MASILO LEPURU
‘’The attitude of the white race is to subjugate, to exploit, and if necessary exterminate the weaker peoples with whom they come in contact. They subjugate first if the weaker peoples will stand for it; then exploit, and if they will not stand SUBJUGATION nor EXPLOITATION, the other recourse is EXTERMINATION” (Marcus Garvey).
In light of the racist violence directed against the African race by white settlers in the North and South of the African continent, our survival as Africans, the rightful owner of the continent, is in question. Africans are like a hospitable owner of a big house who, upon seeing stranded strangers, invites them into some of the rooms of the house to stay together. After a while, these formerly stranded strangers turn against the host and become deadly guests.
What should the owner of the house do with these ungrateful strangers? The case of the president of Tunisia and Peter Marais of the Freedom Front, who regard Africans as immigrants who threaten the racial composition of what they delusionally think is their land reinforces the urgency of how to deal with ungrateful strangers who pose a danger to our well-being and existence.
What do Marais and the president of Tunisia have in common? Well, they are the successors-in-title to their racist and destructive ancestors who conquered the African race in an unprovoked series of race wars. The barbaric ancestors of the president are Arabs who conquered North Africa, beginning with Kemet (ancient Egypt) in 640 AD, which was a centre of African civilisation, while the ancestors of Marais are the uncivilised European conquerors who conquered Azania in 1652.
It is in this sense that these two arrogant descendants of white settlers in the North and South are nothing but an extension of what Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Thousand Seasons calls the predators and the destroyers. Marais and the president of Tunisia, as white settlers, are predators and destroyers who are people on the soil of Africa as opposed to Africans who are the people of the soil of the continent since time immemorial.
The delusional audacity to call Africans immigrants in their own land comes from the core of white settler colonialism, which Patrick Wolfe calls the logic of elimination. According to Wolfe, who was a white settler himself, settler colonialism is characterised by the tendency to replace the natives by destroying them and their culture. Settler colonialism is premised on the struggle between the settler and the native and revolves around the possession of the territory of the native.
In the struggle to dispossess the natives of their territory, the settlers use the “grammar of race”. This is why both the president of Tunisia and Marais, as white settlers, obsess about the racial strength of Africans whom they see as a racial threat (the deeply held fear of racial annihilation whites obsess about) to them as aliens from the continent of Asia.
The elimination of Africans from spaces invaded by these irredeemable white settlers under the pretext of black danger/swart gevaar is the beginning of the extermination of Africans as a race once our cheap labour, which has “saved” us so far, is no longer needed. This is because fundamental to settler colonialism is genocide, a case in point being the indigenous people of Azania, Australia and New Zealand.
This is why white settlers should be regarded as predators and destroyers as opposed to white saviours as they delusionally regard themselves. Africans must wake up and take very seriously the race war declared against them by the Asiatics, calling themselves Arabs and Europeans, which has been going on for “two thousand seasons”.
In dealing with this race war, sometimes dangerously hidden through the project of religious propaganda of Islam and Christianity, Africans must cast aside their naivety of hospitality and dangerous generosity, which got us into this mess of possible racial extermination by white settlers who are attacking us from the North and South of our continent.
We need to practice what John Henrick Clarke called the “selfishness of survival” as a race. The race-first philosophy of Garveyism is what Africans urgently need as a race. Using the race-first ideology for collective solidarity against the white race of settlers, Africans must rid themselves of their naïve obsession with multi-racialism. This deadly obsession is responsible for our mingling with our everlasting and implacable enemies who practice racial solidarity at all times against Africans.
The Arabs have Pan-Arabism in the North, while the Europeans have white nationalism globally. It is time for Africans to embrace and implement the philosophy of Garveyism. The multi-racial continentalism of Kwame Nkrumah, which wants us to fraternise with our white settler enemies in the North and the South, is very dangerous.
This needless Pan-Africanism, which wants us to embrace the predators and destroyers who have nothing but virulent contempt for us as a race, is a deadly illusion. As Africans, we are on our own. No matter what they think and how long Marais and the president of Tunisia have been on the continent, they are not African and will never be. The African race, which is in a situation of a race war, must begin to clearly define its enemies. Africans must study their history for the purposes of racial collective solidarity and revenge against their arrogant and irredeemable enemies from Asia.
Chinweizu, who has warned Africans about Arab colonialism and slavery practised in places like Mauritania and Sudan, suggests in the spirit of Garveyism, that we create an Africans-only organisation (Black World League of Nations) and superstate with enough military power to protect us and command the respect of our enemies anywhere in the world.
It is time to be uncompromising about the Garveyite battle cry of Africa for the Africans only. The naïve multi-racialism of the African Union, which does not address the problem of white settler colonialism of Europeans and Arabs, will not help us as a race under attack. Africans must turn the logic of elimination against all white settlers or perish.
“I do not know of any multi-racial society in human history, the one people have to be in charge. I do not know of any non-racist society in all of human history. And I do not know of any society in human history where the Europeans shared power with the non-Europeans. If I catch a thief in my home and I got a six-room, I am not going to negotiate with the thief and say you stay in the back room or the front room so long as you behave yourself. I am going to negotiate with the undertaker to take the thief away” (John Henrik Clarke 1990, our italics).
Masilo Lepuru is a Junior Researcher at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.
Daily News