Open Letter to Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW21) President Ron Daniels

Dr. Ron Daniels

President

Institute of the Black World 21st Century

Dear Dr. Daniels,

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) notes with interest the upcoming State of the Black World (SOBW) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, to be held April 19-24.

As we have been working on launching our Zone of Peace campaign in recent months, we regret that we have not been able to engage you regarding this event until this late date. However, BAP’s Mid-Atlantic Region nonetheless believes it is important to convey our concerns regarding this event.

Particularly, as a formation of Africans, we understand that any solution to the problems that the African/Black masses in the domestic colonies of the United States, as well as throughout the diaspora and on the Continent, face will be led by those peoples who bear the brunt of that oppression in every aspect of life wherever we are. Therefore, BAP’s position rests on the historic Black Radical Tradition of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle to dismantle the global system of white supremacist, patriarchal, settler-colonial capitalism, and imperialist and neocolonialist oppression.

Naming the People’s enemy is an important aspect of the struggle against these systems as is organizing People to that struggle. In reviewing the conference’s program, we do not see where these aspects are named. 

The “American disease” of capitalism, as the late Glen Ford characterized it, is spread by a globe-swallowing superpower that insists on the right to penetrate every nook and cranny of the planet with its corporate spores, imposed on peoples around the globe at the barrel of this country’s 800-plus military bases and multinational “trade” treaties that obliterate governments’ abilities to resist. This imperialist aggression by the United States fuels the endless militarism around the world that affects Africans and our brethren of darker hue.

The United States became a major economic power through Black chattel slavery within its own borders, genocide of the natives on whose land the Republic stood, and expansion through the seizure and incorporation of its darker neighbor’s territory (Mexico), so certainly reparations—a major focus of your upcoming conference—is a discussion that must be continually engaged. However, how does a People properly assess what is needed to redress their centuries of harm under domestic colonization and international empire-building without naming capitalism, which is at the core of both domestic oppression and global imperialist domination

Kwame Nkrumah had already warned in his 1967 Challenge of the Congo that there were at least 17 air bases, nine foreign naval bases, three rocket sites and an atomic testing range operated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in northern Africa, in addition to military missions in about a dozen other African countries, and called for the urgent need to counter the challenge of NATO in the strategy he outlined in his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, which included the call for a military high command and an All African People’s Revolutionary Army (AAPRA). Amilcar Cabral said that Portugal “...would never be able to launch three colonial wars in Africa without the help of NATO, the weapons of NATO, the planes of NATO…”

Therefore, it is clear NATO has a long history of undermining African sovereignty and colonial liberation. This was dramatically re-affirmed with the NATO-led destruction of Libya in 2011 and the brutal assassination of Gen. Muammar Gaddafi. That event plunged the most developed and prosperous nation on the African continent into an open-air slave market and turned it into a perpetually unstable state. It is a continuing assault on Africans in that country, an insult to Pan-Africanists abroad, and the validation of those revolutionary leaders’ warnings about that white-supremacist international military formation and its continuing threat to our People’s freedom.

Yet, we see IBW21 and speakers highlighted in the SOBW Conference’s program that are in clear alignment with NATO and the agenda of Western imperialism.  

We see no mention in the SOBW program of any opposition to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which is a direct product of NATO through the U.S. European Command that originally “controlled” 42 African states. Established in 2007, AFRICOM was expanded under U.S. President Barack Obama under the guise of fighting fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. But, not only has AFRICOM not made the Continent more secure, terrorism and instability have increased drastically with the command’s expansion, which renders the presence of NATO and AFRICOM on the Continent an enduring and existential threat to African self-determination, stability, and peace. The support for the U.S./EU/NATO-propelled proxy war in Ukraine that the leadership of the IBW21 signed onto has potentially clouded this issue. 

Signing onto the Ukraine Solidarity Network puts IBW21 on the same ideological side as NATO. Few of the featured speakers at the upcoming SOBW Conference have a track record of raising these existential issues that Africans are struggling against on the Continent and in connected struggles against militarized police terrorism in the domestic colonies of the United States. And some—like Bill Fletcher, Jr.—are practically wholesale apologists for NATO and imperialist domination through continued U.S. militarism. 

Further, we point to IBW21’s recent support of U.S. State Department statements on the conflict in Ethiopia and the role of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). The State Department is using alleged genocide and the Ethiopian government’s reported aggression as a justification for supporting the TPLF, as well as a possible intervention via NATO and AFRICOM forces, which raises our concerns regarding IBW21’s ability to speak on behalf of the Black World. 

As one of the two African nations to have never been colonized and, in fact, had defeated fascists in World War II, subjugation of Ethiopia has long been a U.S. goal. Like Haiti, the United States and its allies in imperialist domination still want to make Ethiopia pay for its independence from imperialism. Threatening military intervention in Ethiopia to bring it under U.S. control using the “Responsibility to Protect” principle was the same blueprint used to “intervene” in Libya. But African problems should be solved with African solutions presented and worked out by African people, and any support of U.S. interference is not only tacit support of continued U.S./NATO gangsterism on the Continent, but is in opposition to the right to self-determination of African people everywhere.

We believe this historical moment demands we can no longer sugarcoat and ignore the nature of the enemy, and what tools the enemy deploys in denying true liberty for African people on the Continent and around the world. And, we can no longer pretend that liberal solutions to these problems will merit anything more than the continued capitalist domination and oppression that has gotten us to this point. We believe that revolutionary solutions must also be a part of this conversation to give the People the choice they deserve.

We believe these critical conversations are necessary among African people because we cannot talk about repairing what we will not name. In that spirit, BAP would hope that a resolution would emerge from this gathering that condemns all U.S. and NATO imperialist policies in Africa and throughout the African world. 

We stand ready to offer clear alternatives for how Africans must see and respond to the existential challenges Africans and colonized peoples face at this historic moment. But we must be clear. We are also ready to go into public opposition to those forces that collaborate with our enemies. 

We thank you for your consideration and await your response.

Mid-Atlantic Region, Black Alliance for Peace