Introduction
In February 2022, the Hood Communist Collective commemorated African Liberation Month with four straight weeks of revolutionary African analysis. Here, you can find each of the pieces from that month, organized by the theme of each week. We invite you to revisit these pieces – or read them for the first time. We hope they will provide some guidance and clarity that will serve our people in our struggle for liberation.
Week One – What is to Be Done?
How to Withstand the Neo-Fascists Conquest of Power
by Kali Akuno
It is my honest assessment that as of this writing we have a little less than two years before the neo-confederates and neo-fascists install a reactionary dictatorship by the end of January 2025. In light of my comments regarding this development, many people have been asking, and rightfully so, what should be done to confront the advance of this ultra-reactionary dictatorship over the US empire.
Organizing Africans Against the Capitalist System
by Ahjamu Umi
We can work together across colonial borders to solve our problems. We can build communities internationally. And, those communities can connect with our own societies (Africa). And our societies can be productive and beneficial to all our people and the rest of humanity (Pan-Africanism).
Class Struggle and Freedom Beyond Colonial Borders
by Dr. Charisse Burden Stelley
The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief how truly interconnected our world is, how superficial colonial borders are, and thus how the struggle for freedom must link localized organizing to broader global insurgencies. Of course, this is not new. Though our epoch offers unique challenges, problems, and articulations of the dialectic between repression and resistance, history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.
Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions
by Safiya Bukhari
My own inability to confront the problems and struggle to eradicate counterproductive tendencies within our formations stems from a fear of having my motives misconstrued or of being subject to personal attack. Sometimes it’s extremely hard to deal with situations in a principled manner when people call one another “comrade” but treat each other in a manner that belies the use of that term. Social practice is the criterion for truth. If you talk about people behind their backs, have hidden agendas, or manipulate situations so that certain people are not privy to what’s going on—and I’m not talking about a “need-to-know” situation—it makes it hard for people to criticize such activity without fearing retaliation.
Week Two – Organization is the Only Way!
Black Queer Liberation in Brazil
by Krystal Cerisier
“As maintained in the October article, Failures of the US Left, “what should be largely understood by the ‘US left’ is that fascism and capitalism rely on and support imperialism—- seeking out to exploit nations we’ve come to view as Underdeveloped for labor, benefiting only the most privileged few within the Western nation”. During this year’s African Liberation Day virtual broadcast, this point was exemplified through discussions centered on imperialist sanctions against sovereign nations like Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Venezuela, reiterating the point that “one can not be a revolutionary socialist and not also be an anti-imperialist.”
Objective Facts
by Darius Simpson
Objective Facts is poem from Darius Simpson about the necessity African resistance to the forces of exploitation and oppression.
Why We Need a Mau Mau in Amerika
by Dedan Waicuri and Yusuf Askari wa Watu of Mapinduzi
There is nothing left to do in the US but to organize and mobilize the masses. The US is a country made up of conservatives who are openly racist and imperialist, and liberals who are incoherent and inconsistent; only “inclusive” when it comes to upholding white supremacy and imperialism. They both give false hope to us, the colonized masses, lie after lie, broken promise after broken promise. We have come to see that the US has always resembled genocide, war, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and so many other cancers that we as the colonized masses are infected with. To be cured, to be free, we must rid ourselves of the tumors and infected areas of our body. Only through collective, protracted, and organized struggle will we obtain liberation.
Sowing the Seeds of Revolution
by Samora Machel
To many people production may seem a rite, a necessity, just something we are obliged to do in order to eat and clothe ourselves. It is true that production is aimed at satisfying our basic biological needs, but we also need it to free ourselves from poverty, to better know, control and use nature, and to educate ourselves politically. We are revolutionaries, our activities always have political meaning and content. Therefore our production, besides having an economic meaning and content, must also have political content.
Week Three – The House is Burning
The House is Burning
by the Hood Communist Collective
Africa is on fire, the Third World is shifting towards multipolarity and the colonial reality of Africans in the U.S. is continuously muddled to prevent any attempt at reigniting the radical traditions of Black internationalism and Pan-Africanism. For those of us held hostage in the West, we are children that regard their mother like a dispassionate but confused spectator. We understand, to an extent, that Africa is of us and we are of Africa, but we hold Africa at a careful distance, only bringing it close to claim, to pity, or to extract. Each new cataclysm on the continent takes us by surprise, though we think a certain amount of chaos is expected (it’s Africa after all). And when it comes, we try to fit it within the confines of a worldview warped by the individualism and chauvinism of capitalism-imperialism, stripped entirely of the truth of Africa’s collective present and history. Entirely stripped of the truth of who we actually are and why we’re here.
Week Four – Free ’em All
Political Prisoners in Azania
by Ahjamu Umi
Certainly, even in 2022 and beyond, any analysis about incarceration within Azania has to be framed by the intrusion of European colonialism into Africa. The British, Germans, Dutch, etc., colonized Azania hundreds of years ago and imposed one of the most vicious and anti-human systems in human history. The system of apartheid, which was according to its colonialist defenders, heavily influenced by the racist segregation systems imposed within the U.S. against the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, existed as the law of the land for generations. Apartheid as a system in Azania legalized racial oppression. Africans were forced to live, work, and exist, only within conditions sanctioned by the racist colonizers and the systemization of this process was institutionalized by requiring every African to carry documents confirming their status 24/7/365. Being caught without these documents – commonly known as the passbook – meant immediate imprisonment and even death. It’s important to note that the attractiveness of Azania to the colonizers (like all of Africa) was the vast potential of wealth that exists there. Diamonds, gold, steel, zinc, etc., are all plentiful in Azania and by controlling the country, the emerging European capitalists understood they could and would control the entire planet. This history is important because it framed the basis for how incarceration worked and continues to work in Azania.
The Indiana Prisoner Rebellion of 1985
by Too Black
On February 1st, 1985 guards at the Indiana Reformatory (now Pendleton Correctional Facility) sparked a rebellion with the brutal beating of defenseless inmate Lincoln Love aka Comrade Lokmar Abdul-Wadood. In a successful attempt to save his life, a politicized group of prisoners took several hostages including guards and a politician and occupied a cell block in the Indiana State Prison for 15 hours.
Kuwasi Balagoon: Love, Power, and Peace by Piece
by Rhamier Shaka Balagoon
Freedom is a habit and for Africans throughout history, it is one that can cost you dearly while under the repressive state apparatus of an imperialist power. Despite this, it has rarely discouraged those who’ve taken up the program for Black liberation from making the ultimate sacrifice out of their love for the people. Recognizing the colonial status of Africans in the US and in the diaspora is only the first step. Through organization, struggle, uniting around a set of principles and an unwavering commitment to the movement is where some of the strongest and most fierce of the litter emerges: the Panther, on the prowl, unchained, forged through fire, a deadly weapon of theory.
Prisoners of War
By Shane Williams
Our ancestors, our elders, our (New) Afrikan Liberation prisoners of war suffering the most heightened forms of bestial oppression in america’s concentration camps, deserve more than flowery tributes and toothless appeals to a conscienceless empire. Only the naive or willfully ignorant can not see the failure of the ‘left’ to truly acknowledge the existence of or work toward the release of our political prisoners and prisoners of war. To do so would not only be an indictment of a fascistic socio-political order, but a revelation that the ideological and organizational counters to the social order are insufficient to say the least. Dhoruba Bin Wahad has long reminded us that our enemy has an institutional memory, and as long as the current crop of activists and organizers lack an attachment to historical memory, we will continue to reinvent failure.