The Novel

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.

Le Problème

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!

Mercedes Sosa passed away recently – a beautifully humanistic half-indigenous singer de Argentina. Her revolutionary voice only became known to me after viewing the film Che on it’s road show appearances in December 2008 in NYC. The song “Balderrama” is on that film’s soundtrack and is probably the most interesting and compelling song to me of any music in that film. Since then I had managed to get a copy of her powerful sixteen year-old album 30 Años and I must admit to listening to a little bit of it like every other day. The thing that Mercedes Sosa has managed to teach me, the Pan-Afrikanist militant, is the location and raison d’être of that which is Pan-American in me, which helps me have a practical revolutionary policy towards the Americas, where I was born and have always lived, and towards the whole oppressed world.

It’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!

Planning Aloud, in Light of Repatriation and Commitment

The dimensions of what it means to be an Afrikan patriot have dawned on me ever harder and fill me with more vigor, decisiveness and heaviness. My thoughts lead me to the concrete conclusion that permanent repatriation to serve Afrikan development on the continent is definitely the answer for me, following several more years here and elsewhere of training in skills which interest me and seem quite important and practical for our human, ecological, and social development.

So many influences and thoughts have brought me to this thinking. I have been of the Pan-Afrikanist mindset for well over three and a half years now (since mid-2005, after graduating from undergrad college), but a deep commitment to repatriation had been heretofore rather minor or at best ambivilent in my innermost mind. Of late, though gradually, the commitment to repatriation, one of the most personal conclusions a Pan-Afrikanist born and living in the diaspora can make, has truly begun to click.

From simple reasonings leading to this to the most involved, I will lightly touch on why it is that now I am moving solidly in this direction and what I plan to do along the way. One reason is physiology and diet. I primarily eat tropical fruits (I’m a raw vegan/fruitarian – see my other blog for more info), yet I live within the perimeter of the NYC metro area. How much sense does it make for me as a person eating that sort of diet, and who aspires towards practicing tropical agroforestry anyway, to justify all this international food mileage, when I can just go dwell where my food grows? True, I was born here in North America, and lived all of my 25 earthly years here but for a semester of study abroad in Ghana and Nigeria. But I think my body was most at home during the period when I skipped a whole winter and was in Afrika half a year (in 2007). I loved experiencing almost a year of mild to hot weather and ample sunshine. Winter truly ain’t my trip. I am aware that as a very dark-skinned person I shouldn’t get involved in winters at all. I am probably too far from the equator in NYC to stimulate sufficient vitamin D production in my body naturally through sun exposure on a continual basis. And I want to live a by far more outdoors-oriented life than I can now. Tropical living alone is definitely the answer for me on a personal level – enough with these winters, for real. Life is way too short to endure winters as an Afrikan.

Obviously the deeper contemplations around land and food security, as well as sustainable ecological development and related health issues, dictate that I make my way over to Afrika and stay there to promote and practice what is necessary. In terms of the skills base I now have and will continue to seek for the next few years, at present I have an MA in Africana studies and am now studying massage therapy and personal fitness training full time, which I’ll finish in August 2009. Immediately after that I aim to begin studying towards an MS in environmental engineering, so as to be able to handle, plan, and advocate on water resource and waste water and other pollution management issues to benefit Afrikan masses and campesinos. I’d also like to pick up certification in electricity to know the basics of an electrician, and also pick up some certification on bicycle maintenance and building, both skills I’d like to have to be more survivable, handy, and useful, and to teach all these things, on the continent where electricity is limited and bicycling should be promoted and practiced. The last thing on the list of skills I want to get over in America before I leave permanently is some certification or training in web development, elementary graphic design, computer networking, and film editing. This is to promote communications between and across the Afrikan world, and to be able to operate as a propagandist for the Afrikan Revolution.

On the ground, sustainable, organic agroforestry or permaculture will be something I’d like to learn and engage in, part of why the next major thing for me will be environmental engineering. Of course the Afrikan Revolution has to be green and sustainable, has to improve human and environmental health as well as promote reforestation and increased carrying capacity of arable land through holistic means. I don’t know exactly how I will use the massage therapy and fitness training I am now learning in Afrika (those skills will be how I mainly earn and save money while in NYC), but promoting health and fitness will be central to building strong Afrikans who act with the utmost discipline. Which is why between when I leave America and when I enter Afrika, I’d like to spend some time in Brazil mastering my favorite sport, Capoeira, as well as learning Portuguese. I’d like to spread Capoeira among Afrika’s youth, bringing it back to Afrika, and building links and trust with, and confidence and pride in, these youths. I’d probably like to spend a little time in France as well learning French for use in Francophone Afrika.

