PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness
ISSN: 1543-0855
Issue 5 (2007)
PROUD FLESH INTER/VIEWS: DHORUBA BIN WAHAD
| PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness ISSN: 1543-0855 Issue 5 (2007) PROUD FLESH INTER/VIEWS: DHORUBA BIN WAHAD |
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Greg Thomas
It was Black Solidarity Day that brought us Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a former Black Panther leader and political prisoner of nineteen years, live and indirect from Ghana. The late Safiya Bukhari-Alston actually put us in contact with him before her passing on: R.I.P. He would fly across the Atlantic for three speaking engagements, one in New York City and two “upstate,” with its infamous archipelago of prisons. The first was in the name of a solidarity that is Black. For the next, we drove back and forth to Binghamton, from Onondaga County, listening to the Blues blaring in the dark of night. Homeboy gits into some Blues! I said, “Homeboy gits into some Blues!” Despite this “upstate” part of the itinerary, however, our interview had to take place in New York City, on the go. Black Panther-brilliant on top of brilliant, of course, he was commenting on C-SPAN, entertaining Long-time-no-see visitors and communicating with Continental family via text-messages while answering all of our questions—on November 12, 2003, after three magnificent, marathon talks at three different universities in less than a week or so. Whenever, wherever, PROUD FLESH was thrilled to finally get to interview Dhoruba Bin Wahad.
PROUD FLESH:
Could we begin by having you fill us in on when and why you decided to move to Ghana, exactly?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
There were a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of times things happen in your life, sometimes it appears happenstance, but it’s really something that you’ve needed in your life at a particular point; you make a decision and you go that way. In my case, when I first got out of prison, they were trying to put me back in.
PROUD FLESH:
Double jeopardy, and all that good stuff.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
So I had a decision to make—whether or not I was going to acquiesce and trust myself to a judicial process that historically has never favored me or looked out for my best interests; whether or not I was going to take some type of precaution to deal with that. Of course there was a broader issue around the legality of the conviction, around the changing of the laws, because there were other prisoners involved and these laws would apply to other people who also had information withheld [at their trials, in their convictions by the state]; who were victims of perjury, etc. So I had all those considerations.
After winning my release from prison I worked with Tanaquil Jones, my ex-wife. We were in Freedom Now, a coalition of Puerto Rican nationalistas, New Afrikans, NAPO. . . . I had just gotten out of prison, so in certain respects I had a mandate from most of the political prisoners to represent their interests within this campaign. This was most of the BLA and Panther prisoners. But Freedom Now was an unusual coalition. It had its problems. The main problem was that the majority of the political prisoners and prisoners of war were Black; the second largest group was Latinos. All the information and content of Freedom Now literature pretended an equal balance of political cases and therefore required an equal allocation of Freedom Now’s time and resources. We felt that this was inappropriate; it sent the wrong message. It didn’t really deal with how heavily repression had hit the Black community.
In 1991 or maybe at the end of 1990, we had an international tribunal on political prisoners. We brought in reporters from the U.N. and other places. The NCBL [National Conference of Black Lawyers] did a brief. We did a whole presentation on the existence political prisoners. I wrote a historical piece. We worked on this and it was pretty successful. We had a document that came out of this that recognized the existence of political prisoners in the U.S., which was the first of its kind issued by a tribunal or any type of international body. We took that document to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. I represented the PP’s [political prisoners] there at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. But then there were problems with that because there was some political chicanery, again, from the “allies.” I won’t go in to that. I’ll talk about that in my book.
[That is, Bin-Wahad’s The Future Past: Arising Black and Strong in Racist America, an unpublished manuscript in search of a publisher.]
