The Struggle for Black Reparation in Spain Abuy Nfubea (GAC Conference 2020)

 

The Struggle for Black Reparation in Spain

Abuy Nfubea                                                                        (GAC Global African Congress Conference 2020)

Greetings, comrades, sisters and brothers, because there are more women here than men (LAUGHS) I want to express my appreciation to Glenn GAC Global African Congress General Coordinator European Group. Uhuru comrade and the entire team. I also see in this virtual room some old friends from many decades of fighting together like Sista Assata Nzinga or Brother Buddy Larrier. Glennn you seem too young (LAUGHS) but many years ago I think that in Barbados that we met, you still have Dread Locqs, and I imagine listening to Burning Spear (LAUGHS) I love this brother and all of you. Thank you very much for this invitation (Applause) My humble intention is to do a process analysis of more than 40 years of struggle for reparation in Spain, identifying the political processes and the interactions between them and we analyze and document it to understand as Malcolm x said, where we are and how we have reached this point today 20 years after Durban 2001.

CONTEXT: SPANISH TRANSITION

The history of Afro-Spanish political independence started with field Negreos or Marroons who created the self determination State such Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia, 200 years before Haiti Revolution. Other rebellion was Sas Ebwera the so Call Fernando Poo, today Equatorial Guinea. In 1958, blacks considered "indigenous" or minors in Spain achieved citizenship status, becoming from a colony to a province and later to autonomy. Prior to this date, there was a small minority of blacks who enjoyed the status of "emancipated" or Free Negroes. 10 years later Equatorial Guinea became independent. August 1972, the president of the government of Spain, Admiral Carrero Blanco promoted the organization Afro-Spanish Circle, it was a first attempt in the middle of the cold war of black recognition from an organic framework from the right after the expulsion of the last Spaniards from Guinea at the hands of the new President Macias Nguema in October 1969. After the assassination of Carrero Blanco by ETA in 1973 Afro-Spanish circle continued and there was the emergence of numerous political parties -of all tendencies- founded by the Guinean exile (ARND, FRELIFER, URNG, MOLIFUGE, PANDECA). This was joined by both a social movement in defense of the Spanish Sahara before the green march or annexation of Morocco and the social presence of the MPAIC of the Canarian lawyer, Cubillo. To defeat him, the Spanish government of Arias Navarro, makes numerous agreements with African countries (bribes to their elites, the same as they do today with immigration agreements) who betray the Movement for Self-determination and independence of the Canaries MPAIC, in addition to an attack by the Spanish secret services in Algeria against the Canarian leader. Franco dies in and Juan Carlos I rises to the throne and Suarez continues with the same "third worldist" policy, coming to receive Yasser Arrafat when he was still considered "a terroist". 

FRANCO HA MUERTO 

In exchange for the support of the African Union to Spain, numerous black workers arrive without the need for a visa from Sierra Leone, Conacry, Liberia, Gambia, Moroccans, and Senegal who occupy strategic sectors such as steel, domestic care, agriculture, cleaning, (Moroccans and Cape Verdeans) mining and fishing in Leon and Galicia and numerous African university students from places like Sudan, Angola, Mali, Congo, Ghana, Gabon, Nigeria, at the Colegio Mayor Ntar Sra de Africa. When the law of associations was approved in 1977 from these groups, black organizations of a social and trade union character such as Maleva, Riebapua, Bia Fang, League of Bubi Refugees emerged. At the same time, brother Wolf, the disco for Afro-American military men in the Torrejon base, had already been open since 1973, which in the 80s moved to the legendary Stones, where Afro-American cultural and philosophical avant-gardes such as hip hop sweep among the black youth of Spain. -hop breack dance, the work of Omowale MalcolmX and afrocentric philosophies with groups like The Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight on September 1979. Another artist will be Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force -who will introduce with her Planet Rock. I explain all this in my book, Malcolmx and the Hip-Hop Generation, Buy It (LAUGHS)