A commitment to using advanced skills to promote development and education for poor and working class Afrikan people on the continent is deep in my heart. As the son of Nigerian professionals lost to the West due to the brain drain, I’d like to do what I can to reverse that loss and participate in the movement of highly-skilled Afrikans that choose to stay in Afrika, rather than seek the high monetary salaries offered by our former colonizers. Afrikans who are students and recent graduates with skills critical to further development of Afrika and her people need to ask themselves the deep moral question of the implications of participating in the brain drain by going after the big paper abroad. Begin to think that the collective upliftment of all Afrikans, not just our highly-trained individual selves, can be immensely more rewarding than going away forever, our talents lost to a continent that needs us. We have to pool knowledge and skills and get them out of these elite, inaccessible universities and into the masses. We need to be radically open, altruistic, giving, sharing, unselfish, and humanistic about the skills we pick up in these big schools – and open little schools and libraries, which are absolutely free, so more Afrikans have access to and can actualize our valuable knowledge and knowledge of the whole world. And we have to learn our indigenous knowledge, share and spread it, and thus proceed with development that doesn’t destroy our culture and environment further, but rather strengthens and evolves them.

Of course, there is so much insecurity, despotism, and war in Afrika that much of the brain drain and labor exodus to Europe and elsewhere is perfectly understandable. That’s why for my part I’d like to live in several Afrikan countries for four years, before settling permanently in one, to learn indigenous languages and establish relationships. I want to learn specifically Kalabari, the native tongue of my parents, as well as Yoruba in Nigeria, and then Lingala in DR Congo and finally KiSwahili in Tanzania. The DRC is probably the country I feel the most concern and urgency for, followed by West and East Africa. It is Afrika’s heart and the birthright of our people, though its resources are being nakedly looted and its people exploited, raped and killed massively. Being able to promote peace, education, science and critical thinking in critical major Afrikan languages has long been really important to me, and again goes back to the task of promoting communications across Afrikan peoples. Clear-thinking voices for peace and unity are always needed, especially if they are multilingual and not just in the colonial languages. And time spent in different communities will allow me to learn from them about different agricultural and herbal knowledge and other forms of indigenous knowledge being quickly lost to the scourge of globalization/ Westernization.

All this stuff may seem very ambitious, but I’m committed to it all. So long as I’m a single unmarried childless fellow dedicating my all to the Afrikan revolution, I expect to complete all the above educational tasks by my late thirties, with the years of learning Afrikan languages in different places before settling down in one place beginning in my early to mid thirties. Then, it’s all for the revolution. Starting at my current age of 25, Phase 1, finishing massage therapy/ fitness training school, studying environmental engineering, all up through electrical and web design, etc. should take the next five-six years. Phase 2, leaving America for some brief time in France and Brazil, should happen in years seven and eight (from now). Phase 3, living in four Afrikan countries, should take place during roughly years nine-twelve, and up to fourteen. Phase 4 is when I settle down in one spot for continual work, years twelve-fourteen and onward.

I don’t know if I’ll stick to this plan to the letter: numerable unforeseen circumstances may change. Though currently not big on my mind these days, the question or circumstance of a woman or family in my life might complicate this. And the future doesn’t really exist; it’s only an idea. But I still thing the end result should be the same, and I should be in Afrika before a decade passes. I also don’t plan on doing this alone, but rather in concert, collaboration, and coordination with revolutionary Afrikan organizations and individuals.

In any case, these plans and ideas are a manifestation of my deepening conviction that for an Afrikan Internationalist like myself, for an Afrikan committed to development of the beloved motherland, repatriation is best, despite the difficulties and inconveniences. I’ve always felt alienated in America, since early teenage years if not much much earlier. It’s not a feeling that has managed to escape me as I get older, and I now know how I want to use this life, after much thought and education. And the best use for this life to me seems to be the Afrikan Revolution, in its many dimensions – indeed the Afrikan Revolution is hugely critical to the progress and evolution of all human civilization. And the best place to practice the Afrikan Revolution is Afrika.

The solution for Afrikan people is Afrikan people, not former colonizers, not international financial institutions, ngos, or multinational corporations. Afrikans need us Afrikans in the diaspora. The only person who will develop or rescue Afrika is the Afrikan, period. In due time, I’m going home, to continue the struggle, work the land, and serve and organize the people. Maybe some of y’all will join me.