It was around this time that I started traveling around Europe—speaking in different human rights forums, at international events. I did two tours of Germany, one of France, a tour of the U.K, the Netherlands. My strategy at that time was to keep myself as busy as possible and away from the clutches of New York State as much as possible, while the appeals process worked itself out. We were waiting for a decision at any time. Once the judge made a decision, you know, you would be summoned to court; the judge would issue his decision and if, for instance, he had overturned the reversal of my conviction, then he would have had the option of putting me back in prison until all my appeals were exhausted or allowing me to remain on bail. This meant that if he overturned my decision, I could go back to jail immediately. That’s what the D.A. [District Attorney] was angling for. Of course the Court had my passport. They wouldn’t let me travel unless I notified them in advance. I would then get my passport; they couldn’t really hold it up because it was a means of livelihood: I was speaking and raising money. I was in Europe, actually France, while the key decision was due in my case. I had contacted civil rights attorneys in France who were prepared to litigate for me, for my political asylum.
So there I am, sitting in Paris coffee shops during the dead of Winter. It was all cold and rainy and drab - I was all miserable.
PROUD FLESH:
[Laughter]
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I said to myself, “If I’m going to be a fugitive, I have to make a decision about how to deal with whatever comes down.” I said, “Well, if I gotta be a fugitive, I might as well be a fugitive in Africa.”
PROUD FLESH:
We hear you.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I jumped on the Air Afrique plane, and I flew to Abidjan.
PROUD FLESH:
O-kay!
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I got off the plane in Abidjan and that sun hit me—the heat, color, heavy tropical air - I was like, “Yeah!” That was that. I stayed a little while in the Ivory Coast. When the decision came—the Court gave no advance notice of its decision; they didn’t want to announce it publicly prior to a hearing—they just said that they had made a decision and I had to appear in court.
PROUD FLESH:
Right, right—of course.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I was in southern France at the moment, when the decision came down. I said, “Okay, I’m gonna go back—because there’s a lot at stake.” So I came back, and I prevailed. From that point on, I went to Africa and I would try to stay as much out of here [the U.S.] as possible. It would be over a year after I got out before I gave serious though to moving permanently to the continent.
[Cell phone rings]
This is my baby [wife], I bet you; she’s due in March. She’s Fulani.
[He shows us pictures, many pictures of family, etc.]
. . . This is a picture of the Brother I counsel/manage, the Ghanaian Hip-Life artist, Reggie Rockstone.
PROUD FLESH:
Yeah?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
To continue, I started spending more time in Africa than in Harlem. First, it was a month at a time, and then three or four months. I had been gradually getting myself acclimated, so that when the decision came I could know how to move—by land and so forth. Plus, I was suing these white folks, once they couldn’t put me back [in prison] on the same old trumped up charges. Because I was raised in the South Bronx and Harlem, I knew that the likelihood of becoming embroiled in some type of political problem arising from my inability to tolerate macho white boys disguised as “New York’s Finest,” and smart-ass criminals with law degrees posing as D.A.’s and “experts” on us was great in the U.S. generally, I would be as vulnerable as a wooden “Georgia Porch Monkey” on KKK firing range in my native New York—especially given the collaborative nature of Black leadership in that city. I didn’t think New York was the healthiest place for me to be, given my relationship with the NYPD. And I really can’t stand to see some of the things happening happen [in this place].
PROUD FLESH:
Have you seen the film by Shirikiana Aina, Through the Door of No Return (Mypheduh Films, 1997), which is about diasporic repatriates in Ghana?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Through the Door of No Return?
PROUD FLESH:
Yes.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I was the one who initially instigated bringing the bones of Black slaves back through Elmina’s “Door of No Return” on Ghana’s inaugural Emancipation Day. If you look at the “official” film footage of this event, the bones were taken off this fishing boat and taken back through the “Door of No Return.” I was the one who helped plan and initiate that. Oddly enough, I got involved in Ghana’s attempt to renew its Pan-African identity by way of Cuba, and the old ties our movement has always had with the revolutionary peoples of Cuba. Everyone in Africa knows of Cuba’s support of Pan-African principles, and thousands of African doctors and other professionals were trained by the Cubans. The Cold War dichotomy always distorted our perceptions of white supremacy. But Ghana, under Rawlins, was impressed by Jamaica’s national celebration of Jamaican born Marcus Garvey and wanted to do something similar on the African continent—especially given Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghanaian roots. Ghana kind of like wanted to be the host of a “Pan-African” celebration of the African family, on the continent, and chose the British “abolition of the slave trade” as the symbolic historical event around which to organize. As for me, I tried to interject a need to honor resistance to captivity, slavery and colonialism by making the “Emancipation Celebration,” at least in part, a ceremonial tribute to the spirit of African resistance, which is why bringing back the remains of two runaway African slaves was important. But it all was eventually co-opted, and sanitized, for the tourist industry by internal Ghanaian politics over the distribution of tourist dollars, monuments—the usual—the same ole palm-wine in a new calabash that got our asses sold off in the first place.
