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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Part one | A Black Panther love
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By: <a class="gmail-text"
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<p>Charlotte Hill O’Neal is known by several names.
Residents of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania,
where she has lived for decades, call her Mama C as
Charlotte is difficult for Tanzanians to pronounce.</p>
<p>Others call her Mama Africa because of the
scarification on her cheeks and the ring piercing her
nose, and because she encourages the local youth to be
proud of their culture and heritage. </p>
<p>Her Orisha spiritual name is Osotunde Fasuyi. She was
initiated several years ago as a priestess in the Yoruba
belief system, which originated about 10 000 years ago
in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved Africans brought it to
the Americas and the Caribbean, where it syncretised
with other belief systems and is now practised
throughout these areas. </p>
<p>Charlotte is bedecked in jewellery and beads. Some
items represent Orisha deities and others are
traditional Maasai beadwork. </p>
<p>She is a former member of the Black Panther Party, who
fled the United States with her husband Pete O’Neal half
a century ago. </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-1_Supplied-2-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" moz-do-not-send="true"
width="284" height="426"><br>
Undated: A portrait of a young Charlotte and Pete O’Neal
taken some time in the 1960s. (Photograph supplied)
<p>Charlotte speaks Swahili with a Midwest drawl and her
skin is decorated with tattoos: a black panther on her
left shoulder and Sankofa, a symbol the Akan people of
Ghana use to represent the importance of gaining
knowledge and wisdom from the past, on her arm. African
instruments, including the stringed nyatiti
traditionally played by the Luo of present-day Kenya,
replace the gun once strapped across her body. </p>
<p>Charlotte, 69, and Pete, 80, have lived in Tanzania
since 1972, when local authorities targeted Pete because
of his activities as chairperson of the Kansas City
chapter of the Panthers. They run the United African
Alliance Community Center (<a
href="https://www.uaacc.net/" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener" moz-do-not-send="true">UAACC</a>)
in Imbaseni village outside Arusha city, where murals of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, along with other
icons of the black power and civil rights movement, are
splashed on to the walls. </p>
<p>Charlotte and Pete’s story intertwines with the
revolutionary spirit of thousands of young
African-American men and women who attempted to stand up
to injustice and change the world, but were met with
prison sentences, assassinations and government
repression. </p>
<h2><strong>A confusing, beautiful time</strong></h2>
<p>While their relationship is a testament to decades of
love and support, “I just really didn’t like her,” Pete
says, laughing as he relaxes in their bedroom. Pete
joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 after having an
“epiphany” during a visit to Oakland, California, where
the Black Panthers were founded in 1966. “I was not a
very good person,” says Pete, who was incarcerated as a
teenager in California. “I was a crook and a thief. My
life mirrored so many young Black men and women growing
up in the ghetto and who were attracted to the street
life.</p>
<p>“My friends had convinced me to go with them to Oakland
to see this new organisation, but I had no interest in
trying to do anything to participate in the uplifting of
our people or community. I thought maybe I’d go out
there and do some hustles and make some money.” </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-1_Supplied-3-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
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February 1969: Pete O’Neal talks about the formation of
the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party.
(Photograph supplied)
<p>Like many young Black Americans, it was the Panthers’
focus on police violence that initially attracted Pete
to the party. He met co-founder Bobby Seale and
high-ranking party member David Hilliard in Oakland and
told them: “I’d be willing to do anything to get even
with them [the police].”</p>
<p>“They stopped for a minute,” says Pete. “And they said,
‘Brother, that’s really not what we’re all about. We’re
not about getting even. We’re trying to change the
world.’” </p>
<p>Pete stayed in Oakland for several weeks and
participated in the Panthers’ political education
sessions, learning about revolutionaries from Che
Guevara in Cuba to Mao Zedong in China. </p>
<p>“I suddenly just had an epiphany,” he says. “I would
imagine that this is what happens to born-again
Christians when they see the light. Well, I saw the
light. They talked to me about the suffering and the
sacrifices that were made, and the beauty of stepping
outside of your own desires and aspirations and
embracing something larger than yourself.</p>
<p>“It was a confusing, yet beautiful time. It was like my
mind was expanding and I could see things that I had not
been able to see before. When I left there, I was a
former street hustler imbued with the desire to bring
about revolutionary change. Not just for Black people,
but people of the world.” </p>
<p>Pete, who was 28 at the time, returned to Kansas City.