Obama’s Election – Danger of the New Face of the Same Old, Dying Neo-liberal Empire

The election of Obama is an extremely dangerous step – it has the potential to neuter black critical thought and opposition to the American empire, and put people of color in this country to sleep. It is the highest height of air-headed vanity to see Obama as a change agent on behalf of Afrikan and oppressed peoples, just because he’s “in there now,” and we now have one of “ours” in the White House. At best I can begrudgingly acknowledge that initial boost of self-esteem among Afrikan peoples and maybe hope that, as has been noted by one of my elders, it can encourage young Afrikans especially males to aspire to much loftier goals than what they may feel limited to in the realms of sports or entertainment or in the streets. But I think young Afrikans are best encouraged to become revolutionaries. The urgency of the situation in Afrika, in the third world more broadly, and in the third world within America is now so great that there is no time to rest our historic and consistent criticisms of the Empire, and then not only shut up but go so far as to be apologists for Obama and nurse even lower expectations of him than any other typical president.

Obama is not revolution – not for people of any color – as well a presidential election in the USA is never a harbinger of such. Does it do Afrikan people or people of color in general any good to become the face of the hated-the-world-over American empire? Obama says he wants to get out of Iraq, but simultaneously is promising to bombard poor Afghanistan even harder and even possibly attack Pakistan. Obama is talking of closing Gitmo but what of the hundreds of US military bases all over the world, and other secret prison camps serving American interests? Obama will not overturn the doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” – the American president never has and never will, because “American President” is inherently another name for “Imperialist Headman,” and this is almost a law of nature.

I couldn’t care less for Wall Street or the Detroit automakers. He says he wants both Wall Street and “Main Street” to be happy and complementary. Well, there is just one Wall Street and they represent the tiny owning and capitalist class not just in America but across the world. But there are many many Main Streets, the masses of the American people and their livelihoods. What does it show then that he’s been so gung-ho about bailing out the miserable greedy exploiting bastards on Wall Street, and now is in favor of doing the same for the idiots in Detroit that have always been the enemies of fuel efficiency, electric and hybrid cars, and such? None of these rich CEOs, bankers and money-movers represent any of us. All they have is a swollen sense of entitlement where they have the audacity to go beg for money from Washington from the plush seats of their private jets, while the beggars on the street and the families in America and worldwide are made to feel ashamed to be in need – a desperation made real by the world system perpetuated by these rich fools Obama is so altruistic towards.

Obama’s many catch-phrases and promises may have seemed to be a facade for change many of us could fall for, but in the end his election has not put real people’s power any closer to the levers of policy and political relevance in America. If he was serious about empowering, let alone listening to, the people, he wouldn’t be appointing a whole bunch of Clintonites – as responsible for the deepening crisis on Main Street as the Bushites – in his cabinet to be. He might appoint a bunch of qualified and serious and progressive folks from the millions of otherwise anonymous masses in the country, not the old architects of the same status quo that keeps the masses down. It is further evidence of the false democracy found in the neo-liberal order worldwide. Electorates are allowed to choose figureheads, not dictate policy. Figureheads have to sound ever more clever and appealing to grip the masses, but it almost never translates into real change. Obama’s youth and blackness, and his charisma, have gripped the American people at this moment. But he is off the hook from the electorate once elected, and is answerable to corporate, moneyed, and militaristic interests, just as every president before him was. And his appointment of tainted Clintonites is the very negation of his message of “change.”

I could easily go on with the counter-revolutionary, let alone utterly un-progressive and even anti-Afrikan, nature of Obama’s views and the tendencies to be put in practice by his administration – pro-death penalty, pro-Israel, pro-expanding the military, and so on. Thus it will be of critical importance for Afrikans and other people of color to drop the hypnosis of the moment as quickly as possible, and rise to an even more critical and cynical mindset than we had with Bush. But I think that is perhaps the genius of the ruling class – to have a figurehead whose most superficial characteristics – his color – will appease the otherwise most critical element in America – while they can get away with even more aggression and exploitation, especially increasingly towards Afrika with the newly christened AFRICOM endeavor, headed by a black general to boot. Little different from former Secretaries of State Powell and Rice, Obama will also in all likelihood serve capitalist and imperialist and anti-Afrikan, anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Indigenous, and anti-third world interests on behalf of the ruling class. Obama will probably even go out of his way to distance himself from the concerns of black struggle so as to remain palatable to white people and their white privilege, so he can stay in power and get re-elected.