PROUD FLESH:
Oh, so the film you mention is another film then, which it’ll be important to see. And you’re in there—in this capacity? Wow.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I don’t know if they put me in the film, you know how government propaganda ministries are; they make like you weren’t there at all if it suits their purposes.
PROUD FLESH:
[Laughter] So what’s your relationship to the rest of the expatriates there in Ghana?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Well, it depends on who they are. There are different categories of Black folks living over there. There are Black folks over there because they’re working for companies and corporations. They’re stationed abroad—performing jobs or working for a relief agency or church service and they’re employed by them. They’re working for USAID [United States Agency for International Development] or the government or they’re there on some type of academic exchange project. Then you have another category of Black folks who are over there because they didn’t have any retirement money and they took what little money they had and bounced to Ghana. They’re “Black consciousness,” they don’t want to have nothing to do with white folks, basically. They come over and build a house or they invest, buy some land and they start a little business or something. That’s another group, which tends to be a smaller group. It’s this group that cut all of their ties here, except for maybe family ties which they maintain quite tenuously. And then you have a group that comes back and forth, two months out of the year, every year, and they’re basically transient tourists. But you can’t tell them that.
PROUD FLESH:
You can’t tell them that!
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
That’s basically it in terms of the Diaspora.
PROUD FLESH:
Are you standing alone over there?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
There’s Brothers and Sisters who have been there in Africa, for awhile, and who I’m really close to. I have a family there. It’s a few, Brothers and Sisters, but it’s not many. Then, when “African-Americans” come over, they make like they don’t know where you’re at. What they do is they don’t bring you any business; they don’t try to empower their presence by utilizing your expertise; they come over and what they do is they deal with some local Ghanaians who’ll take them for a ride and jack their money or whatever. Or they call themselves setting their own thing up and have their own little crew. That’s it.
PROUD FLESH:
Let’s go back to the stuff that some of us first read by you, personally. This included things like “the carrot and the stick” piece (“Strategies of Repression against the Black Movement”) which was published in The Black Scholar 12:3 (May/June 1981), some of the pieces in Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (Semiotexte, 1993), etc. You not only talked about COINTELPRO (the FBI or Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Counter-Intelligence Program”) but also very specific programs that go along with it: Operation Chaos (the CIA or Central Intelligence Agency equivalent), NEWKILL (“New York Killings”), Operation PRISAC (“Prison Activists”), FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)—which resurface with a vengeance, out in the open. . . .
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
All of them resurfaced with a vengeance!
