[News] Get up stand up: Youths in the age of revolution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    Get up stand up: Youths in the age of revolution


        Horace G. Campbell


        2013-06-20, Issue 635 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/635>


        http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/87928
        <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/87928>

This week, as Pambazuka News celebrates the youth of Africa at the same 
moment that we remember the life and work of Walter Rodney, we seek the 
inspiration of Rodney and other freedom fighters as we stand up to be 
counted in the struggles for emancipation and transformation. Drawing 
from the lyrics of a prophet of emancipation Bob Marley, my message to 
the youths of Africa today is: stand up, get up! Stand up for your 
rights. Don't give up the fight!

When the youths of Tahrir Square were chanting that "the people want to 
bring down the regime," something had already changed and the world was 
not anymore the same. It was the outset of a historic shift of human 
ideational system: ordinary people can make a huge change. This idea of 
the capabilities of ordinary people slipped through live video footage, 
and broke in the minds of people all over the world. One writer who had 
understood the historic importance of revolutionary moments stated that 
the Egyptian Revolution would change the world. And, two years on, we 
are still in the embryonic stages of this revolutionary process.

This African Awakening from North Africa, which had started from 
Tunisia, has inspired other insurrections -- and most recently the 
youths of Turkey have impeded all of the planning of Israel, Qatar, 
Saudi Arabia and the conservative elements within the imperial centers. 
Brazilian Youths are also registering their opposition to neo-liberalism 
as the organized and unorganized forces take to the streets to stand up 
for social justice. Youths from all corners of the planet are standing 
up for their rights and defying the planners who want to turn them into 
robotic and mindless consumers. In this process, the youths are divided 
between the children of the looters and the children of the sufferers. 
This divide on social lines is visible in the malls and public spaces 
where the children of the rich parade their consumerism. While the poor 
yearn for proper public transportation, the children of the rich drive 
by in their flashy cars. This crude consumerism of the 1 per cent of the 
youth can be distinguished from the majority of youths who are 
struggling for a decent life. The more the youths stand up, the more 
effective the efforts to disarm elements who want to divide, confuse and 
demobilize agents of transformation.

We are in a revolutionary moment, and as in every revolutionary moment, 
the whip of counter-revolution rears its head. But it is the 
self-organization and self-mobilization of the youths that have so far 
confounded the forward planners and militarists who want to derail the 
people-centered objectives of the moment. In Libya, the 
counter-revolutionary forces intervened and established a base for 
future intervention against the youths in Egypt, when the revolution 
matures. These plans which include arming youths to kill other youths in 
places such as Nigeria, Somalia and the Congo are being unmasked as the 
complicity of the imperial forces in terrorism is being exposed and 
there are now deep divisions between all the centers of imperial power.

EMANCIPATE YOURSELVES FROM MENTAL SLAVERY

As the real energy of Africa emerges out of the ashes of the current 
capitalist depression, the financial planners for international 
predators sharpen the planning to capture the minds of the youths. These 
planners seek to politicize regionalism, religion, ethnic differences, 
sexual differences and other contradictions among the people. The 
imperialist ideology of individualism and greed is today compounded by 
four other ideological deformities: (a) male chauvinism, (b) religious 
intolerance, (c) ethnic hatred and (d) fetishism, especially commodity 
fetishism. These deformities corrupt some of the youth and compound the 
physical and mental illnesses in our societies. Standing up for complete 
emancipation requires efforts to break loose from these social 
deformities. We cannot separate the discussion of these illnesses from 
the question of imperialism. This is a delicate issue -- for while it is 
not possible to blame all illnesses in Africa on imperialism, it is also 
necessary to bring to the attention of the youths the reality of 
imperialist plunder and destruction. The term imperialism is no longer 
in use since it is now more fashionable to refer to 'international 
partners' and 'donors'. However, the terms that we use must not disarm 
us and prevent us from teaching the youths.

As we celebrate the youths, there will be immediate recognition of the 
sacrifices of the youths of Soweto who set in motion the mass democratic 
struggles against apartheid. The name Hector Peterson is now remembered 
by many across the globe to commemorate the bravery of the 13-year-old 
who had joined with others to oppose the apartheid imposition of the 
Afrikaans language and culture. These youths wanted total emancipation 
and their sacrifices from June 16, 1976 paved the way for the end of 
apartheid. Today, the vanguardists of South Africa seek to control the 
memory of the youths because they fear the revolutionary spirit of the 
youths. Violators of women and corrupt leaders emerge from the ranks of 
those who seek to hijack the revolutionary traditions of the youth as 
they enrich themselves. The current leaders of South Africa who have 
been willing and able to shoot down mine workers do not want the 
majority of the youths in Africa to remember the inspiration of the 
youths of Soweto 1976. These youths of South Africa inspired a 
generation of young people right up to the youths of Tahrir square.