I hope you don’t fall for this sickening hype, people. It is up to the masses, it is up to Afrikan people on our own behalf, to liberate ourselves and bring revolution and a sustainable and life-affirming existence to our world. It will never happen through an Obama, who may make it seem like racial discrimination is lessened for us in the wilderness of North America. There have been and are many black presidents in the world – in the Caribbean and in Afrika – and just about all of them have failed Afrikan peoples and served interests counter to those of the people and the poor peasantry and working classes. We Afrikan people must become change agents, not this elected figurehead. Don’t wait for him to change a damn thing for the betterment of our people. We should stay as angry at and critical towards his administration as we were towards Reagan and the Bushes, and should have been towards Clinton. None of these dudes – and Obama no iota less – are about to overturn the main music of the American executive branch – the perpetuation of American imperialism.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
AFRIKAN POWER TO THE AFRIKANS!
AFRIKA UNITE!!!
FORWARD TO REVOLUTION!

Food Riots: Crisis of Capitalism and The Monetization of Human Needs

Haiti, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Senegal, Mauritania. These are just some of the countries that have been faced by riots, strikes and demonstrations over the soaring prices of food and fuel around the world. Even in New York City, the food pantries are reporting shortages. The rising cost of oil, the diversion of food crops like corn into the production of biofuels, climate change leading to lessened harvests – these are some of the prime causes of this global crisis on the bread lines and picket lines.

Food insecurity is increasing all over the world and in the Afrikan world in particular. Oppressive neo-colonial governments are being pressed to suspend some of their taxes on basic provisions, but this will surely not solve the problem in the long run, as food and fuel prices won’t be going down any time soon. The unrest is sure to develop into more stringent forms of chaos, violence, and war. Access to water, fuel, and food for rural poor and urban poor alike, let alone land, have exacerbated the situations in Kenya, Darfur, and elsewhere. Now the situation is pressing more tightly with broader reach around the developing world, a situation that has been building for quite some time.

This critical point of the global food crisis – in which even the UN World Food Program faces the choice of making serious cuts if it can’t raise money from international donors – has roots in the crisis of imperialism and western capitalism. Oil prices have skyrocketed since the start of the Iraq war, from some $25 per barrel in 2003 to over $100 per barrel now, creating record profits for the multinational petroleum corporations like BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon, etc. Thus the transportation of food around the world, the petroleum needed to assist in growing staples, and so on have also risen in cost. And staple food crops are being increasingly diverted towards use as fuels for vehicles, also raising prices of staples.

The global economy, and the trade in oil, has been pegged to the US dollar, now plummeting in value due to the sub-prime lending crisis, the deepening collapse and recession of the American economy, and the loss in confidence in American financial institutions and governance around the world. The currencies of many third world countries are also pegged to the US dollar in exchange rates, and thus especially for poor oil-importing countries, their buying power has also been reduced, and inflation is occurring across third world economies.

These global recessions and crises need not be cyclical. Radical measures based on revolutionary thinking must be taken by the masses to redress and correct economic injustices and imbalances once and for all. For too long in the third world we have been working at export-oriented primary commodity economies based on selling cash-crops, raw materials, and sometimes basic manufactured goods to the West in exchange for their money. Well, we can’t eat their money. Money is immaterial. Its value is based on little more than historical agreements and precedents, and words on legal papers and in bank vaults. If we can overcome our lust for this nonexistent commodity called money, and begin to organize our communities and economies around meeting human needs and indigenous food security, humanity can begin to chart a new course for the better, based on egalitarianism, sharing, pragmatism, justice, and community.

Countries filled to the brim with coffee beans (bound for Starbucks coffee houses in the West), like Ethiopia, now face starvation once again. If the Western-defined and controlled formless commodity of money wasn’t what was valued, but instead the simple and practical virtue of meeting local human needs first, Ethiopia’s prime lands would be growing the best, most nutritious foods, in the most sustainable way, for Ethiopians, and other Afrikans. But instead land in Ethiopia is in the hands of the West, by way of how this land grows massive amounts of coffee to be exported to the Western coffee corporations on the West’s terms in terms of commodity prices it determines based on its whims and the demands within its markets. That economic model is anti-human, and anti-Ethiopian, given that Ethiopians starve today, while those elites who perpetuate such models and land-usage systems in Ethiopia are among the only Ethiopians eating well today.

