MESSAGE TO THE GRASS ROOTS AlD, 2020 By Felipe Noguera

MESSAGE TO THE GRASS ROOTS

AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY – MAY 25, 2020

By Felipe Noguera

In the name of the Almighty Creator and in honor of our African Ancestors, on the occasion of May 25th, a day celebrated or commemorated around the world as African Liberation and Unity Day, I greet you in the name of the Caribbean Regional Coordinating Committee of the Pan African Federalist Movement. (PAFM).  To our Muslim brothers and sisters, we wish you Eid Mubarak.

The Pan African Movement has its roots among the first prisoners of war seized, sold and carried away in captivity from Africa in what came to be known as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.  The names Dutty Boukman at Bois Caiman, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacque Desalines of Saint Domingue or Hayti and the countless, nameless, but not forgotten freedom fighters and warriors for liberation called Cimarones or Maroons who formed Quilombos in Brazil, Suriname, Accompong in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country will live forever in the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Africans in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the North, Vicente Guerrero (the first Black President of Mexico), Nat Turner, Denmark Vessy, Harriet Tubman, Gabriel Prosser and Frederick Douglas must be counted among the heroes and heroines in the Pan African Pantheon.

The modern Pan African Movement began in 1901 when Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams convened the First Pan African Congress in London. The Second, Third and Fourth Pan African Congresses were organized in Europe by Dr. W. E.B. Dubois in the aftermath of World War I.  As Africans who had fought “to make the world safe for democracy” returned home to mass lynchings in the US, out of Jamaica emerged the first Pan Africanist leader with the ability to ignite a mass movement based on pride in African consciousness and grassroots entrepreneurship encouraging Black business and commerce to build the community of Africans at home and abroad by letting our money circulate within our community several times before leaving. The Rt. Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey packed Madison Square Garden in NC in 1921 with more than 20,000 African people and built the UNIA-ACL into the largest organization of African people in history.  The BackStar Line promised to take the descendants of prisoners of war of the Songhai Empire back to Africa.  With a subscription base of more than six million, the “Negro World”, UNIA’s monthly publication remains the standard for global, multi-lingual Pan African publication.

The year Marcus Garvey was forcibly removed from the leadership of the mass movement he built by the FBI on trumped up charges of mail fraud and held for years at Atlanta State Prison, in 1945 the Fifth Pan African Congress was held in Manchester, England.  Organized by Trinidadians George Padmore, CLR James, along with Amy Jacque Garvey and Dr. Dubois, the 5th PAC featured prominent student and anti-colonial activists such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Dudley Thompson, Ras Makonen.  5th PAC aimed at and achieved for the first time a solid connection between the intellectuals and the representatives of the masses; an authentic link to the future leaders of liberation movements being born on the African continent.

The Sixth Pan African Congress, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1974, marked the first time a Pan African Congress was held on the African continent.  Although it took a strong stance in support of the Southern African Liberation Movement and was headquarters of the Front Line States and OAU Liberation Committee – ANC, PAC (S. Africa), ZANU, ZAPU (Zimbabwe), SWAPO (Namibia), MPLA(Angola), FRELIMO (Mozambique), a new challenge surfaced in the Pan African Movement.

Until 1974, African people, although largely intellectuals, students, workers had independently organized Pan Africa Congresses, for the first time a government, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Peoples Revolutionary Party) of Tanzania, led by President Mwalimu Nyerere was the host of 6th PAC.  This meant that on a state-to-state diplomatic basis, CARICOM Governments such as Grenada, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, whose leadership at the time felt threatened by Pan Africanists were able to exert diplomatic pressure to prevent the participation of Caribbean Pan African revolutionaries such as Maurice Bishop, Dr. Walter Rodney, CLR James and Khafra Kambon at the 6th PAC.

As Head of Delegation for Trinidad and Tobago and deputized by H.E. Dudley Thompson to assist him in leading the Jamaican delegation, I had a direct involvement in the organization of the Seventh Pan African Congress held in Kampala, Uganda in 1994. Gracela Machel (Mozambique), John Garang (Sudan), Kwame Ture (Trinidad and Tobago), Betty Shabazz (USA), Muhammad Farah Aideed (Somalia) and Paul Kagame (Rwanda) were among the more well-known delegates attending 7th PAC, convened by President Yoweri Museveni and then Colonel, now Major General Kahinda Otafire. While 7th PAC took many important and progressive positions, attempting to highlight the contradiction between state elite control and grassroots empowerment and tried to concretely deal with neocolonial corruption and dependency, the 7th PAC lacked effective follow-up for more than twenty years.

