This article is an excerpted transcription of an interview with Makandal Cinque, who is a featured writer for The Burning Spear newspaper, a student of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and African Internationalism, and lives behind the dangerous prison walls of America. It is printed in honor of our beloved Comrade Ralph Poynter, who would have been 91 years of age on March 22, 2025. The interview of Makandal Cinque was done by Ralph Poynter and Sayero’ Oshosi on Thursday, August 11, 2022, for Ralph Poynter’s What’s Happening broadcast, which aired on WBAI Wednesday, August 17, 2022.
Ralph Poynter: I am ready to start this wonderful interview with brother Makandal Cinque, who lives behind the prison walls and also happens to be a most prestigious writer for The Burning Spear newspaper, a world-renowned African Internationalist newspaper dedicated to the liberation of all African and Indigenous people who live under the parasitic system of the colonial mode of production throughout the world.
Makandal: Yes, Uhuru.
Sayero’: Would you please elaborate on your article in the July 2022 issue of The Burning Spear newspaper?
Makandal: Uhuru, yes. I wrote an article in the July issue of The Burning Spear newspaper that’s called U.S. colonial prisons: the present-day sale and trade of Africans. This article was written to give readers an understanding of the history of the imprisonment of African people in America, tracing it and linking it to the captivity of Africans in Africa and our transportation to America. All throughout our history in this country, we have been colonized, and imprisonment has been an integral part of our oppression.
This is why the captivity of slavery and the captivity of imprisonment are frighteningly similar.
Sayero’: Can you now break that down on a grassroots level?
Makandal: Mind you, in the case of the judicial enslavement of Africans, which turns out to be State ownership of masses of incarcerated Africans, the laws were and are created by the alien and foreign power—the ruling class whom we today call “the government”—who, after the so-called abolishment of private individual slave ownership, created these severe laws cloaked under the rule of law.
This U.S. government specifically and perpetually allows for the parasitic colonial mode of production to maintain a vast and endless surplus of African slaves.
We are captives to an alien and foreign power. We are bound to their laws, to their authority and control, so they punish us for breaking their laws, which were unjust in the first place.
We are sentenced more harshly under their laws for similar crimes that the colonizers are arrested for. On a grassroots level, that keeps our communities destabilized because, in many instances, the fathers are all in prison, the uncles are all in prison, the mothers are in prison, and the children grow up susceptible to the same traps and problems that their parents had: poverty, deprivation, drugs, ignorance, joblessness, etc.
It becomes a vicious cycle—crime, drugs, violence, and prison—that we get trapped in generation after generation. And it’s reached a point now that we have generations after generations of Africans that are in prison: fathers, sons, grandfathers, grandchildren, uncles, nephews, cousins.
It’s a problem that we’ve been dealing with for generations, and it’s not getting any better because we have more Africans in prison in this country than we have in Jamaica, than we have in Barbados, Bermuda, and the Bahamas.
We have more Africans imprisoned in the U.S. than you have in nations throughout the African Diaspora.
The Burning Spear newspaper welcomes letters and reports from behind the prison walls. The Burning Spear ships free to any incarcerated reader who requests it.
Free ’em all!