For we as Afrikans, who suffer the hardest under the regime of food insecurity and inflation of today’s crisis-level zeitgeist, it is imperative that we blaze forward new ways of being human, using land, and meeting human needs. These ways must be charted and mastered and promoted outside the capitalist market economy altogether. The current neoliberal standard would have us monetize even our drinking water, and perhaps one day even the air we breath. We cannot stand for that, and must be radical enough to say that we can be communal stewards of the land, sustainably grow the best food for our needs, preserve the quantity and quality of the local water table, and do all of this independent of money. To move this radically, we must overturn our greed and selfishness as individuals and ethnic groups. It seems like a tall order for Afrikan peoples.

But I assert that it not only can be done and is totally within our human potential, but it must be done to stave off an otherwise certain mass starvation and new chapter of unprecedented strife across the world, particularly the Afrikan world. These cyclical crises can be interrupted in their tracks through the revolutionizing of how we see economics and money, and through the further evolving of our Afrikan selves away from greed and lust for this artificial, deceptive commodity called cash money – defined now by the West, with which it bats black people around like strong winds.

Brain Drain – Irreversible Short of Revolutionary Thinking

On 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.

Kenya’s Ashes – Far from Uhuru

Demonstrators beat a man as they protested an overnight police crackdown on people who had not paid their rents in Mathare, a slum in Nairobi. The police descended on Mathare and evicted dozens of families in the Luo ethnic group who had refused to pay rent over the past months. Landlords have been unable to collect rents since the disputed presidential election in December, which the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who is a Luo, lost.

Photo: Anne Holmes/Reuters

Not yet Uhuru.

It is taking all too long for we as Afrikans to humanize our relationships with one another. In the realms of politics, economics, culture, and society, too many Afrikans have riven fault-lines and raised high ridges between other Afrikans that blockade true collaborative progress, the only progress worth a damn.

Kenya broke down. It wasn’t just because of an election. That was just the catalyst, the match strike over the existing pool of nitro. That pool was formed out of the simmering hatreds born of injustice and perceived and real preferential treatment of some groups over others, of one class over the many. The presence of injustice is the womb of upheaval. A violence with no revolutionary content whatsoever can only be described as ferociously repulsive and anti-human to the last ends of rationality. A riot is not a rebellion.

The image above represents the mass desperation to be known by any modern human being living in the world with half an eye open. Fresh eyes open, cougars on the balcony! In desperation man dismembers man, then becomes more desperate and dismembers himself in the process. Knowing this I only resolve to soldier up even more, and make all my actions and relations with others, especially other Afrikans, humanizing ones.

Machetes can cut down succulent fruits from tall tree limbs, or they can slice half the face off a teenage Afrikan in the wrong place and time. Machetes have their proper uses. Against other innocent Afrikans is not one of them.

Odinga, Kibaki – their responsibility for the disaster of Kenya in 2008 – over 1,000 dead, hundreds of thousands displaced – is profound indeed. But to what end this madness now? We see the culmination of a scientific process – the spread of chaos from the seed called injustice. We shouldn’t grow valentines-day flowers for European lovers now. We shouldn’t grow coffee beans for Starbucks now. We must first feed one another, love one another, and figure out what the whole significance of being a human being is. Hatred is a big black bag over our heads in situations like this.

Who can know the mysterious usage of our humanity? One answer: the collective masses engaged in struggle, challenged by the revolutionaries among them to keep evolving and stay creative and amazing. Our humanity – at its best – is built around the humanity of others, where constant reinforcement, material, social, psychological, and otherwise, are the norm. We will get a lot further ahead, and do so more quickly, by being human beings and growing together. After all, we’re all in the same boat.

Yet Another Blog…

I’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.

Hood Realism to Dialectical Materialism?

As a student of hip-hop, I am interested in the nominally realist view of the world expressed in some of the music that some construe as nihilistic or pessimistic. GZA, Nas, and perhaps Raekwon are significant proponents of a worldview I provisionally refer to as ‘hood realism. Hood realism is a worldview that takes the world for what it is, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get outlook, without superimposing, or having much tolerance for, romanticism, unselfish idealism, heavy metaphysics, or other potentially comforting but immaterial or impractical bullshit. It recognizes that the world is cold, unjust, brutal, harsh, violent, and unforgiving to all but those who brusquely go out and “get theirs,” sometimes by any means. As a hardcore atheist, scientific realist and naturalist, and dialectical/ historical materialist who only – and unapologetically – cares about shit that’s in this material world/ universe, in this impermanent and inconsequential life, and no other, I am increasingly interested in how the worldview I refer to as hood realism can potentially translate more avowedly into a scientifically-based social, political, economic, and material understanding of the world among a vaster body of Afrikan peoples, which I strongly assume would help us move forward much more quickly, constructively and decisively than under the religious/ metaphysical delusions which socialize most Afrikans today.