ONE AFRICA ONE NATION

 What from 1980 influenced several different inmigrants, refugee youth movements, studients and African families such as the breackers. A time, characterized by conflicts and social mobilization, demands for labor and feminist social change, collective political effervescence, both factories and students. At the same time, an attempt to recolonize and institutionalize racism with concepts such as integration resurfaced both on the white left and on the right, which was opposed by a broad sector of the black people, led by the Guineans who demanded reparation. This sector was linked to the fight against Apartheid which was joined by other Africans such as Afro-Cubans, Afro-Americans, Zaireans, and Moroccan Amazighs. They founded in the 86 the Pan-African movement. It is in this context of the so-called Spanish Transition that the demands of the struggle for black reparation arise- 

FREE MANDELA 

 Today was the first action, created by MALEVA in 1986 when this group of  Equatorial Guinea studient  assault de Southafrican embassy in Madrid. Before that in 1978 until the referendum the Black Movement has undergone countless changes and has been mutating, adapting, at times, to repressive situations, or pushed, others, by more favorable winds during La Transición. The present words offers us, for the first time in Spanish, an overview of its history process. This is  fundamentally of synthesis, but also of reflection and interpretation of its global historical trajectory, its various stages and its general characteristics.  Thus, Black Movement in Spain proposes a journey from primordial Pan-Africanism to current sovereignty, analyzing all the keys and the similarities and differences with other sister movements, such as feminist, fascist, ecologic, LGTBIQ, anarquist that allow us to better understand the saddlebags of the current Pan-Africanist outbreak and the possible leaf route that you could draw in the near future. The synthesis A history of Spanish Pan-Africa, and, more recently, the origins of reparation and the evolution of the black struggles and it vanguard: the Pan-Africanist Movement.  The historic key has also deepened in the comparative study of the different European new black radical ( The British, French or German cases). Since Franco's times, reparation is a popular Afro instrument of percussion, used as a means of communication, entertainment and communal expression of antiracism. Today it is in Spain also a black, free and independent politica space. From our small hometown we are committed to a caring and diverse planet. A community of critical and engaged activist. They are the pillar of this discussion.

CARRERO BLANCO 

 In Spain, blacks people have always fought against slavery, colonialism, White Power, Apartheid, emigration (it is the same thing that produces racism) and but if we have to set a date at the beginning of the struggle for Black reparation, it begins in Spain during the dictatorship against the reserved matter law of Equatorial Guinea that today still continues as a vestige of Franco's regime in democracy consisting of silencing the Obiang dictatorship. After Franco's death in 1975 with the Royal Suarez decree of 1980 affirmative action policies for access to the administration of the Equatorial Guinean community led by Jesus Bibang and Rufino Ndongo from PANDECA. In 1982, after the Tejero coup de Estat, the Anti-Apartheid Free Mandela movement emerged with great international force, launched by Winnie Mandikizela from Soweto. This movement raised awareness and brought together many Afro people, including black women (Guinean, Beninunes, Cameroonian, Congolese, Dominican).

 NEW STRATEGY: FROM SLAVERY TO INMIGRATION

The struggles against the first inmmigration law that made black people in Spain alienating, turning any black into a stranger and threat or submissive. As the spokesman for the Pan-Africanist Movement, Mba Bee says, they foreigner all black people through the image and alarm of the boats. The PSOE of Felipe Gonzales and his education ministers Maravall, Solana and Sole Tura carried out the most malevolent and effective policies of institutional racism in the history of Spain. Starting in 1988, the Pan-Africanist Movement began an internal debate that led to dissent within the Anti-Apartheid Movement. This debate with all its enormous contradictions was fulfilled in the founding of the Spanish section of the Black Panthers NBPP party that arose as a result of alliances with the student movement, the grassroots church and initiatives as roles for all. Faced with the struggles of '92, those who declare that in the struggle for reparation, the institutional fact cannot represent the engine of the process but that it must be outside the institutions. This strategy breaks with strategies and organizational frameworks of the intellectual black bourgeoisie uncle tom who tried to agree from the institutions the reparation with a state that has already been whitewashed when entering the European Union. Thus, new leaderships and strategies emerge in the Pan-Africanist Movement based on the unilateralism of political action, the accumulation of force in a community key, thus generating a strategic political discourse in the face of folklore around the demands for reparation.