“I severed ties to the people who were involved with me
in my former life. I tried to take some of the people
from my former life with me on this new path. But they
thought I had lost my damn mind.” </p>
<p>He founded the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther
Party in the state of Missouri. </p>
<h2><strong>Far from love</strong></h2>
<p>Charlotte, meanwhile, was finishing high school in
Kansas City, just kilometres from the city of the same
name in neighbouring Missouri. “I was always raised to
be very proud of who I am and my Africanness,” she says,
the clinking of her jewellery as she gestures adding
percussion to her speech. </p>
<p>“This was during the civil rights movement. Then I saw
people like Malcolm X and then later with Stokely
Carmichael, and then I started hearing about the Black
Panther Party. It was amazing for me to see these young
brothers and sisters with their black leather and
shades, and their berets and all this marching,” she
says. </p>
<p>When Charlotte was a senior, she started seeing Pete in
the newspapers and would cut out these pictures of him
and paste them on her bedroom walls. “But I never
thought I would actually meet him.”</p>
<p>Charlotte would soon meet Pete, though, and it would be
far from love at first sight. </p>
<p>Charlotte was a successful student, but she often
bunked school and crossed over to Missouri to attend
political education courses at the Kansas City chapter.
About two months after graduating, Charlotte officially
joined the Black Panther Party. Pete was on a speaking
tour and helping other branches, so he wasn’t there when
Charlotte joined. </p>
<p>Charlotte was 18 and began living in a “panther pad”,
where young Black Panther members would live in a
communal environment and set an example of the
revolutionary socialist society they hoped to build. “We
cooked and cleaned together, and we would go out into
the fields and have weaponry training,” Charlotte
explains. </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-1_Supplied-4.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
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11 Feb 2019: Charlotte O’Neal at her home in Tanzania. A
Black Panther tattoo adorns her left shoulder. (Photograph
by Jaclynn Ashly)
<h2><strong>Strict code of conduct</strong></h2>
<p>The Black Panther Party had a strict code of conduct
and warned its members against using or possessing
narcotics, marijuana or alcohol while doing work for the
organisation. “You’re not supposed to do hard drugs or
anything when you’re on duty,” Charlotte says. “You were
supposed to be very alert because the police were on us
all the time. We weren’t supposed to give them any kind
of excuse or reason to bother us, because they would
harass us and arrest people just so they could deplete
our finances by making it so we were constantly bailing
people out.”</p>
<p>Signs around the panther pads and chapter offices
warned members against being “non-functional”, Charlotte
says. “But we were teenagers and this was the 1960s,
right?” She tilts her head back, chuckling
mischievously. </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-1_Supplied-5-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="426" height="284"><br>
5 August 1969: A member of the Black Panthers peeks around
the bullet-pocked door that police blasted with gunfire
during a pre-dawn raid in Chicago. (Photograph by Getty
Images)
<p>She and the other young Panthers decided to drop pills
called Red Devils, the street name for secobarbital, a
sedative-hypnotic pill used to treat insomnia and
epilepsy that was used for recreational purposes in the
US throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. </p>
<p>“So we dropped them and we were out of it,” Charlotte
says. “We were having a good time. Everybody’s smoking,
doing this and that. We were thoroughly
non-functional.” </p>
<h2><strong>Talking back</strong></h2>
<p>The young Panthers were unaware that Pete was scheduled
to return to Kansas City that day. He said: “I walked
into the house, and I could get the aroma of illicit
substances wafting through the air. I said, ‘What the
hell?’ You could smell weed everywhere. And they were
just partying on the porch with the music turned up
loud. This is a political organisation. And they were
just having a good time and I came up on them
unexpectedly.</p>
<p>“Bear in mind,” Pete adds. “I was a father figure. Most
of them were in their teens and, quite frankly, a lot of
them were scared of me. So I came in and said, ‘What the
hell is going on?’ And their mouths fell open and they
were just staring at me and everyone was silent.” </p>
<p>Charlotte was finally meeting the man whose image had
adorned her bedroom walls. “I was so out of it,” she
says. “I could hardly talk and I remember him being so
mad.” </p>
<p>Pete, furious with the young Panthers, looked to his
right and saw a young woman he did not recognise, a
“skinny little girl with a big fat head”. He glanced at
her and asked angrily, “And who the hell is this?” </p>
<p>The skinny girl with the fat head replied in a nervous