The GZA joint “I Gotcha Back” from the Liquid Swords album possesses much content relevant to hood realism. I quote it in full, emboldening critical lines:

Chorus: GZA and RZAI gotcha back, but you best to watch your front
Cause it’s the niggaz that front, they be pullin stunts
I gotcha back, but you best to watch your front
Cause it’s the niggaz who front (they be pullin stunts)

Lyrics:

I was always taught my do’s and don’ts
For do’s I did, and for don’ts, I said I won’t
I’m from Brooklyn, a place where stars are born
Streets are shot up, apartment buildings are torn
and ripped up, stripped up, shacked up and backed up
from fiends, cause the bosses on the scene, they got it cracked up
Kids are slingin in my lobby
Little Steve and Bobby
Gettin paid but it’s a life-threatening hobby
Yeah, they still play hide and seek
The fiends seek for the crack, and they hide and let the cops peep
Grown folks say they should be out on their own
Before the gangs come and blow up their mom’s home
Because they lifestyle is hectic, so fuckin hectic
Blaow! Blaow! Blaow! Bullets are ejected
My lifestyle was so far from well
Coulda wrote a book with a title “Age 12 and Goin through Hell”
Then I realized the plan
I’m trapped in a deadly video game, with just one man
So I don’t only watch my back, I watch my front
Cause it’s the niggaz who front, they be pullin stunts
Back on the Ave of Lavonia and Bristol with a pistol
Stickin up Pamela and Crystal
You know your town is dangerous when you see the strangest
kid come home from doin the bid and nuthin changes
What is the meaning of CRIME (what?)
Is it Criminals Robbin Innocent Motherfuckers Everytime?
Little shorties take walks to the schoolyard
Tryin to solve the puzzles to why is life so hard
Then as soon as they reached the playground, blaow!
Shots ring off and now one of them lay down
It’s so hard to escape the gunfire
I wish I could rule it out like an umpire
But it’s an everlasting game, and it never cease to exist
Only the players change, so…

—–
I like how GZA highlights a world where oppressive conditions are overwhelmingly real and seemingly changeless, where danger is the norm. This is the world as seen by an Afrikan youth in a ghetto in America. It’s qualities are immutable, even in a media otherwise saturated by the mores and escapist whims of a cultural la-la land.

Inspecta Deck backs up these perceptions in the second verse of the famous track “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)” from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers):

It’s been twenty-two long hard years of still strugglin
Survival got me buggin, but I’m alive on arrival
I peep at the shape of the streets
And stay awake to the ways of the world cause shit is deep
A man with a dream with plans to make C.R.E.A.M.
Which failed; I went to jail at the age of 15
A young buck sellin drugs and such who never had much
Trying to get a clutch at what I could not… could not…
The court played me short, now I face incarceration
Pacin — going up state’s my destination
Handcuffed in back of a bus, forty of us
Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so ruff
But as the world turns I learned life is hell
Living in the world no different from a cell
Everyday I escape from Jakes givin chase, sellin base
Smokin bones in the staircase
Though I don’t know why I chose to smoke sess
I guess that’s the time when I’m not depressed
But I’m still depressed, and I ask what’s it worth?
Ready to give up so I seek the Old Earth
Who explained working hard may help you maintain
to learn to overcome the heartaches and pain
We got stickup kids, corrupt cops, and crack rocks
and stray shots, all on the block that stays hot
Leave it up to me while I be living proof
To kick the truth to the young black youth
But shorty’s running wild smokin sess drinkin beer
And ain’t trying to hear what I’m kickin in his ear
Neglected, but now, but yo, it gots to be accepted
That what? That life is hectic

———–

Again, this verse stresses the impossibility of escaping the harshness of the real world, short of getting intoxicated on heavy drugs. As Malcolm X once declared to us, we are trapped! Trapped in the poisons of drugs, alcohol, and poverty itself, such as to keep us from seeing what is real, definitively. The escapism of the store-front church, the corner drug merchant and his whares, the corner bodega and its miserable food, or the every-other-block liquor joint, are among the poisons that keep us from waking up into fully accepting and thus being able to overturn our ugly reality. Because only those who fully face reality itself have any real chance of changing it. Which is why I take what I refer to as hood realism, and the glimpses there are of it in hip-hop – the music of my generation – very seriously.

