This excerpt comes from a speech given by Onyesonwu Chatoyer, on a panel titled “Black Complicity in American Imperialism: Can Pan-Africanism Be the Solution?” at the National Black Radical Organizing Conference, summer 2023. View the full panel here.
I want to specifically speak to the Obama administration and what it represented, because we have to understand as African people, that the ruling class of the U.S. The global capitalist ruling class is extremely invested in severing our connection to Africa; is extremely invested in making us believe, again, that we exist apart from the global majority and from the masses of African people all around the world. They want us to believe that their history is our history.
They want us to believe our identities, the identities that they shape for us. Because they understand that, if we understand ourselves as part of the global African population, if we understand our national territory as Africa, then we will organize and rise up against imperialism and exploitation of Africa.
And they cannot have that, because we are sitting in the middle of the belly of the beast. This is why they work so hard to do it. So what the Obama administration represents, is a peak in the strategy of counter-revolution, meant to keep us submissive to the U.S. ruling class. Meant to keep us disunified with the masses of African people, meant to keep us confused about who we are.
Have y’all ever seen those t-shirts that have MLK, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and then Obama all in a line? Have y’all seen those posters in your family’s house? Have you seen how widespread Spread that narrative is among our people? That’s why they did it. It is extremely important that we don’t have to focus on individuals, but we have to break the emotional tie that these people have with our people.
We have to expose them for the enemies that they are.