At revolutionary moments -- such as this one -- the old ideas, old 
forces, and old modus operandi can no longer hold together all the 
centers of domination and oppression. At such moments, the planning for 
divisiveness and confusion comes up against a greater thrust, that of 
youths in other parts of the world who come forward to expose imperial 
planning for surveillance and mind control.

The recent revelations by Edward Snowden, the former CIA information 
technology employee and contractor for the National Security Agency 
(NSA), has exposed the massive operations of the US military and 
intelligence against all peoples of the world. Snowden revealed the fact 
that the US government has gathered, on a permanent basis, data from 
everyone: "You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from 
somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go 
back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every 
friend you've ever discussed something with."

The reality was that these capabilities were not just used inside the 
United States. With the information it assembled, the US government can 
readily construct a detailed social and political profile of individuals 
near and far. According to the "Boundless Informant" data-mining tool, 
some 97 billion pieces of intelligence were gathered worldwide from one 
NSA spying program in March 2013 alone. In addition to the 3 billion 
pieces of intelligence from within the US, there were 14 billion from 
Iran, 13.5 billion from Pakistan, 12.7 billion from Jordan, 7.6 billion 
from Egypt, 6.3 billion from India, and 3 billion from Europe. It is now 
also known that "Kenya is the most watched African country on the US spy 
network." [1]

This information is coming one year after an American with links to the 
military and intelligence forces, under the guise of a humanitarian 
agency, produced the YouTube video Kony 2012. [2] This 
pseudo-cum-militaristic humanitarianism gives a clear indication of the 
level of sophistication and subtlety behind the planning against the 
people that want to mobilize for genuine transformation of their 
society, especially the youths. Having failed to provide direct military 
assistance to the beleaguered Yoweri Museveni government through the 
mobilization of youth internationally, the US Senate this week 
authorized the expenditure of US $90m to provide logistical support to 
the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the 
threat posed by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

The US militarists had to find another way to provide support for the 
Museveni government at a moment when the military command structure is 
torn asunder because some Generals are opposed to the creation of a 
monarchy in Uganda. Every effort to confuse and dominate the new 
generation comes up against new forces of strength. In eastern Africa, 
the forces of division are exposed as people yearn for peace and 
democratic participation.

After the youths of the Occupy Wall Street registered their opposition 
to the 1 percent and created the clarity that society must organize for 
the 99 percent, the purveyors of neo-liberal capitalism continue to use 
the corporate media as a weapon against the minds of the young. Added to 
the mainstream media are those mindless violent video games produced by 
the military-information-entertainment complex, which seem to distract 
and demobilize the minds of young people away from reality into a 
virtual world of militarism where killing and violence are supposed to 
be normal.

Yet, as the gaming industry rolls out new products (as they did last 
week), the youths who are in the majority in Africa, Asia and Latin 
America are searching for new forms of intervention to break the 
monopoly of the media. As they come out with new ideas, we must continue 
to urge that the youths revert to Bob Marley and all of the prophets of 
liberation to seek inspiration and to grow from one level of 
consciousness to the next.

Young people are being inspired by the idea of emancipation from mental 
slavery. The idea of fundamental change and the unification of the 
working class for a better society are still percolating all over Africa 
(and the world), countering and challenging hegemonic ideas. These were 
the ideas that Africa's freedom fighters such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice 
Lumumba, and Walter Rodney stood for.

LUMUMBA, FANON, WALTER RODNEY AND THE YOUTHS

Ideas are not material objects that are vulnerable to physical 
destruction. Despite efforts by western hegemons and their collaborators 
to discredit the revolutionary Pan African ideas, these ideas -- 
emancipation, dignity, unity, and rights for ordinary people -- survived 
and are being carried on by the youths who are innovating new ways to 
"stand up, get up, don't give up the fight," in the defense of these 
ideas until they become reality.