Nas, in his track “Black Zombies” on the album The Lost Tapes, beautifully reminds us of how lost Afrikan peoples are on all levels (politically, educationally, spiritually, economically, etc.) in this matrix, this construct of contemporary capitalism, and being the victims of that global economic regime. I quote in full, highlighting important lines:

[Nas]
Yo, you believe when they say we ain’t shit, we can’t grow?
All we are is dope dealers, and gangstas and hoes?
And you believe when they be tellin you lie, all on the media?
They make the world look crazy to keep you inside?
Why you listen when the teachers at school
know you a young single parent out strugglin, they think you a fool
Give your kids bad grades and put ‘em in dumber classes
Killin shorty future, I wonder how do we last it
Underground in they casket? Ancestors turnin
I’m learnin somethin every day, there is no Lazareth
Words like God is Greek or Latin
So if you study Egypt, you’ll see the truth written by the masters
My niggaz is chillin, gettin high, relaxin
Envisionin, ownin shit, yo it can happen
What do we own? Not enough land, not enough homes
Not enough banks, to give a brother a loan
What do we own? The skin on our backs, we run and we ask
for reperations, then they hit us with tax
And insurance if we live to be old, what about now?
So stop bein controlled, we black zombies

[Chorus: (sung)]
Walkin talkin dead, though we think we’re livin (black zombies)
We just copy-cat, followin the system (black zombies)
Walkin talkin dead, though we think we’re livin (black zombies)
We just copy-cat, followin the system (black zombies)

[Nas]
Aiyyo we trapped in our own brain, fuck behind bars
We’ve already gone insane
They’ve already gave up, cut our own heads offs
Stab our own backs and dream too much
without fulfillin reality; too greedy and
can’t have one or two chains, we need three of dem
Can’t have one or two guns without squeezin ‘em
on our own people and, fuck black leaders
cause whites ain’t got none leadin them, the rhythm is cosmic
Nas is divinity, the deity’s prophetless
All get down and get up
Victims walkin ’round with Down’s Syndrome, all stuck
Faintin, shoutin, catchin Holy Ghost in church
Scared to do it for ourselves ‘less we see somebody doin it first
We begged, we prayed, petitioned and demostrated
Just to make another generation – black zombies

[Chorus]

[Nas]
You scared to be yourself, cause you in a trance
Feel free, hear the music and dance
If you cared what they think, why wear what they wear, just for you
Dumb niggaz with long beards like they Arabs or Jews
or from Israel, (?)bish’meal Allah, el-rachman, el-Rahim (?)
Islam’s a beautiful thing
And Christian and Rastafari, helps us to bring
peace against the darkness, which is unGodly
So what’s the black man’s true religion, who should we follow?
Use your own intuition, you are tommorrow
[roaring] .. that’s the sound of the beast
I’m a Columbia record slave, so get paid
Control your own destiny, you are a genius
Don’t let it happen to you like it did to me, I was a black zombie

[Chorus]

[Nas]
Wake up! Black zombies in a spell for more than fo’-hundred years
Ghetto niggaz won’t have it no mo’, can I get a witness?
Why listen to somebody else tell you how to do it
when you can do it yourself; it’s all in you, do it, do it
Do it niggaz..

—————-

Nas’ verses are mission-critical here. He not only highlights are embarrassing shortcomings, but he is also advocating for us to think for ourselves and to be our real selves. He is critical of the bizzare and culturally alien religions many Afrikans are tied up into, advocating instead the natural and free use of our own beautiful and fully-endowed intuition. He recognizes how the schools deliberately fail us, how we fail economically by being dependent and not owning our own homes, banks, etc. And he highlights how we have often failed to be innovative, independent-minded, and risk-taking to change our condition, instead relying too much on “black leaders” or awaiting the safe example of other groups and peoples before acting. This is the positive potential of a worldview of hood realism, which uses examples from the cold world we live in to exort us to use common sense to face it and change it for the better, out of our own natural and organic initiative.

Raekwon’s verses have often served to remind us how materialistic man is, which is fine inasmuch as forcing us to remember that material conditions and necessities (and modes of production) define the actions of human beings. Material conditions and modes of production include the illicit drug economy, the only one left in our community after de-industrialization and the criminalization of the youth and imposition of such desperate conditions that the youth can only meet their material needs at the expense of one another (horizontal or “black on black” violence). His refrain verses from some of his tracks on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx are demonstrative of this notion:

from “Incarcerated Scarfaces:”
Now yo yo, whattup yo, time is runnin out
It’s for real though, let’s connect politic – ditto!
We could trade places, get lifted in the staircases
Word up, peace incarcerated scarfaces

and from “Knowledge God:”
Yo why’s my niggas always yellin that broke shit
Let’s get money Son, now you wanna smoke shit
Chill God, yo the Son don’t chill Allah
What’s today’s mathematic Son? Knowledge God