In March 2015, still reeling from the debacle of Libyan destruction, the Government of Ghana, supported by the Global Pan African Movement Secretariat, attempted to convene the 8th Pan African Congress in Accra, Ghana.  The effort was a feeble one, failing to rekindle the enthusiasm and support of most of the African Diaspora. The Caribbean Pan African Network, which had collaborated with the African Union in the formation of Region VI (the other regions being North, South, Central, East and West Africa) or the Diaspora as part of the AU.  The Caribbean then accepted the invitation, coming out of Senegal, West Africa in 2015, to participate in the Pan African Federalist Movement (PAFM). 

The Charter of PAFM has organized all of the regions of the AU as well as North, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia among its members and aims to create the United African States in a generation or less. Approached to Coordinate the Regional Initiating and later Coordinating Committee for the Caribbean, I was excited by the grass roots structure, which the charter proposes to empower the African people at home and abroad by asserting our Sovereignty as a global federated African nation. With Sister Oshun of Jamaica as Deputy Caribbean Coordinator, we were in short order, able to organize National Initiating Committees in Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the Virgin Islands. Many National Coordinators are leaders from the Rastafari Community, which is natural since in the tradition of Garvey’s UNIA, Rasta is the root of the society – politically, economically, culturally and spiritually. Others are professional, trade union, youth activists and Pan African entrepreneurs.

PAFM held its Pre-Congress in Ghana in Dec. 2018 and elected its Executive International Provisional Committee, which also includes Regional Coordinators, and elected Brother Miguel from Belize to the IPC.  The most critical challenge facing PAFM at this historic moment is educating the masses of our people; especially our youth and finding the best, most effective way of doing so in this age of biological warfare and genocidal attacks against African people at home and abroad.   Now the weapons of war being applied against us are invisible, microscopic viruses, nano chips and the vaccines which spread them and radiate us.

Our message to the grassroots is to think critically for yourselves. “Africa for Africans at home and abroad!” Know that we are continuing the legacy of Garvey by building industry which will create autonomous and secure infrastructure, and in turn will engender industry, employment and development. Unwilling to wait until the AU’s projected date of 2063 to integrate Africa and aggregate her economies, we in the Caribbean will also be able to accelerate Caribbean Union as one of the United African States by first and foremost educating and then mobilizing African people to use referenda, plebesites and constituent assemblies physically and virtually to democratically establish the United African States by 2030. This will entail among other elements:

• Sovereign Public Health Policies as evidenced by the exemplary performances of Cuba, Madagascar and Tanzania in the respective roles their leaders have played during the so-called Corona Virus Crisis.

• Sovereign Educational institutions at primary, secondary and tertiary levels such as the Malcolm X/Marcus Garvey University and other physical and virtual educational structures that we must create in order to reverse the brain drain and reverse the miseducation  of our people which produces more parasitic, privileged elites than humble, competent, honest and conscientious Pan African servants of the people of impeccable character adorned by human values of Ubuntu and Ma’at.

• Sovereign financial institutions, fiscal and monetary policies and currencies digitally and cash backed by renewable solar energy and pegged to gold, which already exists in Jamaica in the sovereign territory of Accompong.

• Sovereign and autonomous communications networks and infrastructure to conduct virtual encounters such as this and to independently educate, entertain, safely and securely support electronic trade and commerce and coordinate strategic services;

• Sovereign means of safe, but effective local, regional and international transport, infrastructure and logistics for people and cargo.

• Sovereign means of defense of our people and their territory, animals, plants, minerals and natural environment.

After more than four decades in the struggle for African unity and liberation, I feel confident that the PAFM is the political and economic movement that is best and most widely organized and supported for the empowerment of African people. The struggle to balance popular democracy with diplomatic and strategic war of maneuver is constant.  Join the PAFM or any other progressive African organization and be part of the solution for African Unity, Liberation, Empowerment and Sovereignty. Together, we will end half a millennium of African oppression and usher in the African Renaissance and the Golden Age of Humanity.

Now or Never Africans Must Unite!