Walter Rodney had written extensively about colonialism, war and 
revolution. His book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, continues to 
inspire millions all around the world. Walter Rodney, the Pan African 
historian, was assassinated on June 13, 1980. Those who assassinated him 
physically are now seeking to assassinate him intellectually. Even those 
who write books about Rodney and quote from him seek his ideas for 
academic positions and seek to divorce the work of Walter Rodney from 
active revolutionary change. This has been the case in the home of 
Walter Rodney, Guyana, where the ethnic and racial chauvinists have now 
sought to drive a wedge between youths of African and Indian descent. 
Even within the Global Pan African movement there are those who want to 
drive a wedge between youths of Tunisia and youths of Mali (between 
Arabs and Africans). These elements promote Pan Africanism on the basis 
of politics of exclusion. Walter Rodney had opposed racial chauvinists 
and he opposed those Pan Africanists who wanted to divide Africa using 
the Sahara or religious differences to support imperial divisions. 
Rodney had clarified the importance of the youth for the African 
Revolution. In writing about C.L.R James, Rodney had stated that "Most 
youth in Africa will have heard the axiom that each generation rewrites 
its own history. It does so not merely for giving different answers to 
the same questions but by posing entirely different questions based on 
the stage of development that a particular society has reached. Certain 
scholars will be among the first to raise the new and meaningful issues 
because of their sensitivity and connection with the most dynamic group 
in society. Thus when African peoples were mounting the struggle for 
political independence and as they continued that struggle through 
military means in Southern Africa and political economic means 
elsewhere, they automatically became interested in recalling previous 
resistance."

Rodney would be dismayed today that many youths in Africa have not heard 
of Hector Peterson and the hundreds of thousands of youths who fought 
colonialism and apartheid. Silencing the history of the true heroes and 
heroines of the freedom struggle falls within the same category as the 
assassination of the freedom fighters of Africa. The assassination of 
Walter Rodney (like that of other Pan Africanists like Patrice Lumumba) 
as well as the overthrow of Pan African visionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, 
was meant to blunt the spirit of freedom, but certain ideas are 
indestructible.

We urge African youths to call on all previous resistance as they seek 
to develop a common ground to enrich the revolutionary processes that 
are now erupting.

Patrice Lumumba had understood the need for African liberation. He had 
written, "United as the children of one family, we shall defend the 
honor and freedom of Africa." These were the words of a Pan Africanist 
who also understood the centrality of the Congo to the African 
Revolution. Lumumba was silenced. But his words echo on and are 
reinforced in the mission for the African Revolution -- from generation 
to generation.

It was Frantz Fanon who argued that "every generation must, out of 
relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it." 
Fanon, a medical doctor, internationalist and freedom fighter from the 
Caribbean island of Martinique was calling on the generation of the 
period of anti-colonialism to fulfill its mission in bringing an end to 
overt colonial domination. The generation of youths after 1945 took up 
the task of confronting colonial rule. From every part of the continent 
there were organized and spontaneous acts of opposition to colonial 
racism, exploitation and plunder.

One of the tasks of the freedom movement after 1945 was to liberate all 
Africans from colonial rule. This task is still incomplete (Western 
Sahara, Mayotte, Cayenne, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Martinique and over 
50 other colonies) and we have to remind ourselves that as long as one 
part of the world remains under colonial rule, others parts of the world 
will be threatened by the same colonial forces. It can now be said that 
despite the sacrifices of the youth in Africa manifest in the major 
struggles to eradicate colonialism and apartheid, the tasks of ending 
violation and exploitation is still incomplete. Youth and their role in 
previous revolutionary struggles in Africa must be studied to inspire 
those who were too young to be part of the great struggle to defeat 
apartheid.

AFRICAN YOUTHS AND EMANCIPATION IN THE ERA OF NGOS AND DATA MINING

What are the new questions for the 21st century? There are many 
contemporary questions regarding emancipation, transformation, unity, 
and rights for which today's youths have to seek answers, taking 
inspirations from the struggles of previous generations. Numerous 
imperial organizations sponsored by the friends and enemies of Africa 
and enemies of the youth, under the guise of the so called international 
non-governmental organizations, seek to cream off the brightest of the 
youths of Africa and employ them as consultants to support the data 
mining that is going on at the imperial centers. Some of these 
international NGOs which operate under the pretext of providing 
education, health, and social welfare services, are seeking to collect 
all forms of intelligence information. And as they failed in Egypt, so 
imperialism has redoubled its efforts to invest in divisive formations 
in all parts of the world. African youths must become more conscious of 
these ploys and become even more active in sites where there are efforts 
to unearth the activities of looters who use tax havens and offshore 
companies/accounts to rob the society of money that could be used for 
reconstruction, health, education, and environmental repair.

Wangari Maathai left a message for the youths. This message is that the 
youths must replenish the earth and must save the planet. This message 
joins with the message and ideas of the indigenous peoples of Latin 
America and Asia. These peoples are pointing to the youths of the world 
the folly of the ideas of dominion over nature. We have seen that nature 
will take its revenge. Global warming is real and there must be system 
change in order to reverse global warming. Instinctively, people 
everywhere are grasping this basic fact. The more people grasp these 
facts, the more imperialism redoubles efforts to sabotage global 
initiatives from the environmental justice forces.

