The UK’s foreign minister, David Lammy, is also a descendant
of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean. As a young Labour politician he showed
radical promise but has more latterly been so captured by Zionism that its
racist, white supremacist ideology causes him to be quite literally an
apologist for those who justify the wholesale massacre of Palestinians by
referring to them as ‘Human animals,’ just as European enslavers referred to his
and my ancestors as apes.
Drafting this in Lagos, Nigeria, I was troubled by the
number of people who have bought into the narrative that the genocide has its
roots in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. It is now widely accepted that the
background and history are important, though it might surprise many that Africa
features in these.
At the sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in
1903, Theodor Herzel presented to the delegates an offer made by then British
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, of land in British
East Africa, for a Jewish Homeland. Apparently, this offer was
considered seriously but eventually rejected in 1904. One area that objections
to the idea came from was white British settlers already in East Africa, but
the majority of the disquiet was from other Zionists who preferred Palestine.
What the Africans knew or thought about the plan appears not to have concerned
any of the other players, despite the fact that it was their own stolen
ancestral land that was being considered.
The Balfour Declaration would eventually come in 1917,
granting the Zionists Palestine: supposedly “a land without people for a people
without land.” It was either wilful deceit and self-delusion at play (it is
inconceivable that the British didn’t know that Palestinians already occupied
the land in question) or it was plain racism, in that they didn’t consider the
Palestinians people.
Whilst Africans have particular reason to empathise with Palestinians,
the majority of us will be as baffled as the rest of humanity (many Jews
included) are, by descendants of Holocaust survivors behaving in such unashamedly and
unapologetically barbaric ways, in full view of the rest of the world.
The bafflement is not total though. In Nigeria, a relative
with intimate knowledge of the Bible reminded me that Gaza today is not as bad
as Jericho of biblical times: the Israelites, newly emancipated from slavery in
Egypt (and emboldened by the act of God obligingly parting the Red Sea for them), were
ordered by Joshua to carry out God's commandment as passed through Moses: Utterly. Destroy.Them.
Old Testament scholars likely still debate whether by the
time the texts first came to be written (not to talk of the versions available
to us so many centuries later), the words ascribed to Moses and Joshua remained a true and
accurate account of the instructions that came from the heavens, and not the
result of any misinterpretation, manipulation or misrepresentation by the long
line of priests and scribes.
Scepticism about religious officials is justifiable considering
that in late 2024, the Archbishop of Canterbury (the leader of the worldwide
Anglican Church) resigned from his post, and one of his predecessors defrocked himself, due to their involvement in covering up sex scandals. The Roman
Catholic Church’s record on that front is famously also shameful.
My relative believes, like many, that the Jews are God’s
chosen people, and that what is going on in Palestine is preordained.
Interestingly, they don’t accept the biblical justification of African slavery
(the curse of children of Ham), dismissing it instead as an excuse for greed
and exploitation. We each choose what narratives to believe and how to
interpret them, of course.
Had the East Africa Plan of 1903 resulted in a Jewish State
there instead of in Palestine, it is conceivable that the situation there could
be worse still than contemporary Gaza (unimaginable as that may be): the
genocide could potentially have started earlier, and one can only speculate
about whether the levels of outrage (and indeed indifference, particularly of
international leaders) would have been the same as we see now. And, mirroring
the complicity of neighbouring Arab States in the Palestine genocide, it is
also likely that neighbouring African states would have turned a blind eye, as
they calibrated their interests not according to African brotherhood, but to
the dictates of Israel and the West.
Where, for example, would Rwanda stand in a Zionist genocide
of Ugandans and Kenyans? It is rather sobering to realise that their 1994 genocide
claimed more lives in its 100-day duration than Israel achieved in 15 months,
and without the Western-supplied high-tech weaponry used by the IDF. That
genocide, itself a by-product of Rwanda’s history and continued Western (and
Chinese) meddling, and the rebuilding of the country under Paul Kagame, is now
almost universally described as the Genocide
Against the Tutsi. This is indeed
an inaccurate description because it ignores the four-year civil war that raged
in the country before the genocide began, with one side being led by
then-General Paul Kagame. It also ignores the fact that during the civil war,
through the 100 days, and up until 1996/7 in Rwanda, Congo and Zaire, there was
also
a Hutu genocide – one that has been officially recognised by international
human and civil rights organisations. And yet, the prevailing narrative remains
the Tutsi genocide, in a reminder that the African proverb,
“Until the lions
have their historians, stories of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”
applies as much to inter-African conflict as it does to European domination of
Africa.
