbalance, north-south migration, pan-africanism, revolution, self-determination, structural adjustment, third world on March 19, 2008 by The Precision AfrikanOn March 3, 2008, a conference on Afrika’s brain drain (particularly of medical professionals) opened in Kampala, Uganda. The conference aimed to highlight the desperate medical needs of the continent, and how the lure of better pay in the West prevented Afrika from meeting those needs. I have heard that there are as many or more Nigerian doctors in the West than in Nigeria. In any case, the brain drain, dealt with here with respect to health professionals in Afrika, has created lopsided imbalances in doctor-to-population ratios, and has resulted in the biggest health care shortage of all world regions. The conference highlighted that a global action plan is necessary to “manage” the migration, which cannot be halted. But I think our planning around the problem of the brain drain in the third world, Afrika in particular, must take a far more critical and revolutionary cast than this talking shop would allow.
Afrika is losing fastest its citizens with the skills most readily desired in the West – including engineers, doctors, lecturers, writers, nurses, therapists, musicians, and others in the creative and professional fields, whose training often comes at great expense to their home countries. But these countries can’t compensate, or in many cases permit to operate in freedom, such professionals to the levels expected in the West. And in the West, the fiscal priorities of governments no longer include training domestic health-care professionals, engineers, and other professionals. Thus in much of America, doctors and nurses frequently come in dark skin and bear international accents – be they Indians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, etc. It is cheaper to import professionals than to invest in education. If not for immigrant professionals in the contemporary economies of the US, Canada, the UK, or France, these countries would likely face labor shortages in critical areas like health-care, infrastructure, university staffing, and so on.
The West is currently winning the war over the world’s best and brightest workers. Immigration schemes in the US, Britain and France privilege the most highly trained and certified candidates. When Afrika tries to fill its shortages of professionals by employing expatriate staff, she winds up spending over $4 billion a year, according to a This Day (Lagos) article from April 26, 2007. And since 1990, Afrika has been losing 20,000 professionals per year to more developed countries.
There is an even more desperate exodus to highlight, of ordinary Afrikans leaving the continent for Europe by any means – a dangerous boat ride to the Canary Islands, a long trek across the Sahara to Morocco to jump the fence into Melilla and Ceuta, Somali and Ethiopian boat-people bound for Yemen, and so on. But the root of the problem is the nature of global capital itself, the geographies of wealth, power and influence established by Western imperialism. The global centers and the peripheries – and most of us, especially Afrikans, are living in the peripheries – are in a dialectically opposed relationship based on who defines wealth and who is supposed to produce wealth for its definers.
Our economies, based on primary commodity exports, are chasing after what Western economies are willing to give of their prestigious currencies for our unprocessed goods. Our cocoa, coffee, diamonds, gold, petroleum, coltan, etc. – their prices are all controlled in the West, and are subject to the rise or fall of demand for them in the West. Thus our economies are controlled by the West, to the extent that we continue in this totally economically unimaginative, uncreative and slavish direction, which directly continues neo-colonialism and permits neoliberalism.
In such a regime, how can lasting wealth ever be generated among the masses, and within the broader economy such that it can retain its professionals, indeed all its workers who are all of equal worth, by compensating them well, by providing them with free, democratic, protected spaces in which to work, by having jobs available at all, jobs which contribute to Afrikan economies and Afrikan people’s well-being, not Westerners? How long will we listen to the dictates of “comparative advantage” within structural adjustment philosophy, which bids us keep doing what we are good at (selling cash crops and minerals, etc.) to get wealthy, while eliminating public expenditures on health care, education, etc. and introducing user fees that very few Afrikans can pay?
If you want to stop the brain drain, you will need a revolution, both in economic structure and in the ideology which socializes Afrikans. We must learn to stop seeing everything Western as prestigious and come to have full faith in and love for ourselves. That means we will be dedicated to using our skills, whatever they may be, first and foremost for the benefit of other Afrikans, and not merely seek for jobs offered in the West or by white bosses. And the economic structure has to use Afrikan resources for the benefit of Afrikans first, meaning we Afrikans will use our own raw materials and process or manufacture them into something useful to us first.
I’m not interested in “export-led growth” or the free-market and whatever GDP numbers are supposed to show us. They say Afrikan economies are now growing at x percent a year. Which Afrikans are getting richer then? Mainly those running banks, and running tel-com companies, and running churches, and doing crime. The rest are starving or leaving Afrika in droves, including doctors, nurses, engineers, laborers and farmers. The news is not good.
Revolution – in economic policies, in consciousness, all around – must govern how we think and plan towards stopping this “brain drain.” Afrikans must realize that we are continuing to sell ourselves out, if we do nothing to overturn the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and the global economic structure and the geographies of wealth and exploitation. Afrika and the third world must overthrow the maquiladoras and plantations of the West, the mines, etc. and assume self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and commitment to our own peoples and lands. We must overthrow our notion of what money is, indeed we should get rid of money all together, or at least stop holding in such high prestige and value these currencies imposed on us by the West, on which most Afrikan currencies are based, their values pegged to them without afterthought. Humanity, progress, the beauty of a just and healthy Afrikan society and a clean Afrikan community and nation with great infrastructure and health and education – these things must come to be the prime motivators of Afrikan peoples, not cash money, especially all this money based on Western currency, and ultimately hoarded and locked up in the West itself.
If not revolution, Afrika will only become further ghettoized by the further emaciation of its own knowledge and skills base, the crumbling of its own already blasted universities, and so on. Then, these neo-colonial governments will spend billions on NGOs and expatriates from the West to look like they are doing something, when these foreigners only further alienate us from our will to act independently and see ourselves as capable of whatever is necessary to rescue ourselves.
Afrikans need to believe in and work for ourselves, or at least build towards that reality. There is no reason, no rule in the universe, that Afrikans in Afrika cannot have the highest living standards in the world, based on our great material resources, and on our human resources – and the most important resource of all is the human resource.
Yet Another Blog…
Posted in afrikans, art and revolution, dharma, hip-hop, hip-hop music, hip-hop studies, hip-hop theory, human freedom, literary criticism, literary theory, music, music and revolution, rap music, zen on February 23, 2008 by The Precision AfrikanI’ve started my third blog, Hip Hop Dharma, which branches off the last entry to allow me to do really free-associative thinking on hip hop, the arts, my arts, the real world/ samsara/ the burning house, and other juju/ kensho shit. Take a look. This definitely relates to Afrikan revolution, and to being human.