The youths must demand that they are not mobilized for war. The 
international nonprofit and non-governmental organization learnt in 
Latin America that the more there are international instruments to 
protect the rights of the youth, the more it is necessary to create 
organizations that will divert the energies of the youth away from 
direct action to defend their interests. This became very clear at the 
youth conference prior to the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in 
Durban.

It was the clarity of this moment of reparative justice and the global 
call for reparations that pressured some so called leaders in Africa to 
come up with NEPAD. Ten years after NEPAD and the New Africa Initiative, 
the people are now returning to the ideas that came out of Durban 2001. 
Our brothers and sisters from Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and other parts 
of the Global African Family are reminding us that there can be no 
business as usual until there are clear apologies for slavery.

Only recently the British government for the first time acknowledged 
that crimes were committed in Kenya by British imperial forces. The same 
relentless campaign that had been carried out by the surviving members 
of the Land and Freedom Army (of Kenya) must be carried out by the 
Global Movement for Reparations for the slave trade and slavery.

The issue of reparations is urgent in identifying those who carried out 
crimes. This includes the identification of the social forces in Africa 
that facilitated these crimes of enslavement. Africa never recovered 
from the criminal destruction that had been unleashed during the warren 
to procure enslaved beings. It was this destruction that paved the way 
for the partitioning of Africa. The fact that a society such as Belgium 
murdered over ten million Africans after the partitioning of Africa 
should be general knowledge.

Today, there are many discussions about the potential of the African 
youth. We agree that there is great potential for revolutionary change. 
The world is going through a major technological revolution and the 
youths can arm themselves with knowledge of previous revolutionary 
moments to arm themselves with the ideas and forms of political 
organization that can make a decisive difference in this period. Kenyan 
youths have shown remarkable creativity with social media and have 
pioneered new products such as M-Pesa and Ushaidi. Youths in that 
society are holding the line against those who want to manipulate ethnic 
differences so that youths kill each other. It is in Nigeria where the 
backward elements have mobilized disaffected youths in the so-called 
Boko Haram to carry out mindless violence. Other youths in that large 
and populous country seek new ways of mobilizing and are holding the 
line against absolute barbarism of the corrupt elements

It is important to locate peace, reparations, and reconstruction as a 
process that breaks old patriarchal ideas and attitudes. The 
reformulation of peace and the harnessing of the creative energies of 
the youth is emerging in a situation where it is becoming clear that 
peace cannot be an imported commodity based on the landing of troops 
from international peacekeepers. The experience of the role of the 
United Nations from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba down to the 
recent intervention in Libya demonstrated the reality that the concept 
of peace that is widely circulated (and associated with the US Africa 
Command) does not value Africans or the self-determination of African 
societies. Most of the peace agreements that have been made in Africa 
have been platforms for more war and violence. It is this violent 
history of war as peace that is forging the conceptual break with 
realist principles of politics and the view that might is right.

An alternative vision of peace that brings back the Pan African 
principle that, "the African is responsible for the wellbeing of his 
brother and sister and that every African should carry this 
responsibility" should be enshrined in the streets and villages all over 
Africa. The Constitutive Act of the Union seeks to move from the idea of 
"noninterference in the internal affairs of states" to one that spells 
out the necessity to prevent genocide, crimes against humanity and 
unconstitutional military interventions. This change that was manifest 
in the call for non-recognition of governments that came to power by 
military coups (after 1999) was a significant step in the 
demilitarization of Africa. African women from the grassroots who have 
been campaigning for peace have been the strongest and most resilient 
forces championing new concepts of politics, citizenship and peace. The 
implicit ideal that is now on the agenda is the philosophy that defends 
human life and defends the quality of the lives of the workers and 
ordinary people.

As the African youths move to defend this philosophy and the ideas that 
Pan Africanists such as Walter Rodney stood for, it is my wish that they 
draw on the inspirations and traditions of the previous generations. 
African Youths will move from strength to strength, and as they move 
they will be singing the words of Bob Marley. Get up stand up, stand up 
for your rights/ don't give up the fight.

And May Walter Rodney and his spirit live on among the revolutionary 
youths of Africa.

* Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political 
Science at Syracuse University. He is also a Special invited Professor 
at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of the book, 'Global 
NATO and the catastrophic failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the 
Forging of African Unity published by Monthly Review Press. 
http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4123/ The book is distributed in 
the UK and in Africa by Pambazuka Press.

END NOTES

1. "Kenya is The Most Watched African Country on The US Spy Network" 
AllAfrica.com, June 11, 2013. 
http://allafrica.com/view/resource/main/main/id/00061936.html
2. See Horace Campbell, "Kony2012: militarization and disinformation 
blowback," Pambazuka News, March 22, 2012. 
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80989

-- 
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