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[align=center]Compradorism— the problem with African Leadership[/align]
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http://www.hollerafrica.com/showArti...ac92fe889dec24[/align]
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[align=left]By: Chinweizu [/align]





Compradorism—the problem with African Leadership
Fellow Black Africans of both our homeland and our global diaspora! Greetings!
[align=justify]My task today is to focus your minds on the paramount fact about the context of our lives: That Black Africa has been in a race war with White Power [Arab as well as European] for at least 1000 years; that we are almost in the last moments of the last battles of that race war, and yet most of us still don’t realize we are at war; and that unless we wake up from our zombie slumber, and change, profoundly change, our mentality and our behavior, and build a Black African superpower by 2060, we shall irreversibly lose the race war and be exterminated by the end of this 21[suP]st[/suP] century.[/align]

But you may ask: what is the evidence of this war? And who is the enemy?
The three principal enemies of Black Africans are Imperialism, Arab Expansionism and Black Compradorism. To refresh your minds, I shall describe them briefly:

[align=justify]Imperialism has, since the 1440s, made war on us: first through the so-called Slave Trade, i.e. the trans-Atlantic trafficking of Black African war-captives for chattel-enslavement in the Americas; then next through the conquest of Africa [the so-called Scramble-for-Africa by the European powers]; and next through Colonialism [the rule and exploitation of the conquered Africans by expatriate Europeans]. Thereafter imperialism took the form that Nkrumah denounced as neo-colonialism. Imperialism manifests today as what is called globalization—the American-led collective imperialism of the Pan-European powers. Imperialism’s most deadly attack on Black Africa, so far, was the AIDSbombing of Black Africa in the late 1970s—a genocidal and covert biological warfare attack which was deliberately aimed to exterminate Black Africans.[/align]

[align=justify]Arabism/Arab Expansionism, between 640 and 1900 AD, resulted in Arab invaders conquering, settling and controlling more than 1/3 of Africa, namely supra-Sahara Africa and the Sahel zone, including most of the Nile Valley. In those same centuries, Arabs captured, exported and enslaved millions of Black Africans. Today Arabism manifests in the conflicts in the borderlands [Mauritania to Sudan] between Black Africans and the Arab settlers. Arabism’s aggression against Black Africa is most in the news today as the Darfur Crisis, and the so-called civil war—actually an Afro-Arab race war-- between South Sudan’s black Africans and the Arab-minority regime in Khartoum.[/align]

Compradorism is the enemy within. The compradors are those Black Africans who are in league with Imperialism or Arabism; those who regard their White Power masters as our FRIENDS and guides. Compradorism manifests in the acceptance, by the governments and elites of Black Africa, of Arab membership in the OAU/AU; in the obedience of Black governments to the IMF-WTO-World Bank agencies of UN-Imperialism. In the last 50 years, compradorism’s greatest help to the White Power attacks on Black Africa was its unpreparedness to protect us from AIDSbombing; the second greatest has been its lack of the will and ability to stop Arab expansionism in its tracks, let alone beat the Arab invaders into retreat.

[align=justify]In the early1920s, eight decades ago, the great Marcus Garvey warned the Black World that it was in danger of being exterminated by its white enemies, and he urged us to build a “Political Superstate� in Africa to protect ourselves. He said:[/align]

[align=justify]The attitude of the white race is to subjugate, to exploit, and if necessary exterminate the weaker peoples with whom they come in contact. They subjugate first, if the weaker peoples will stand for it; then exploit, and if they will not stand for SUBJUGATION nor EXPLOITATION, the other recourse is EXTERMINATION. [P&O:I, p.13][/align]

And Garvey warned:

[align=justify]This is the danger point. What will become of the Negro in another five hundred years if he does not organize now to develop and to protect himself? The answer is that he will be exterminated for the purpose of making room for the other races . . . [P&O:I, p.66][/align]

And Garvey declared:

[align=justify]We are determined to solve our own problems, by redeeming our Motherland Africa from the hands of alien exploiters and . . .[by] the creating for ourselves [there] of a political superstate . . . a government, a nation of our own strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth. [P&O:I, p.52; II, p.16][/align]

[align=justify]Yet, unfortunately and culpably, for 80 years now, Black Africans have failed to heed Garvey’s wise advice. In the last 50years of our resumed self-government, the project of building a Black African superstate [i.e. a Black Superpower] has not even been undertaken. Consequently, we find ourselves today--400years earlier than Garvey predicted--in the middle of the extermination that was long ago foretold.[/align]

[align=justify]Our journey of escape from the dungeons of Imperialism and Arabism is a long one. The best of our leaders in the 20[suP]th[/suP] century [Nkrumah, Nyerere, Cabral, Mandela etc] did their best, but their best was not even enough to win true independence for us, let alone to win the race war. So, there’s much still to be done.[/align]

What now is to be done?

[align=justify]Everyone says Africa’s problem is leadership. But what exactly is wrong with Africa’s leadership? In one word, it is compradorism. In brief, Imperialism and Arabism are only able to dominate, exploit and confuse us through their local agents, their fifth column in our midst, the caste of Black Compradors. This pseudo-bourgeois class-stratum that led the decolonisation movements in Africa was a caste of comprador-African agents of white supremacy. If we don’t grasp that point, we will understand nothing and everything else we know will only confuse us! As Fanon correctly observed about this pseudo-bourgeoisie that now leads Black Africa:[/align]

[align=justify]"the bourgeois phase in the history of under-developed countries is a completely useless phase. When this caste has vanished, . . . it will be seen that nothing new has happened since independence was proclaimed, . . . [that] that caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought and the institutions left by the colonialists. . . . and that everything must be started again from scratch. . ."
--[ THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, p.142][/align]

Do you want to win the race war and have our race survive? If you do, you must help defeat compradorism. That task is our key to defeating Imperialism and Arabism.

What kind of leadership does that require?

[align=justify]For the type of leadership required to defeat compradorism and its foreign masters, Black Africans should learn from Meiji Japan, Maoist China, and Castro’s Cuba. We can also learn much from Cabral’s leadership in Guinea-Bissau. And Steve Biko’s in South Africa. So there: You have your work cut out for you. [/align]
Go and learn thoroughly, and get the job done before 2060!!
Thank you.
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Talk given by Chinweizu, author of The West and the Rest of Us, to the Black Heritage Summit Plenary session,NIIA, Lagos, 04Dec2006
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All rights reserved.

© Chinweizu 2006

Perhaps these African "leaders" can make a start by getting off their a**es and condemning President Robert Mugabe's continued annihilation of Zimbabwe?http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6508971.stm

^^^ But judging by their past record - I'm not holding my breath.

But Mugabe is a "one off" right? Surely, there aren't other African "leaders" as useless as him? Oops, I forgot to mention Yahya Jammeh, the President of Gambia who claims he can "cure" aids with his bare hands: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=460&id=276502007

With cockroaches like these in charge... who needs enemies?

We need to stop being so God damn naive and defending useless African rulers who are screwing overour people. They are the worst type of cancer - Africa has no chance of progress until some real leaders take charge.

Leaders like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4395978.stm

p.s The current population size of Africa is around the 600 million mark. By mid-century, the population will be well in excess of 1 billion (even by conservative estimates). Therefore, the idea that Africans face "extinction" by the year 2060 is simply misguided.

Agree, the population is booming and thats not including Africans in the dispora. Places like Brazil, the Carib and America.

Nigeria recently took over from Brazil population wise.Don'tbeliveany one group is out to commit genocide on us either.