We are told never to forget. To remember our beginnings, forged in fire and brimstone. May 25th is one such day that reminds us of those beginnings, those nationhoods, and other such righteous impulses written in the destiny of a people and a continent still grappling with “what could have been.” This day, whether a hot tropical day or if it ever snows in May, will forever be a symbol that reminds us to smash oppression wherever it might be found within and beyond the African world. We don’t commemorate African Liberation Day (ALD). ALD isn’t the stuff of history and memory. We march onward to the United African Nation that must be. Through constant political education and organizing, the African masses both home and abroad will build a united socialist Africa. That needs to be said, to set the stage for what follows.
The liberation of the African continent from colonial domination and the feelings that animated that era were glorious. They still speak of other joys and bygone adrenaline rushes. Twenty-twenty-two, we are the children who play with the ashes of that fire that once was. A fire that burnt the very heart of god. A time when Africans took the world by storm and spoke of nothing but liberation and death to the colonizer. Today we struggle to even honor their memories. Tyrannies and coups have tainted the African memory and given birth to a wondrous creature who lurks and haunts the urban landscape and rural environs of the long-suffering continent —the neocolonial man. This being cuts across class struggle. In the poor quarters, he’s born anywhere and dies sometimes in the high waters of the Mediterranean Sea, trying to enter Europe. In the rich quarters, he scoffs at his own people in persistent derision whiles milking them dry of their resources. One a victim, the other a gatekeeper. Engaged in a fierce and bitter struggle, the one who wins will determine the constituent elements of this land.
Many children in Africa continue to die of hunger. Tomorrow, others will feed off the carcasses of dead children by fattening offshore accounts at their expense. There will be pontifications of poverty reduction and curbing hunger and thirst. Funds will come, from dubious sources. They will give life, love, and mansions to those who speak on behalf of the muffled, hungered-to-death, and silenced. Who lives and who dies depends on who can bow for the powerful and shed their humanity. Neocolonial politics.
I was on the phone the other day with my comrade. We spoke between intersperses of bitterness and joy. He recounted to me the floods, the death in the slums, and other such morbid things that are the stuff of African neocolonial states. I sat for a long while and thought about the hard truths that we once spoke to violent power. Where did that get us? Many died because of it, others were exiled or jailed. You can judge this as adventurism, but where we come from, what isn’t an adventure? The leaders take cruises off the blood of our people, and the masses cheer them on. Have you ever seen the entourage of an African president on one of those dilapidated roads? The latest cars – riding on ancient, dusty roads. Comrade and I spoke for a while and reaffirmed our commitment to our struggles, knowing, deep down, the line has been drawn for us all: solidarity with the cause of the people, or death.
For many, the struggle is an aesthetic. Reminds one of negritude memories, but remember Africa was never born in you or I — that was just escapist poetry. This continent is a land matter, eternally subsisting and in motion. Changing backwards, as capital and empire continues to ravage her – and we continue to sing amen! Dialectics take a whole new meaning, and Afrobeats meanwhile spirals on. Philosophy and music in dialogue, without agreement. Pessimism abounds in copious amounts as reactionary governments meet China and sell what little is left of our souls. Imperialism finds home yet again, forgetting “We look neither East nor West but forward!”, as said by Kwame Nkrumah, the great Pan Africanist. That was a great moment, or movement – choose one if you’re so dialectically inclined – do you remember Bandung and the Tricontinental?
Perhaps there is such a thing as suffering from liberation blues. The constant moaning, groaning, crooning of “what ifs” blurting out of young mouths. What if Nkrumah was never overthrown? What if Lumumba survived? What if, many ifs? The devil’s key to Pandora’s box. We are those young mouths, so stiff, sometimes so stuffed with a thousand many things. The children that played with the ashes that are the remnants of yesterday’s embers. So long a walk to liberation. Walks filled with defilement and betrayal. Walks smoldering with echoes and gunshots of whether African socialism or scientific socialism or communism. A continent still drowning in the ancient debates between Idealism and Materialism. It’s been a long walk, not to freedom – Mandela sold out already, it was said – but a long walk to the gates of hell. To survival of less-than-a-dollar-a-day, to failed uprisings, to wars. It was an era that seems to never arrive as it gently nudges, with firm footsteps, into our young, stiff, and stuffed bodies.
Speaking of bodies, I hope you remember all those fallen bodies that gave this day its worth. All the bodies dying, because what this day embodies is still a far-flung dream. All the bodies, still waiting to be born into a future that looks more like embracing an apocalypse. All the black bodies that, afore time, ended up on the other side of the Atlantic.
I hope we don’t reduce ourselves to bodies. We are so much more. We are subjects, sometimes objects and other times beings. And so long as we are subjects, we will keep fighting, winning and losing. Getting up again and devising to win. Since we are the many, and the righteous.
We shall never forget our embodied histories, tales, and narratives we carry with us to serve both as a reminder, and an impetus, to soldier on. May 25th, may we win. May we honor yesterday’s resolve with today’s yearning. Diagnosis complete — or shall we say in the words of a Gambian petite bourgeoisie, “end this blame game.”
*Alieu Bah is a writer from the Gambia and a member of Mwamko, a vanguard of a way of thinking that aspires to another order of being and doing within the African continent and her dispersed diaspora.