stutter: “I-I-I’m Ch-ch-arlotte Hill. I-I-I’m from
K-K-Kansas City. And I-I joined the B-B-Black Panther
Party.” </p>
<p>“Who the hell let her join the party?” Pete responded
furiously. He turned to Charlotte and said, “Shut up and
don’t say another word.” But Charlotte retorted: “You
can’t tell me not to talk. My daddy told me that I
always have the right to talk.” The other young Panther
members let out a collective gasp, Pete recalls. “They
were thinking, ‘Oh Lord, she’s dead now.’”</p>
<p>“He was real mad at that,” Charlotte says, smiling from
ear to ear and slowly shaking her head as she remembers
being introduced to the man who would become her
lifelong partner. “Brother Pete ran a real strict ship
and here I was talking back to him.” </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-1_Supplied-6-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="426" height="285"><br>
1969: Pete O’Neal chats with children eating a free
breakfast provided by the Black Panthers. (Photograph
supplied)
<p>“I remember thinking that I can’t stand this girl,”
Pete recalls. “I thought this girl was definitely going
to be a disruptive force in the party. I didn’t like
her.” As punishment, Pete made the young Panthers run,
carrying each other on their backs, and then locked them
in a storage cabinet. “I can’t remember if I left them
there for a few hours or I left them there all night. I
really can’t tell you,” Pete says, grinning. Charlotte,
meanwhile, says she passed out soon after being locked
inside. </p>
<p>But Pete and Charlotte were living together a few weeks
later and soon after that, they married. “How did that
happen? I really don’t know,” Pete said. “But what I do
know is that she has been the love of my life, my
greatest inspiration and my best friend.” </p>
<p><em>Part two of the O’Neals’ extraordinary story tells
of their escape from the US and how they ended up in
Tanzania.</em></p>
______________________________________<br>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Long Read: Part two | A
Black Panther love story</h1>
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By: <a class="gmail-text"
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February 17, 2021<br>
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<p>More than half a century before a police
officer would kill George Floyd, sparking mass
protests, Black Panther Party co-founders Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale understood that police
brutality was the most immediate and pertinent
concern for the Black community. </p>
<p>Their organisation was envisaged and
established in the back room of the North
Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, where
Seale was employed in 1966. Charlotte and Pete
O’Neal’s relationship was birthed and nurtured
by the Black Panther’s evolution, from its
moments of triumph to its downfalls.</p>
<p>“Newton and Seale understood police brutality
as an issue of dignity and disempowerment
experienced by individuals,” writes Robyn
Spencer in <em>The Revolution Has Come: Black
Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in
Oakland</em>. “For Blacks, hostile and violent
interactions with the police were part of the
fabric of daily life, and negative experiences
with the police linked people across age,
gender, and class.” </p>
<p>Panther members came from the military, gangs
or had learned to use firearms to hunt, says
Spencer. “In many ways, the panthers’ connection
to armed self-defence was visceral … But if you
came because of the guns, you also had to learn
political education, and if you came for
political education, you still had to learn how
to use a gun.” </p>
<p>Soon after founding the group, Newton and Seale
launched patrols to monitor police activity in
Oakland and Newton learned the intricacies of
the city’s open-carry gun laws. </p>
<p>The two would observe the police while they
made arrests and intervene with cameras, tape
recorders, legal books and licenced firearms.
“The sight of two young black men, carrying
guns, loudly asserting their rights to bear arms
and warning the police not to be aggressors
repeatedly drew crowds,” Spencer says. </p>
<p>“The idea of picking up a gun was very central
because in a sense the gun was something that
can be used for self-defence and it was
something that had been racialised,” Spencer
explains. “They saw the rights of gun ownership
and the rights of self-defence as things that
were historically denied to people of African
descent. Those laws were made for white people
and the Panthers took those same laws and
repurposed them for a revolutionary end.” </p>
<p>Emory Douglas, who acted as the minister of
culture for the Black Panther Party, often
designed caricatures of police officers as pigs
in his drawings printed in the Black Panther
newspaper, once again flipping the power dynamic
between Black communities and the police. </p>
<p>“The Panthers replaced fear with action,” says
Spencer. “The Panthers took police officers,
which were these all-powerful authority figures,
and transformed them into an image of a pig.
