Who is Prime Minister Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla? Burkina Faso cheered and celebrated at the news of Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla’s appointment to office as prime minister on October 21st, 2022. While there are many new faces and figures in Burkinabé politics right now, Kyélem de Tambèla is a familiar face to many Burkinabé who have known him for decades. In other circumstances this label may be given out too freely but, Kyélem de Tambèla has rightfully earned the title of Sankarist as demonstrated by his own background. As a student in France in the 1980s, Prime Minister . . .
Pan-Africanism
Africans and Identity
We want to carefully discuss our African identity because the answers we arrive at are fundamental to our Pan-Africanist objective. By defining our identity, we are defining our fighting force and ultimately we are defining the people for whom we fight. This is also the first step in the process of defining our enemy, which Sekou Touré named the “Anti-People.” These are essential definitions and in spite of the complexities involved, we have to get them right if we are to someday be free. I am sure all will agree that it will take all of us to defeat capitalism . . .
“Total Peace Is the Call”: Reflections from Colombia
Ajamu Baraka representing BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team was invited to serve as part of an international delegation of human rights defenders that would accompany the activists, community leaders, government officials, and representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN) on a historic “humanitarian Caravan” between January 17 and the 21st to the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian areas of the Pacific coast of Colombia as part of the peace process initiated by the new government in Colombia. Ajamu was also an observer and international guarantor in Havana, Cuba during the last round of the Peace Process that produced the Ethnic Chapter of the peace . . .
Worldwide Revolutionary Black Unity: Pan-African Ideas Becoming Reality
When Teodora Gomes, an immortal leader within the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), spoke there most likely wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Comrade Teodora was speaking to a room full of voting delegates present at PAIGC headquarters in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, for the first Party Congress for the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). There was A-APRP participation within the room from chapters and organizing areas in Guinea-Bissau, Azania (South Africa), Kenya, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Canada, and the U.S— a pan-African vision in the making. Widely regarded and respected within the PAIGC, A-APRP, and . . .
Star Spangled Blackness
There’s always been something about Black people wrapped in the American flag that has made me uneasy. For me, it’s a symbolism indicative of the intimate bonds we have with our oppressor, and the way it results in a longing to be accepted by those whose survival is predicated on our destruction. So, when I heard of the 1619 Project, I had immediate reservations. I’m well aware that 1619 was the year that the first recorded enslaved Africans came to the shores of the British colony, which would later become the state of Virginia. I support the need for African . . .
An Exercise in Dialectics
In both classical physics and quantum physics dialectics involves the propensity of material and immaterial things to move. This motion is responsible for the development of both the material and the immaterial and their transformation from one state to another. Motion is the mode of existence of all real things. This motion is the result of struggle and contradiction between the positive and negative forces within everything. The resulting motion is of two types: movement through time/space and movement or transformation from one state to another. In classical physics, a thing is what it is: a plant, a rock, or . . .
South Africa, Why Are You Scared of White People?
The incident that took place at the Bloemfontein Maselspoort resort complex on the afternoon of Christmas 2022 reminded me of Julian Kunnie’s inquiry on democratic South Africa when he quizzed, “Is apartheid dead?” At the resort, two teenage boys of African descent were involved in a racist scuffle with several seemingly Dutch descendants [Afrikaners/ white people] about the use of a swimming pool that was ‘exclusively segregated for whites only’. Social media was abuzz about the incident and the New York Times strangely got hold of the story and video footage of the incident. Most members of the society condemned . . .
The Murders of Malcolm X & Pio Gama Pinto
On the 21st of February, 1965, Malcolm X was killed in the Washington Heights neighborhood while speaking to an audience in Harlem, New York. Malcolm had just formed a new movement, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), having left the Nation of Islam the previous year. He was 39 years old. Three days later, on the 24th of February 1965, Pio Gama Pinto, a socialist revolutionary in Kenya, was assassinated outside his home in Nairobi. He was 38 years old. The assassination of both Pinto and Malcolm X in the same week has long raised serious questions and conspiracy theories . . .