BLACK CONCIENCE

This radicalization by Black historical memory and its reparation decisively influenced the institutional policies that continue with the struggle of the uprising of the doctor Dr. Alfonse Arcelin with the liberation of the black dissected and exhibited in a museum in Banyoles in 1992, within the context of the struggles against the V Centenary of the discovery in which the Spanish State tried to exclude and make the black population invisible from the imaginary and historical narrative, entitled: encounter between two peoples (Indians and whites) leaving out and invisible the Africans who were the ones who as a year of work. The slave women built the Spanish empire in America since 1492. There were always Pan-Africanist responses from the political point of view, such as the assault and demolition in Barcelona of the statue of the banker Antonio Lopez i Lopez  in 2018, who made his money selling blacks is one of them. The Pan-Africanist Movement has always promoted debate, marches and protests with a political and doctrinal sense (REPARATION) as it has been a political line and Pan-Africanist creed and not anything folkloric for the crimes of More in Salt, Aliu in Lleida, Fonseca in Tenerife, Desiré an Cameroon brother in Barcelona 2000 of 18 shots, Ndombele in Alcorcon, Mbaye in Madrid Lavapies, Samba Marteen in Aluche.

 VICTORIES

But not all were defeats but we have achieved great victories: Durban 2001, Law 62/2003, Afro-descendant peoples cooperation law, thanks to Fundación Vida Grupo Ecologico Verde, PNL 2010, RH 595 Senate USA or the Afrodescendents Decade UN 2014-2024 where we managed to put the only foundation created for Black peoples, at the UN: To go to Durban 2001. We created CECRA Spanish Coalition Against Racism, we internationalized the fight for reparation through GAC Global African Congress, African Socialist Internal ASI, Afro-American 21, IV International, Seminar against the only way is to document the process and be part of this memory and continue a fight for reparation for both the fires like these in Badalona and the racist attitude of the Catalan authorities and the complicit silence of the white left for us Garveyist, they are not new: Lukum Taka 2008, Cal Afrika at Bessos Mar Barcelona. They are part of our struggle. Who kills black people and why is it never investigated?

RACISM, DEMOCRACY AND REPARATIONS

The 2nd national congress of the Pan-Africanist movement held in Madrid in 2005. The black question on the white left: from marginal invisibility to quotas. The Black question in the Political parties after Durban conference evolved from the marginalization by affirmative action quotas and policies. Although today there are many studies on the Spanish feminist movement during the transition, very few researches had deepened the role of women in the parties that shaped the democratic reform. Spain: since before the death of Franco and, especially with the great victory it held during PNL, directly conditioned practices and attitudes of Black struggles in the Spanish society. How did these Black people take part in a partie of withe and for men? How did they ideologically change the party? What kind of political culture did they introduce? How did panafricanits frame the reparation activity inside the political Party? Popular party led by Adolfo Luis González PhD and Gustavo de Arristegui were the first to assume the black reparation in 2008 in the middle of the Obama era while the left only developed the law of historical memory with the Spanish civil war. For its part, the left launched a strong Afro-feminist movement that, although it was very depoliticized and far from the black community, which, thanks to the aesthetic quastion of Natural Afro hair, achieved a lot of black visibility but from the denial of its own (political) reparation process. This meant that from 15-M 2011, the parties impregnated by the third wave of the feminine decolonial injected into their ranks black people (PODEMOS, Psoe, PP, ERC, CUP,) white power in black faces, the majority arising from a Militancy of the networks, white hippy left or directly created by the white power itself, most of them declassified and lacking the sacred foundation that Steve Biko called: black consciousness with an abstract postmodernist political discourse typical of the white left or rather fashion: in an anti-racism "happy Flower" of Bbuen rollito.

AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY 

ALD is one of the great symbol of Reparation. With the recovery of the feast of Africa Day since 1998, an intellectual changed from the Negroe conceptualization of Afrika Day  to African liberation Day as Kwame Toure visioned it and that format that remains today in Spain. Although the massive celebration was held esporadicament in Spain, with organization such Sos Africa, it is due to the Pan-Africanist Garveyist as the national holiday of Africa, and we began to explain what it is and why it is celebrated and what produced the first recovery of the African independent institutions. This historic celebration in reparation and the will to recover black political self-determination. The Pan-Africanist Garveyist in the region of  Murcia and its leader Maddy ba Cisse was the organization that in the last decade gave the day of Africa its political character, visibility and hegemony among the black communities, in front of the folkloric and neocolonial or capitalist consummer celebrations.