—————

In these verses Raekwon asserts the urgency with which poor Afrikans must escape their conditions by any means. He says time is running out – and it sure is! He says it’s for real, and we have to connect politic – ditto! We have to analyze reality and analyze political realities, as well as real-politic – another notion for the politics of getting over by any means, which is the way of much of the world today. And then he asks frustratedly, “why’s my niggas always yellin that broke shit?” Why we just complaining about our poverty? We can’t just complain. He continues, “let’s get money son, now you wanna smoke shit!” He’s stressing that we must make moves to get material resources! And you can’t do that by smoking shit, by reverting back to your old escapist habits. Don’t smoke shit, change shit! And you can’t do both!

In the track “Motherless Child” from Ghostface Killah’s album Ironman, Raekwon asserts the end-result of real-world analysis in simple terms:

Rich man, poor man, read the headlines
Nigga getting murdered for spot and bigger dimes
Jobs and drug wars
Living by gun law
Jailcats come home and want to take yours
As the young one, growing up broke me and my people
as the self, huh, I guess we all in the same boat
Think it, plus drinkin that 90-proof
Playin’ on the roof sayin’
we need a next man to shoot…

—————–

Raekwon wants us to read the headlines, regardless of our class position: this is the reality! We are killing each other to get over, whether it’s for jobs or drug turf. Whether in the legal world or the illegal world, we all live by gun law. And if you are a sensitive black youth like Raekwon, you look around you, “read the headlines,” and see that we as a people are all in the same boat. Yet we revert to “that 90-proof” and the escapism of the drink, and keep doing the same thing over and over… Hence GZA’s statement that “it’s an everlasting game and it never cease to exist, only the players change…”

I think that the game CAN change if more of our people wake up to what the game really is and own up to our responsibilities as the played pawns we are or the revolutionaries we could be. Raekwon once again states in simple terms that this world right here is Hell, so who could believe in Heaven? This refrain from Heaven & Hell in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx:

What do you believe in? Heaven or hell?
You don’t beleive in heaven cause we’re livin in hell
(repeat 2X)
So it’s your life

————–

I think that the ability of hip-hop to perceive the dire straits of the world very clearly and unflinchingly can be a door-opener to using that perception in a more deliberately scientific way to inspire our people to change their own conditions concretely. The nihilism and pessimism many see in lyrics such as the ones I have highlighted here, to me, are refreshing signs that our people have a strong, natural urge to see the world as it is and nakedly share its nature and face it as it is. I’m always the kind of person that’s more comfortable with the real than with the fake, the mundane instead of the fantastic, science over religion, physics over metaphysics, Hell instead of Heaven. Hell is the world, Hell is our anger and frustration, our violence towards one another, the oppression we face and exist within, the illusion and escapism system that blinds us to the true nature of the socio-economic constructs which define our lives. But Hell gives people something to fight for. By seeing the nature of Hell clearly, we can come to terms with the means by which we can slowly convert it into Heaven. Human potential is such that it is within our power in our lives here in this world to transform conditions for the common good. Human beings created this Hell we all live in right now. Human beings can also undo it and create something far better.

But we also have to squarely see Hell for what it is. I am thankful to the rappers of my generation for being willing to show the world just what Hell is. It is up to folks, especially of the generation that sees the world in the vain of hood realism, to begin to move to a constructive realism, a scientific material analysis which can offer methods and means to make positive changes. The solution is in the problem, as the discipline of mathematics shows us. The five-percenter idiom, “what’s today’s mathematics?” can be a daily greeting that constantly reminds us to look at the world as it really is and search for the latent solutions within the problems.

The vigor of science, of dialectical and historical materialism, can be applied to hood realism to provide Afrikans in the ghettos of America, who are schooled in hip-hop, with powerful analytical tools with which to find avenues of transformation and revolution. Dead Prez, GZA or Nas might not necessarily be so far from Marx or Nkrumah. Let us draw more lines and make more links and think more critically. The naked brutality, the ugliness, the obvious contradictions – I need to always be reminded of that, so I can keep moving. It never depresses me because I also know where we need to go from there, on a scientific analytical basis, and motivated by deep humanism. Pessimism, nihilism? Nah, its school for those who might try to escape the wrong way. But we must add to that school constructive analytical lessons, too.

So thank you my rappers.

Here open the gates of Hell!
(Homage to Hell, the Great Bodhisattva!! – Hakuin)
hell is our best teacher