The Biden-Harris U.S. presidential administration announced the inaugural members of the Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement in the United States.
The group of 12 members notably included actress Viola Davis, most recently recognized for her role in the movie Woman King; WNBA all-star Chinenye Ogwumike, African Diaspora Network founder Almaz Negash, among the rest of the bunch who are venture capitalists, clergy, bankers, and corporate figure heads.
According to the White House press release, Kamala Harris announced the plan to form this council at the 2022 U.S. Africa Leaders’ Summit which excluded Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan and Guinea, countries who were also suspended from the African Union for their non-alignment with U.S. policy. The 2022 U.S.
Africa Leaders’ Summit was an attempt to salvage the waning influence of the U.S. in Africa by offering neocolonial African heads of state a direct line to U.S. imperialist resources. Since the summit, the U.S. has waged a serious campaign to concretize U.S. influence on African policy by sending various leading members of the U.S. government to Africa to meet African leaders.
The new council’s role
The newly formed Advisory Council on African Diaspora is responsible for reinforcing “cultural, social, political, and economic ties between the U.S. and Africa, and promoting trade, investment, and educational exchanges between the United States and Africa,” according to the press release.
One can surmise that the advisory council will serve as the black faces of the U.S. domestic colony whenever it is necessary for the U.S. to gain influence among the cultural and economic sectors of the African petit bourgeoisie.
Even though this is an all-African committee, this council was created as a tool of U.S. imperialism to represent the interest of the U.S., not Africa.
U.S. multi-pronged strategy
We should not be fooled by this latest attempt of the U.S. to appear as a trusted partner of Africa and African people. The advisory board is part of the U.S.’s multi-pronged strategy to intervene in and undermine Africa’s self-determination.
In June 2022, the White House released a Fact Sheet that announced their global infrastructure and investment plan. Listed among the strategies to gain economic footing in “developing countries,” was the promise by the U.S. to deliver $25 million to support the economic empowerment of African women through the Uhuru Growth Fund I-A.
“The United States is a domestic
colony that established itself on
the backs of enslaved Africans,
from the wombs of African
women and bathed in the blood of
Indigenous people.”
The Fund, managed by Uhuru Investment Partners, is registered in Luxembourg with a colonizer as the chairperson of their investment committee. Despite claiming to raise over $200 million through the World Bank and other international government fundraising endeavors, their portfolio of investments only includes two companies.
It remains to be seen what, if any impact, this fund has made toward advancing the economic empowerment of African women. It’s also no coincidence that the name of their fund includes, “Uhuru”, the Swahili word for freedom, first made popular by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) and made internationally recognizable by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) that leads the Uhuru Movement.
Why so pessimistic?
The United States is a domestic colony that established itself on the backs of enslaved Africans, from the wombs of African women and bathed in the blood of the Indigenous people. African people have not had one moment of peace and prosperity inside the U.S. domestic colony since we were forcibly brought here. We’ve survived brutal attacks and fought for every democratic right that the white colonizer has tried to keep from us.
In the United States, in 2023, African people are lynched by white vigilantes, we overpopulate prisons, have our children kidnapped by the State, are fighting against attacks that guarantee our right to vote, and African migrants are treated like animals at every border while the real Uhuru economic and political work of the African People’s Socialist Party is under attack by the U.S. government.
The United States isn’t interested in improving relationships with African people. The clearest example of that is the fact that the U.S. government, under Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, has yet to drop the charges on the Uhuru 3 and pay reparations to African people. Instead, the indictment against the Uhuru 3 is still looming and there is no White House strategy on the matter of reparations to African people.
In fact, Chairman Omali Yeshitela, leader and founder of the APSP, faces 15 years in prison for the work he’s done to put political and economic power in the hands of African people. It is through the work of our Movement where a doula training program was developed and conducted, as well as an African women’s health center that’s being constructed in the most economically depressed sector of St. Louis, MO.
These programs reflect our commitment and will as African people to be free and self-determining, not constantly at the mercy of the colonizers, even when they come in black face. Like always, U.S. imperialism would rather organize a committee, filled to the brim with the African petit bourgeoisie, to advance its political interest in our homeland, while the neocolonial puppets hand them our Africa on a platter.
It’s not pessimism. It’s making an educated analysis based on the history and current status of the treatment of Africans by the U.S. government. There can’t be a U.S.-Africa partnership because there are 54 different Africas. A “partnership” between Africa and any foreign nation will be impossible until Africa is united as one nation under the leadership of the African working class who will own the means of production to improve the lives of all African people. Let’s fight to close every gap that imperialism has wiggled its way through. Until it’s won.
Africa Must Be Free!
African Workers of the World Unite!