 CONTRAINSURGENCIA 

These movements that are leading today in Spain began the process of liquidation and demobilization of the black revolutionary struggles, a decision that is extended to the rest of the territorial and sectoral bodies. Just as the previous phase of political struggle had tempered the Garveyista organization to intervene in the events of 2017, the revolutionary process itself put the Garveyista vanguard to the test, or its leaders and orientation ceased. As Mbolo Etofili points out in "relatoria sobre balance de España en el decenio Afro-descendant ", under the intervention of FOJA, following the course of the political process opened by historical reparation Marches on October 12, Colombus Day 2006 in Madrid and 14 Febrero in Barcelona 2013, was fundamental to prepare and lead to the victory of reparation PNL 2010 on February 17 decreeing the day of the black community in Spain. In this consolidation of the Reparation process there were actors of the same as Buddy Larrier, here present or sista Verene Sherpard. In a convulsive phase like the one that goes on in the Alcalá Revolution after the assassination of Lucrecia Perez in 1992, the Pan-Africanist Movement takes on new challenges and opportunities and at the founding congress of the OEUA, it embraced Garveyism in Barcelona. The political definitions around reparation accelerate in the revolutionary processes of those years, which are characterized by the shift of the concept of black community to "racialized" and the denial of class struggle. The growth of reparation is linked to that of hegemony within the black avant-garde of Garveyism from the 3rd National Congress in Barcelona 2013 attended by a delegation of the AAPRP, it was marked by a line that fervently followed the development of the strategy assumed in the 2nd congress Lavapies 2005 and Barcelona 2012 consisting of internationalizing the struggle for GAC reparation, which emerged in Barbados 2003. Other influences were PARCOE from sister ESther Ekwa, GAC under the leadership of comrade and unionist Glenn, was decisive to consolidate reparations in the participation in the international trubunal ITRAP reparacion Berlin 2010 with comrades such Yonas Endrias Muktar or Senfo Tokham. 

A LUTTA CONTINUA 

  30 years later African struggles in Spain and we could face the process of counterinsurgency, demobilization and liquidation initiated by the Afrosocialist groups of Consuelo Cruz and continued by Yeison and Rita with the festivals and their refusal to turn PNL 2010 into national law. They have managed to get blacks themselves to accept terms such as (colored, sub-Saharan, Afro-descendant, African and now racialized) as antagonistic terms, proceeded to erase all vestige of the relations between Spain and its African colonies Morocco, Sahara, Equatorial Guinea and all the 200 million Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean and what led to the storming and taking of the South African embassy in Madrid, promoting the rise of Black revolutionary organizations. However, the main argument for reparation was the existence on the ground of Pan-Africanist Garveyist political organizations such as the Maleva, Black Panther Party, FOJA, OEUA, Sankofa, Federation Panafricanista, Fundacion Vida Grupo Ecologico Verde, LukumTaka, FAAM...that guaranteed that the black political struggles and demands for reparation did not end in folkloric or depoliticized expressions uncle tom. In this sense, the creation by the Pan-Africanists of mass media such as Radio voz de los sin voz Moise Nvumba and radio makutu Josimar Oyono and Uhuru Afrika tv Baldw Lumumba and this magazine Reparacion africana, founded in 2007,  were crucial. In 2011, the Black Parliament of Spain emerged, electing Marcelino Bondjale as president, and in 2015, the Pan-African committee for the decade of Afro-descendants ECOSOC UN was created in Geneva, Switzerland, electing Dr. Mbolo Etofili Luis Alarcon as international coordinator. The struggle for reparation created a new socio-political identity that marks the mental decolonization of black artists and professionals. This characterized the militancy and radicalization of forms and expressions that created not only materiality and a strong political identity that marked the feeling of belonging of all the Afro-Spanish generations.