PROUD FLESH:
Right, that’s the question! . . . Joint Anti-Terrorist Task Force, Operation Mirage (re: “Arab-Americans”), the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, of course, all these things you had addressed or laid out a long time ago. So, are we selling our selves short when we only refer to COINTELPRO? COINTELPRO may be symbolic for the whole apparatus of repression. But unless we’ve read you, for example, we may not know be aware of all these other programs which have worked or continue to work in tandem.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I think that we don’t really understand that COINTELPRO represented a particular stage of development of the national security state and its evolution towards what we see today—in terms of its disposition to use state instruments of law enforcement for political purposes. To control and manufacture public dissent through instruments of the corporate state, etc. Legal terrorism. When COINTELPRO first started, in its more or less modern form, it was directed at the Garvey movement, although it didn’t have the same formal code-name. The Garvey movement reached its peak at the turn of the century, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and at that particular time—1920 to 1930—fascism was on the rise in Europe. Criminal empires were established from bootlegging and gambling revenues. At the same time there was a “great depression” going on, and the influence of the socialist and communist parties was growing worldwide, in leaps and bounds off of industrial working class discontent. To respond to that, the U.S. government or the bureau that [J. Edgar] Hoover headed began to utilize disruptive techniques and a program of counter-intelligence to discredit and destroy “enemies of the State, God and Mom’s Apple Pie.” That was the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The European nation-state in the late twentieth century is not qualitatively the same as it is now. Essentially, at its roots, it’s the same. But it has evolved. Yes, we do ourselves a great disservice when we focus on COINTELPRO, when we focus on that particular period. You have to understand too that even when there were hearings on COINTELPRO, they were never fully developed. In fact, the Church committee broke off the hearings when they came to the subject of the FBI’s coordinated involvement with local police agencies in squashing Black militant organizations, which was the most damaging aspect of COINTELPRO.
PROUD FLESH:
And the most explicit connect with the present, probably.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Or with a lot of cases of people still in prison. Yes, it’s true that it is impractical to say we are where we are at today despite current Black leadership. And the history of that “despite” is why some “analysis” is given room to thrive while others are crushed like a roach caught on the kitchen sink when the lights come on! Check how the idea of participatory “democracy” in racially polarized “America” is permitted public discussion—while a more historically accurate Black nationalist viewpoint is discredited and marginalized. One viewpoint holds the Anglo settler-state historically accountable, while the other rationalizes its relative greatness. The African Diaspora in “America,” by all parameters of measurement that qualify a colonial condition, are an internal domestic colony, a subject people; and their living spaces are occupied by the armed agents of the state—the metropolitan colonial authority—the White “American” Republic. Black people, especially the poor and disenfranchised, sense this neo-colonial dichotomy in their very bones; and that is why one viewpoint is suppressed and the other is not.
Yes, we do ourselves a grave disservice by not understanding that COINTELPRO represented a particular stage in, and reflected the development of, this European nation-state, into the national security state.
PROUD FLESH:
FEMA seems to have been something pretty secretive, cloak-and-dagger or generally unknown, at least, until “September 11th” happens, then you could turn on Lifetime on Cable TV and see this 1-800 flash, soliciting contributions.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Well, FEMA wasn’t really secretive; it was like LEAA [Law Enforcement Assistance Association], in the beginning, although LEAA was set up to channel private, corporate and state funds into upgrading law enforcement agencies. That’s when they were really beginning to militarize U.S. domestic police agencies (1967 -75). They felt that they had to deal with “race riots,” that they had a potentially homogenous internal population of hostile Black folks. So every police department in “America” wanted to qualify for LEAA funds. This meant that they could get SWAT training, helicopters and all of these things. Of course, since then, the “Homeland Security Act” has now made LEAA academic. But FEMA was never really that secret. It was supposed to organize the federal government’s response to a national emergency—man-made or natural. What it did do, because of its guidelines for volunteers and funding was to provide cover for right-wing groups, survivalists, ultra-nationalists and racists who increasingly populated state and local militias. A lot of the white-supremacists, militarists and survivalists, would find themselves in various local FEMA chapters. You see?
PROUD FLESH:
Okay.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
FEMA was very instrumental in fostering that white-supremacist sentiment which is present in those militia movements. But the privatization of war has made such right-wing paramilitary groups obsolete.
Let me add that I don’t think a lot of people understand that historically the political right-wing within the white dominant culture, the conservative Christian so-called “fundamentalists,” this historical right-wing has been the extra-legal mechanism of support for institutional racism, for the state’s stances and policies. The “legitimate” political apparatus has always looked to the social and cultural right to enforce the mores and the values and the standards that made its political conservatism viable. That changed with these militias and, of course, it changed radically with the bombings that occurred in the Midwest several years ago.
