We wrote some time ago on the role of African intellectuals in the world:
“The strategic role of Africa in the struggle for the liberation of the world must be understood by all African intellectuals. Imperialism will never leave us alone of its own accord. Imperialism does not care if we have elections or not, if we are Anglophones or Francophones.
“What we need to do is build the African Socialist International, to mobilize the one billion working masses in the African world for the African revolution. Students can have a future if only they join up with the African working class, which is the class that carries the future of all of Africa and African people on its shoulders.
“Students can join only as a revolutionary class. Oppressed workers and peasants do not need opportunist intellectuals, who are waiting in the wings for their turn to join the gravy train.”
Since the defeat of the black revolution of the sixties, the idea and concept of intellectuals have been a massive enterprise of mystification of colonized peoples’ brains everywhere.
The bourgeois colonial universities and African petite bourgeoisie’s universities and similar institutions produce thousands of graduates every year whose horizon has been framed outside the necessity of struggle for African freedom and self-determination.
Despite all the attacks and struggles we have faced, we have been redefining this notion of intellectuals. We are not leaving it in the hands of bourgeois institutions and their representatives.
On one hand, we are continuously developing initiatives to cement the defeat of the colonial bourgeoisie, without which the defeat of the African petty bourgeoisie will not be satisfactory. It is the former that trains and defends the latter.
Criminals like Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni could not last a day without the massive political and ideological support that they get from various bourgeois press and institutions.
On the other hand, we are consolidating and expanding existing anti-colonial institutions like The Burning Spear, Black Power Blueprint and setting up new ones to negate the political economy of global colonialism.
African intellectuals must be for liberation
You can’t be an African intellectual outside the struggle to recover our universal right to be self-determining people on this planet.
Genuine African intellectuals are produced and developed in this process of rebuilding the international African national liberation struggle to defeat colonialist and neocolonialist rulers, and regimes where conditions allow and advance the ultimate African universal struggle to eradicate the colonial mode of production from our planet.
A PhD, a bachelor’s degree or a diploma indicates one’s individual potential and ability to operate and succeed within the colonial mode of production, and it definitely makes one an African intellectual. However, to be one with integrity requires participation in anti-colonial struggle to create a new world based on the destruction of the foundation of colonialism as the historical and active permanent foundation of capitalism.
It’s in the struggle to end the hundreds of years of domination of Africa and African people that one will find the legitimacy and integrity of an African intellectual.
You can’t be an African intellectual outside the struggle to recover our universal right to be a self-determining people on this planet.
An African intellectual must be born, must be engaged and must be openly or secretly an active part of the active struggle for African redemption.
The bourgeoisie dictates what it means to be an intellectual. It controls the institutions of learning and the content delivered by these institutions. However, in this period of endless crisis of global colonialism as mode of production, the bourgeoisie is on the defensive. It can no longer defend itself politically and ideologically against the fighting people of Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba and increasingly against African people, too.
In places like India and China, colonialism is understood as an extension of European capitalism, therefore limiting the domination of their countries to something like 200 years for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh; and even less than 200 years for China.
Colonialism replaced feudalism in Europe
Africans in Africa, the Indigenous people of the Americas have a different experience. We were not invaded by capitalism, but by colonizers who became capitalists on our back. The Europe that attacked Africa and the Americas was not industrialized.
As Chairman Omali points out, it was not capitalism but colonialism that replaced feudalism in Europe. The term capitalism was not in use until a French journalist and socialist, Louis Blanc (1850), defined it as the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others. Karl Marx used “capital” and “capitalist mode of production” in “Das Kapital” (1867).
The English civil wars, an expression of the rising power of the bourgeoisie versus the declining power of the nobility, led to the capture of power in England by the bourgeoisie’s representative, Oliver Cromwell, who took power in 1648 before losing it to King Charles II.
Colonialism in different forms
In 1776, the white settler colonizers created the republic of the United States of America. In 1879, some 13 years later, the French bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchy and captured power. The U.S. and French bourgeois revolutions and governments became the universal symbol of the death of feudalism and the rise of power of the bourgeoisie over the European continent and society.
China and India were colonized by the bourgeoisie governments, while Africa and the Americas were first colonized by feudal-led governments.
This is the fundamental difference that we need to consider when we are talking about India and China in the multipolar world.
Africa and the Indigenous people in America cannot be free without the complete end of the colonial mode of production that requires us to be colonized subjects forever.
It is accepted that the industrial revolution triumphed in England between the 1830s to 1850s, when factory production became the dominant economic aspect of colonial production inside England.
This is not to deny the British colonial control of India expanding from 1757 and the 1839-1842 Opium War that began the assault of China. My point is simply to emphasize that the white bourgeoisie had already emerged and consolidated in Britain.
To be a genuine African intellectual, you have to speak of the particularity of the African revolution defined by the necessity to end colonialism as the mode of production.
Fighting for a multipolar world is alright, but it does not go to the core of the question. Russia, India, China and even possibly Iran can fight for a multipolar world. But Africans can’t do that.
The real question is how to take advantage of the multipolar struggle to advance the African revolution and worldwide unification of the African Nation.
The freedom, the integrity, the prosperity and genuine national economy of Africa requires all Africa’s sons and daughters to be engaged in a struggle for Africa’s national liberation.
This is one primary reason why we must build the African Socialist International everywhere to take on the fight for the rise of the African working class and the African revolution.