Even in the way they used language, like ‘off
with the pigs’, and how Emory Douglas and other
Panther artists drew the police as pigs against
a united community standing up and conquering
the fear and moving into collective action, they
were telling a story in a way that the people
could understand that they actually had the
power.” </p>
<p>When Californian authorities – in response to
the Panthers’ armed patrols of police activity –
tried to ban them from carrying loaded firearms,
dozens of mostly armed members barged into the
capitol in Sacramento in protest. This audacious
stunt and the 1968 assassination of Martin
Luther King Jr caused membership to swell. </p>
<p>Black Panther chapters opened across the US to
address the needs of communities. The Panthers
established education programmes and the
Breakfast for Children Program, and set up free
medical clinics with volunteer doctors and
nurses. They saw their movement as part of a
global class struggle and partnered with other
organisations, including on the white Left. </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-2-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="426" height="284"><br>
Undated: From left, Black Panther Party
co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton at the
party’s headquarters in San Francisco, California,
in the United States. (Photograph by Ted
Streshinsky/ Corbis)
<p>One of the first programmes Pete O’Neal
implemented in Kansas City gave free breakfast
to children. At one point, they were feeding 700
children a day, says Pete. </p>
<p>The Kansas City chapter set up clothing and
food distribution programmes and free health
clinics with registered nurses. “The news media
focused on one thing: ‘A Black man has a gun!’
But they didn’t want to talk about the beauty of
our community [upliftment] programmes,” Pete
says. “I was very proud of all of this and it
was something I had never participated in in my
life, something as grand and altruistic as
this.” </p>
<h2><strong>‘Down for doubles’ </strong></h2>
<p>The FBI created a counterintelligence programme
in 1967 dubbed Cointelpro, which targeted Black
nationalist organisations. Then director J Edgar
Hoover said in 1969 that the “Black Panther
Party, without question, represents the greatest
threat to internal security of the country”.</p>
<p>The FBI flooded the organisation with
informants and forged letters, correspondence
and even cartoons to create or build on existing
tensions between Panther members and their
allies. Panther leaders, including Pete, had
their phones and homes wiretapped illegally. </p>
<p>Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms arrested Pete on 30 October 1969 for
allegedly transporting a gun across state lines.
About two weeks earlier, Pete and other Panther
members had stormed a Senate hearing in
Washington DC after receiving information about
the Kansas City police confiscating guns and
giving them to right-wing organisations such as
the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the
Minutemen. </p>
<p>While he was already on the Kansas City
police’s radar, after his arrest Pete began to
fear for his life. “When I would go to court,
the police would laugh while they were searching
me. They would tell me, ‘When you go to jail,
you’ll be on our turf and you’re coming out in a
box,’” says Pete.</p>
<p>A Black officer warned Pete that the police
were planning to kill him. “I knew he was
telling the truth. I made my mind up in that
moment that I was getting out and dodging.” </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-3.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
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11 April 1969: Black Panther Party members
demonstrating outside the New York County Criminal
Court during the Panther 21 trial of members
accused of shooting at police stations and a
bombing. All were acquitted. (Photograph by David
Fenton/ Getty Images)
<p>But Pete went to his trial and was sentenced to
four years in prison. Despite already having a
record, which included an escape from prison,
the judge allowed him to stay out on his current
bail agreement during the appeal process. “That
was unheard of,” Pete says. “I think he knew I
had a record of escape and thought it would be
better if I just got out of their hair … I spoke
out very strongly and continuously against
police brutality. They didn’t want to make me,
or anyone, a martyr and give us more power.” </p>
<p>Hoover had issued a directive under Cointelpro
to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could
unify and electrify the militant Black
nationalist movement”. </p>
<p>University of Florida professor and <em>Black
Panther in Exile: The Pete O’Neal Story </em>author
Paul Magnarella says there was “no justice” in
Pete’s 1970 trial. It was riddled with
“constitutional defects” that ensured the trial
was “neither fair nor just”.</p>
<p>Pete knew he had to, but did not want to leave
the US. “Charlotte was enchanted by the concept.