PROUD FLESH:
Timothy McVeigh.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Yeah, Timothy McVeigh . . . in Oklahoma. So now we see there’s a radical shift in “America” from a sympathetic right-wing to almost a hostile, resentful right-wing, who feels that the government isn’t going far enough to deal with “aliens,” Blacks and non-Western, non-Christian influences. I think that’s very important to understand. Because in the current war on terror, professional armed security agencies operate under U.S. government contract—and we see as in the case of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it was the Mercenary Blackwater Security agency, under U.S. contract in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, that deployed professional killers in Black neighborhoods in a “law and order” capacity. It’s always been my position that the national security state views all of its citizens as potential enemies; it even views the racist right that way—thus the rise of a professional mercenary class of killers, jailers, and “security specialists.”
PROUD FLESH:
Now, you’ve said at least on one occasion that COINTELPRO began on the slave plantations. Could you just speak to that statement, for a second?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
COINTELPRO’s counter-intelligence program was a war strategy. It was a military strategy, a “PsyOps”—a psychological operations strategy, designed to counter the intelligence and the spying capabilities of one’s enemy. On the plantation, it was always necessary to control the African population. When we were first taken into slavery, one of the things that it was necessary to do was to break the will of the enslaved, to make them feel dependent, as if there was nothing else for them to do but submit to the will of the white man– that’s all psychological; that’s behavioral modification. That’s where the old “good cop, bad cop” routine comes from!
PROUD FLESH:
Laughter]
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
From the plantation. “Jethro, I know, I know . . . Mr. Gilmore is a terrible taskmaster. He whips y’all all the time. But I don’t. . . .Look, you need to get that back taken care of . . . do that. . . . ”
PROUD FLESH:
[Screaming!]
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
“Look, I tell you what you do. Come around the back of the shed tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do for you.” All of that crap started on the plantation. And then homeboy would bounce back to Catfish Row and advocate for Mr. Gilmore on the down low.
PROUD FLESH:
Right.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Talking about, “He ain’t like the rest of them white boys, I’m telling you. He’s kind a cool. I mean, I can talk to him.” That’s all COINTELPRO.
PROUD FLESH:
On this same subject, you’ve also written that “we need to challenge, neutralize and destroy” the black “middle-class” which identifies with the system and that is used in the state’s strategy to (in the language of COINTELPRO, or Hoover) “challenge, neutralize and destroy” the Black liberation movement. Can you elaborate?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
One of our problems is that we really don’t know what we’re up against. We don’t really understand that we’re up against the state. We don’t really understand that we’re up against a nation-state. The nation-state has at its beck and call different interests groups. One of the major ways in which they undermine the interests of the vast majority of working people is by employing elites and people who have elitist educations, who believe they are destined or ordained to run things; and these elites identify with the very forces that are holding you in check. It wouldn’t be possible for them to hold you in check if it weren’t for them, at least not in that fashion. Maybe “destroy” is too strong a term, but definitely, as Amilcar Cabral indicated and [Eduardo] Mondlane indicated, we have to create the type of conditions that make them want to abandon or betray the historical interests that their class has had in our people’s oppression. If they didn’t identify with the oppressor, then they’d destroy themselves as an oppressive class.
PROUD FLESH:
On another note, you know, we got in touch with you through Safiya Bukhari.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Who’s passed.
PROUD FLESH:
Yes. We were contracting with her to bring her in September, I think, for Black Convocation and, while we were waiting for the signed contract to come back to us, we got a FAX about the news. That’s how we found out. Beforehand, however, that’s also how we got in touch with you, via her. Can you say a few words about her importance?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Well, the people who mourn the most over Safiya’s passing, and transition, are the political prisoners; and I’m not saying that to say that those of us on the outside who knew Safiya and worked with her don’t miss her and mourn her passing. She was always their guardian, always trying to break through the isolation that they suffered. It took a lot out of her because doing political prisoner work is very draining. It can be very frustrating. A lot of young brothers and sisters have come to the political prisoner issue to deal with it and have run away drained and exhausted, not that their love or respect or care for political prisoners has diminished one iota; it’s just exhausting and unrewarding work. Safiya had always worked tirelessly, day and night, for the PP’s. I think that she will be sorely missed by them. Now, you know, the issue of political prisoners has fallen somewhat into disfavor. A lot of other issues are confronting people. People have moved on after “September 11th.”
