Pan-Afrikan liberation cannot be contained within the state.
red black and green
painted over whiteness
marks the end of wicked
state apparatus
I’m going to open this piece by saying something contentious: something that will curdle the blood of the Left and leave the reader wondering whether I am enemy or ally:
The BLM movement liberalised the anti-racist struggle.
In May 2020, as we were secluded in the confines of our homes during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us were also forced to face the insidious clutch of racism within our global political sphere. The murderous scenes of another Black guy asphyxiated by the police plagued our TV screens and social media. Rest in peace to George Floyd, just one of several Black people killed by the brutality of the police. And as the masses around the world grappled with this callous event, protest marches were called, book clubs were formed, anti-racist workshops were started, social media posts were shared and many Western businesses and institutions - ironically - released a statement admitting that “Black Lives Matter,” and, oh yeah, can we forget those infamous black squares that acted as a panacea for all of the system’s ills.
It is en vogue to be a socialist, one only need peer at the publicity stunts acted out on the blood-spilt red carpet of the Met Gala last year, with Cara Delivigne and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donning outfits reading “Tax the rich'' and “peg the patriarchy.” Society is full of contradictions, with one of them being celebrities attending a $30,000 Amerikkka-themed event whilst trying to convince everyone that they hate the function of the bourgeoisie, yeah right. Or, let’s look at how many BLM activists modelled in fashion magazines wearing outfits costing thousands of pounds. The reality is that radicalism will never be trendy as its very purpose is to stare down at the monolith that is this system and its institutions of cultural capital. Any attempt to bring these ideas to acceptance by the mainstream money-grabbing class is a dilution of its intention.
These things created a sudden flood of support for Black lives on the surface, but my argument is that they did not act to fully address the underlying spiked bed of globalised capitalism that is the all-encompassing cause of racism. And whilst ACAB was screamed, abolition was talked about and the principles of Marxism were searched on Google, what are the people behind this doing to affect real change? If we are to accept what is said at protests and on social media, that capitalism is the cause of white supremacist violence, then the solution is to completely eradicate the system, and that can’t be achieved as we simply lay stagnantly in our comfortably uncomfortable lives and within our warped visions of state comfort.
Black capitalism ain’t cute, even when clothed in meaningless anti-capitalist slogans. A state isn’t functional to true liberation when its very nature is to subjugate people in return for so-called “protection” (i.e. the protection of property). The popularity of the BLM movement isn’t progressive if the masses - including the property-owning class - merely talk to the talk but with no action. We don’t need symbols, we need an elimination of the system of white supremacy.
We live in a society of spectacle. One where the mass consumption of a murdered Black body can act to further the grip of white supremacy. The decrepit status of social self-enlightenment is reached when we sanctimoniously choose to care about issues on the surface, whilst an inferno is bubbling up beneath. The public paradoxically hands more of their crumbs to the oppressor when they separate a callous scene of the Black Death and rejoice as the murderer gets put behind bars. What was it that Darcus Howe says, “We’ve complained to judges about judges,” and many are satisfied when that same racist state puts in punitive measures to capture one of its puppets? But nah, to rebuke this system, there must only be indifference to the law, even when it does seem to be on our side because it’s the same shit as Black CEOs or a Black president. They tease us with the idea that they are on our side, but let’s not be fooled. Their side will never be our side and their table never our table because all these systemic wins make us more docile to their sword.
So what do we have to contend you ask? Where is the rebellious power in Pan-Afrikanism?
The ideology of Pan-Afrikanism is a wide blanket that covers many posts, from the glorification of Black capitalist nation-states to non-hierarchical structures that would resemble principles of anarchism (and I don’t mean that feeble white anarchism which lacks consideration of Black experience). To me, Pan-Afrikanism is an acknowledgement of the collective histories and experiences that bind Afrikan-descendant people together: histories and experiences that are riddled with harm, subjugation and genocide. Pan-Afrikanism is a call to freedom for Black people to take back their power by destroying those systems that have oppressed. This can never be attached to the state because, as Charles Mills pointed to in his book “The Racial Contract,” the modern state was created on the foundation of white supremacy: this is why all institutions within it are racist, including the police, the courts and the education system.
Afrika was literally divided up into states that would suit white exploitative interests. To quote socially-conscious wordsmith Dave in his song Black:
Black is people namin' your countries on what they trade most
Coast of Ivory, Gold Coast, and the Grain Coast
But most importantly to show how deep all this pain goes
West Africa, Benin, they called it slave coast
I would go further to critique that they never were “our countries,” that’s not to say that it was not our land (that’s undeniable), but rather that the states were not ours: we had tribes, and yes some tribes were more hierarchical than others (bun the idea of a pre-colonial Afrikan utopia), but they were not extractavist like the capitalist states of the white man and they definitely weren’t demarcated as they are now. Afrikan people knew this and fought against the state in favour of communal structures at the same time that others were fighting for a Black state, however, these histories are largely bleached out of history or shamed. For example, in Zambia, there was a large peasant movement fighting against Britain’s colonial power in the lead-up to independence. This movement advocated for the sanctity of communal structures but was eventually destroyed by the independent government with the help of the British forces. This is not a lone story, and the will for Anarkata (another word for Black anarchism which rebukes the whiteness of the movement) was wide, something pointed out in Ashanti Alston’s pivotal speech “Black Anarchism.”
I’ve noticed when the word anarchism comes up in Black spaces it is met with a hostile glare, with images of white punks in chains nihilistically burning shit for the sake of it in some self-absorbed reckless abandon. But let’s move our minds away from this, and to be honest, let’s let go of the word if we need to because it’s not about the label, it’s about resistance, violent or non-violent. It’s about acknowledging the strength in us and in the people around us. It’s about throwing a (metaphorical, if you will) bomb on the oppressor’s wicked fantasy to enslave us. It’s about autonomy, which means removing our upward stare even onto those Black activists who we want to guide us because we must guide ourselves. We can’t replace the state with a state or even with a vanguard of our fellow people in the same way we can’t replace the criminal justice system with a system of transformative justice. Why? Because to replace is to reform, and we must destroy this order and rebuild our world in the ashes of the old.
As Black anarchist Zoé Samudzi writes: “We are simultaneously subjugated and teased with promises of liberation via individualized neoliberal self-betterment and swallowing of a long-soured [Black capitalist dream] whilst choking back dissonances and forcibly reconciling irreconcilable double consciousnesses.”
We will not be dissolved into their system and their borders.