But the idea of leaving the States sounded
horrible to me,” he says. “But it was the best
thing that ever happened to me … It’s funny how
life works sometimes.” </p>
<p>The Left had what Spencer calls a “modern-day
underground railroad”, people who could smuggle
activists wanted by the authorities out of the
US. </p>
<p>The couple began planning their escape to
Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent
leader in the Black Panther Party, had launched
the international section of the party after
being charged with attempted murder and fleeing
the United States in 1968. At the time, newly
independent Algeria was a hub for anti-colonial
movements around the world.</p>
<p>Charlotte and Pete could not tell their
families about their plans. Charlotte remembers
visiting her father at the station where he
worked as a firefighter. “I was trying so hard
not to cry. But we didn’t think we would be gone
for long. Maybe two years.” </p>
<p>There was 24-hour police surveillance on their
home, according to Charlotte, and they had to
sneak out the back wearing disguises. Charlotte
wore a wig, “looking all bourgeois”, she says,
and Pete straightened his hair. The couple hid
in the boot of a car until those helping them
escape had crossed state lines. </p>
<p>They ended up in Long Island, New York, where
“rich white communists” set up their documents
and a lawyer drove them to the airport. Pete
took Charlotte aside. “I told her that she
didn’t have to go. She had gotten a full
scholarship to go to medical school in Texas …
You don’t have to do this,” Pete remembers. </p>
<p>Still a teenager, Charlotte’s response was
confident: “No, brother chairman. I’m down for
doubles. I’m with you all the way.” </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-4-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
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January 1969: Pete O’Neal points a finger at
Barney Myers, the administrative assistant to
mayor Ilus Davis, in the anteroom of the mayor’s
office. (Photograph supplied)
<h2><strong>A life of exile</strong></h2>
<p>The O’Neals spent several months with activists
in Sweden before flying to Majorca, Spain, and
from there to Algiers in Algeria. “When we got
off the plane, we stayed in a bug-infested
hotel,” Pete says. Not having an international
contact, he took a leap of faith and asked the
hotel owner for a number for the Black
Panthers. </p>
<p>Pete spoke to Cleaver, but he was “very
suspicious of me”. A bitter split had formed in
the Black Panthers between Newton in Oakland and
Cleaver in Algiers over the trajectory of the
party. Newton said it should focus on community
programmes, while Cleaver wanted to focus on the
militant aspects and creating connections with
international revolutionary movements. Newton
eventually expelled Cleaver and the entire
international section from the party, which led
to spats of deadly violence between the Panthers
and its dissidents.</p>
<p>These tensions were compounded by the FBI,
which was wary of Cleaver developing
international alliances hostile to the US,
according to Spencer. </p>
<p>“I was worried about this split,” says Pete<em>.</em>
“A lot of people died in the Black Panther Party
because of this split. I gave Charlotte all the
money that I had and told her, ‘If I don’t come
back, get out of here and go back to Kansas
City.’” </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-5-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
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Undated: Charlotte O’Neal on one of the
traditional instruments she learnt to play in
Tanzania. (Photograph supplied by Charlotte
O’Neal)
<p>But when Pete arrived at the Black Panther
Party’s office, he was greeted with open arms.
“I felt like I had finally come home.” The
Algiers office was a place where Panthers could
meet and socialise with revolutionaries from
around the world, from Vietnamese communists to
Palestinian anti-Zionist fighters. </p>
<p>But relations between the party and the
Algerian government began to disintegrate,
exacerbated by two plane hijackings to provide
the Panthers with hefty ransoms. The Algerian
government intercepted both ransom payments and
returned the funds to the US. </p>
<p>The Panthers, increasingly low on funds,
publicly denounced the Algerian government,
which cut the Panthers’ lines of communication
and placed them under house arrest for six days.
This, along with Algeria’s softening diplomatic
stance on the US, was the beginning of the end
of the international section of the Black
Panther Party.</p>
<h2><strong>‘Pole by pole’</strong></h2>
<p>“When things began to fall apart in Algeria, I
wanted to go back to Sweden,” Pete says. It was
Charlotte who convinced him to consider
Tanzania. Hundreds of African Americans were
living there, including former members from the
Kansas City chapter. “I took her advice and it’s
the best advice I’ve ever been given.” </p>
<p>In 1972, the couple went from Algeria to Libya
and then Egypt, where they were detained for not
having a cholera vaccination card. Charlotte
forged their yellow fever documentation to read
cholera and the Egyptian authorities released
them the next day. </p>
<p>“We had our honeymoon at a really nice hotel
next to the Nile River,” Pete remembers, until
they received their visas. The Tanzanian
government welcomed them as “freedom fighters
and political refugees”, says Charlotte. </p>
<p>“That was the last commercial plane I ever got
on,” Pete says. </p>
<p>Charlotte was “overjoyed by the beauty” of
Tanzania, he says. She “was excited and was
looking at the colours and cloth. But it took a
while for me to adjust. I grew up my whole life
in the city and coming here, I saw the rusting
tin roofs and I thought this was going to be
hard. But slowly I got used to it. Now you
couldn’t drag me out of here. I will be buried
here.” </p>
<p>The couple lived in former capital Dar es
Salaam for about a year. But the hot and humid
coastal environment had adverse effects on
Pete’s health, so they migrated inland and
rented a home in Ngaramtoni village in the
northern Arusha region. </p>
<p>Charlotte and Pete learned how to farm and
became self-sufficient. They soon obtained four
acres of land in Imbaseni, a quiet village about
25km from Arusha, where they live today. </p>
<p>They recycled everything and Pete learned how
to build windmills to provide electricity to the
area. They raised chickens, milked cows, hunted
and began farming beans and making sausages,
which they sold for 15 years. </p>
<p>The O’Neals built a centre for children and
teachers would congregate to offer classes. But
Charlotte says its popularity soon rendered it
too small and the daily trips to and from the
city became a hassle. Pete and Charlotte decided
to build a centre at their home. </p>
<p>“The first classroom was to teach computers,”
says Charlotte. “We didn’t have the internet and
it was those big giant computers with tiny
little screens. And then the elders asked us to
teach English and so we built another building
for that. And it just kept growing after that.” </p>
<p>The couple founded the United African Alliance
Community Center (UAACC) in 1991. The centre
offers free classes in art, sewing, jewellery,
yoga, ecology, hip-hop, music, photography and
video production and editing.</p>
<p>Pete has not been able to return to the US, but
Charlotte does speaking tours there each year to
help raise funds for the centre. </p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-6.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="426" height="284"><br>
March 2020: Pete O’Neal at his home in Tanzania.