PROUD FLESH:
Sure enough.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
The reality that America has some of the longest-held political prisoners in the world hasn’t really stayed with people. There hasn’t been any real serious strategy or political campaign to deal with them. A lot of them are up for parole right now. They need support.
PROUD FLESH:
One of the articles that this Sister was known for was on gender and Black revolution, an article published in one of the Panther newspapers; and we’ve seen you make several comments both in print and in person about the psycho-sexual dynamics of oppression and repression and the need to address that, sexism, homophobia, etc. You address the relationship of the psycho-sexual to the general political-economic and social history.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
You know, human beings are sexual beings. There has to be a whole lot of psycho-sexual undertones to things that we do. The personal is political; and the political is personal. So how we relate to each other, how we relate in our relationships has political ramifications. But, again, I think that those political ramifications occur in context. They occur in the context of culture, time and place. What we really should try to understand, I guess, is the dimensions of oppression that restrict or inhibit or somehow restrain people from reaching or manifesting their potential, stepping outside of the niche that society might have provided for them based on some type of stereotype. Dealing with sexism and homophobia are all part and parcel of evolving this type of consciousness or approach. As a Muslim, I’m often criticized [by other Muslims] for my attitude towards gay people. I don’t have an intolerant and condemning attitude as most Muslims do. But then again, too, that doesn’t just apply to this issue. When we talk about Islam today, one of the major conflicts or struggles within Islam is reopening to the door to what’s called ijuma, or “reasoning,” because the door to reasoning in Islam was closed as a consequence of certain events that followed the death of the Prophet. It’s very important for Muslims right now to try and reopen the path to understanding and reasoning, to use knowledge or wisdom to chart the best way forward for us.
PROUD FLESH:
I think it’s interesting that you make these connections. One of the things that you also said in “War Within” (from Still Black, Still Strong) is that we have to realize that the enemy has the whole apparatus of academia at its disposal.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Yeah.
PROUD FLESH:
And one of the things academia has done in the last couple of decades in particular is to represent the Panther legacy as a sexually backward one—even though it can’t catch up with so much of what Panthers have said in the past or with what ex-Panthers, former Panthers are saying in the present about some of these issues, such as what you’ve said about the psycho-sexual dynamics of oppression and repression. This doesn’t get said in academia, ever. You can go across the board and look at different views, different articulations and different paradigms and nothing coming out of academia, regardless of what it’s called, matches up with the politics that came out of the Black liberation movement, ultimately, in this respect.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
That’s a backlash, I think.
PROUD FLESH:
Yes, it’s definitely a backlash!
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
It’s a backlash because what you had was an entire movement whose ideological positioning, analysis and social practice far outstripped the analysis and social practice of those who were supposed to be more educated; who were supposed to have access to higher education; and who were supposed to be experts—or who were even moral “leaders,” ethical “leaders.” I think that this built up an enormous amount of resentment;
PROUD FLESH:
Okay.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
And it carried over from generation to generation. I could tell you how it plays itself out. There’s a few individuals now who are living high off the hog—they have access to resources now; they went from margin to center of “legitimacy” and people see them as being symbolic of or standing for something. These individuals seldom if ever have anything to do with any of the movement or organization of projects that are close to the politics and attitude of where they come from. And this goes all the way down the line, whether they’re the parents of Hip-Hop icons or academic icons themselves—personas who people idealize. They don’t want to have anything to do the politics of armed struggle, the efficacy of it, the use of violence against the state. They don’t want to have anything to do with placing primacy on freeing our political prisoners. And they don’t lend their resources to any of this. The character of such cowards only perfunctorily rejects certain principles of capitalist domination and elitism. For people like this, support for a political prisoner—say, a Mumia Abu Jamal—is based on their perception of his guilt or innocence, the injustice of the legal process, not for the liberation movement that gave birth and voice to a Mumia Abu Jamal. Not for our Right to Resist. Did the world sympathize with Mandela because he was innocent or guilty—or because they opposed the racist apartheid state and supported Black Africans’ legitimate right to overthrow it? Mandela was as guilty as Christ!