Challenging accepted narratives would therefore lead to some
searching questions: Why, for example, did Paul Kagame address the Israel
lobbying group AIPAC in Washington DC, and later visit Jerusalem during the
Palestinian genocide and speak in support of Israel? Could there be some truth
in the suggestion that there is an ongoing, underreported genocide happening in
Congo, and that this is fuelled by Kagame’s neighbouring Rwanda aiding and
abetting the plundering of the country’s resources by Western and Israeli
interests?
African fratricide is also devastatingly evident over the
hills in Sudan, where a civil war has been raging since April 2023, but
overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine. That situation is particularly tragic because
just over a decade ago, the Arab-Spring-inspired popular protests led to the
ousting of the dictator Omar al-Bashir, and the people got tantalisingly close
to establishing something close to people power, thwarted only by the army’s
insistence in retaining a big stake in government. Two generals, falling out
and being encouraged and supported in their violence and equipped by external
actors (including Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Wagner Group, Russia and the
USA), have left the country in blood-soaked ruins.
One also worries about the answer to questions surrounding Bola
Ahmed Tinubu, the current Nigerian president. With an origin story and
educational background shrouded in mystery and doubt, and a history allegedly
involving major drug-dealing and money-laundering in the USA, Freedom of
Information requests into his past submitted by a Nigerian investigative journalist have been blocked by the CIA, the FBI and the DEA – Drug Enforcement
Agency, all of them citing or suggesting that their releasing such information
(regardless of whether or not the Nigerian public are entitled to it) would not
be in the best interests of the United States. In other words, according to
people who know better than me, the Nigerian president might be a “CIA asset.”
While on the one hand he called for a ceasefire and
condemned Israeli aggression, a recent state visit made by him to France, in
which he declared that Nigeria is “open for business,” might cause a collective
eyebrow to rise in suspicion. The two presidents, Tinubu and Macron, have been
keen to assure the public that the “business” in question does not include the
establishment of French military bases in Northern Nigeria, in the wake of
their expulsion from the former colonies of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger,
following popularly-supported coups.
Firmly anti-imperialist, anti-French and even anti-ECOWAS, those three
countries have joined together to form the
Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – a
mutual defence and trade bloc. That they should want to defend themselves
against France is one thing, but their neighbours?
Well, Tinubu it was whose
Senate prevented him from sending Nigerian and ECOWAS forces to reverse the
coup in Niger in August 2023. Whether other countries will voluntarily join and expand the
AES remains to be seen, though there will be those who hope for other soldiers
to follow the example of the Sahelian triumvirate and take power.
Traore,Goita and Tiani will be well aware of the fact that popular
anti-imperialist leaders have historically been assassinated by order of
Western powers, but one hopes that they and those around them are adequately
prepared to repel the attacks when they inevitably come.
Those protectors must include the masses whose protests and
actions helped propel them to power. In Western citadels there are masses on
the streets too, protesting against their governments’ complicity in the
Palestinian genocide, in the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere; but
the people in power, owned and controlled by personal ambition or huge business
interests, care more about their positions and sponsors, than they do about
their citizens.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in Israel, where, despite
mass protests calling for a deal so that Israeli hostages could be freed, Netanyahu,
in a bid to avoid incarceration, used those hostages as pawns in his sick game,
causing and prolonging untold suffering and death in the process.
All over the world, we the people are effectively hostages
to our governments and the interests they serve, and our futures under their
control are bleak. There are numerous examples of people fighting back to
inspire us to act – from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the actions of uMkhontowe Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, who contributed so much to the downfall of
the Apartheid regime in South Africa. There are also smaller groups and actions. Sometimes
we win, sometimes we lose; but if we don’t fight, we don’t win.
One small group is proving to be an effective part of the
fight against the Israeli regime. Started by two individuals in England,
Palestine Action has grown into a movement that has through the actions of
several ordinary people of all ages, shut down three sites owned and operated
in the UK by the Israeli arms and technology firm Elbit Systems. They have also
caused the company and its subsidiaries losses of millions of pounds in revenue, cancelled contracts, and security costs, through a sustained campaign of disruptive
activity. An American factory has also been forced to close by Palestine Action
Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Elbit is also active in Africa. It is probably more
difficult for a Palestine Action Nigeria or Rwanda to achieve similar successes,
since the authorities in most African countries are less likely to hesitate to
order their minions to shoot activists on sight, or to deal with them in other
violent and unjust ways.
This is where another historical internationalist example can inspire new ideas. Oliver Tambo, uMkhonto weSizwe leader-in-exile, organised a clandestine mission in which young white volunteers from around Britain entered South Africa and carried out a dramatic operation, the purpose of which was to announce to society, to the subjugated African population as well as to the Apartheid regime, that, despite the apparent total defeat of the resistance, the ANC was still active. The psychological effect on both sides was tremendous, not least in resurrecting hope among the African population.