(Photograph by Jaclynn Ashly)
<p>One donor, former Black Panther Party member
Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, gave Pete and Charlotte
$10 000 to help access water. He won a
$4.5 million settlement for a wrongful murder
conviction. Often referred to as “Papa Rage”, he
lived in Tanzania for about 10 years with his
wife and child before dying there in 2011. </p>
<p>“This drill company came here and … when they
struck water, we had this big celebration,”
Charlotte says. “The first thing we did was
install a water tap so people wouldn’t have to
walk for miles to get water. Later, we ended up
helping to dig and erect 36 electricity poles.
Now everybody [in the area] has access to
electricity.” </p>
<p>Other former Panther members who have visited
and contributed to the centre include Douglas,
who gave art classes to the students. </p>
<h2><strong>A homebody and a grandfather</strong></h2>
<p>Pete and Charlotte established the Leaders of
Tomorrow Children’s Home in 2008, which gives 28
disadvantaged children a home at the couple’s
house, education and healthcare. These children
have become part of their family. Malcolm and
Ann Wood, the O’Neals’ children, are now in
their 40s. </p>
<p>“I did not particularly believe in romantic
love,” says Pete. “I was well travelled and well
schooled in the university of life. I brought
her [Charlotte] on her first plane ride. She was
a child compared to me, but now it’s almost as
if the roles have reversed. I stay home and take
care of the children.” Charlotte has become the
energetic one, making videos, movies and music
with the youth in the area, while Pete has
become the homebody. “I never thought I had a
grandfather bone in my body. Now they hang out
with me all day. At night, I have 20 children
crowded in my bedroom … and I love it. This is
what my exile has become.”</p>
<img
src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16Feb_Black-Panther-part-2-Supplied-7-scaled.jpg"
alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="426" height="284"><br>
Undated: Pete O’Neal with some of the children at
the centre he and Charlotte set up in Tanzania.
(Photograph supplied by Charlotte O’Neal)
<p>But decades later, Pete continues to experience
post-traumatic stress from the police brutality
he faced in the US. “If the police stop me on
the road, they all know me. They wave and say,
‘Mzee [elder in Swahili], how you doing?’ But I
still can’t help but feel nervous.” </p>
<p>The Black Panther Party finally crumbled in the
1980s. Relentless targeting by local authorities
and the FBI led Newton to become increasingly
paranoid and suspicious. He created an
authoritarian atmosphere in the party and
allegations of corruption and Newton’s drug
abuse began piling up. In 1989, he was shot and
killed on one of the same street corners of
Oakland he had attempted to revolutionise. But
Newton remains one of the most brilliant and
well-respected minds of the black power
movement.</p>
<p>Charlotte and Pete say they have continued the
legacy of the Black Panther Party in Tanzania.
“I’m a deeply flawed person,” says Pete. “I was
then and I remain that way today. But my goal
and aspiration is to try and be just a little
bit better today than I was yesterday.</p>
<p>“I don’t always succeed. I backslide. But I
hold on to this thought, philosophy and
intellectual liberation I discovered back in
1968, and I continue to hold on to it dearly.
And I think that will be my salvation. I’m not a
religious person. But if I’m wrong and heaven
exists, I’m going to get in there.”</p>
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