PROUD FLESH:
There you go.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
If I were to go to half of these people and say, “Look, we need some resources to do such and such,” the most they’ll do is say, “Yeah, man, I agree with you. What you need to do is ... You need to do this. . . ” While you may understand that preachers and leaders of “divine inspiration” may be may morally inhibited from supporting acts of violent resistance to tyranny, one can’t confuse their inhibitions with access to their donor mailing list. But they won’t contribute anything themselves. Nor do they want anyone to contribute to the cause of PP’s, who would otherwise contribute to their agenda. Other than what they could throw in the collection plate on Sunday. This is the disposition of the [Ben] Chavis’s, [Al] Sharpton’s, [Jesse] Jackson’s, [Charlie] Rangel’s, Cornel West’s and [Louis] Farrakhan’s.
I think it’s a lot of backlash.
I think also very important and true for an entire generation of Black intellectual historians and scholars, many of whom were the ones who were ridiculed when we were in college as being cultural nationalists, who are now heads of departments; who now enjoy some prestige and have a couple of books under their belt; who now have a little following. These are individuals who perpetrate this type of thing.
PROUD FLESH:
Most definitely. We are glad to hear someone address this issue for sure. Now, tell us something about that books you are working on, yourself.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
I got a treatment right here. I’m supposed to meet some people about this today. One is The Future Past: Bio-Story of Dhoruba Bin-Wahad. I’m trying to get this to a publisher. I’ll let you read the first page!
PROUD FLESH:
“In the beginning we were strong, young and vibrant—but flawed. Our limitations lay in our mortality, and the frailty of bone and flesh. But even our flesh was cause for celebration.”
PROUD FLESH, okay!
“How could we succumb to the enemy of the sun, the sun that toned us dark brown and the hue of ancient Odum trees. At the start our minds were unfettered and our hearts full of song. The Blues was unborn, though we knew both pain and suffering. Who from among us could imagine it, that Middle Passage through Hell, the horrid moans of disemboweled souls, or defined screams cut short by the roar of the sea as another spirit plunged beneath its training waves. Surely it must’ve been that, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, the unforgettable, the intolerable that fashioned us from Delta-sounding clay into the most endurable of human molds. We swallowed by the millions, like fragile spirits into a void—betwixt came rum, cotton, tobacco and gold, from which the fortunes of nations were amassed, to a halting cacophony of backbreaking groans and snapping bullwhips. We were truly children of the dark upon whom harsh enlightenment and ‘Western civilization’ shone, children of the veil between life and death and the freedom of chains.”
Whoa.
The Future Past: Bio-Story of Dhoruba Bin-Wahad.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
That’s just a disemboweled . . . [Laughter]
PROUD FLESH:
So what’s the second book?
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
The other one is Beggars on Horseback.
Now where the hell is that? It was right here. It disappeared. [Searching] Oh, shit.
[Finds it]
This is the one that had a missing section. And the missing section is that I realized I really had to do a good essay on the impact of technology on traditional culture—because of its significant impact on Africans and contemporary African culture.
It has a couple of parts to it. The second part gets at some of the things we’ve talked about . . . to a Pan-African economic independence.
PROUD FLESH:
“Creating a Pan-African Power Paradigm for the 21st Century.”
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Yeah. It talks about the economic base for this.
Here, this whole first part of the analysis is about money: African hierarchal structures and institutions of power; finance capital. . . . This is the one in which I try to set out why Africa is in the situation it’s in.
[Reads from Beggars on Horseback]
PROUD FLESH:
Got you. Enough said!
To Be Continued. . . .
Citation Format:
Greg Thomas. “Proud Flesh Inter/Views: Dhoruba bin Wahad,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007.
Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.