On the 1 May 2021, Pan-Afrikan youth commemorated the anniversary of the 1 May 1820 legal lynching of William Davidson, through the British courts of the enslavers of his Afrikan people, resulting in his murder by hanging and subsequent beheading by the British State, by launching a class-action to redress such harms of the Maangamizi with a historic case of Reparatory Justice for Planet Repairs utilising Law as Resistance known as the Global Majority Vs the UK Government Campaign.
William Davidson was the son of a formerly enslaved Afrikan woman born in Jamaica and the Scottish Attorney General of Jamaica. At the age of 14, against his mother’s wishes, he was sent to Glasgow to study law. He rose to become one of the pioneering leaders of not only the Trade Union Movement but also the Spencean wing of the emergent Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Movement for the transformation of Britain and its Empire into a true commonwealth of emancipated nations pursuing agrarian revolution that would seize back all stolen lands, redistribute them to everyone and thereby transform the world. Such land redistribution and agrarian repairs were intended to be done in such ways of environmental justice as would result in what today we refer to as ‘Planet Repairs as the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) brought into conceptualising highlighting the interconnections between reparatory justice, environmental justice and cognitive justice.
According to Esther Stanford-Xosei and Dr Nicola Frith, in a co-produced paper for a project known as REPAIRS; Planet Repairs refers to the need to proceed from a standpoint of pluriversality that highlights the nexus of reparatory, environmental and cognitive justice in articulating the need to repair holistically our relationship with, and inseparability from, the earth, environment and the pluriverse giving due recognition to indigenous knowledges in contrast with western-centric Enlightenment ideals that separated humanity from nature and thereby justified exploitation for capital accumulation.
Choosing to open the Afrikan Liberation Awareness Month activities from the 1st May 2021 with a Pagya strike of positive action and also to highlight the two year anniversary since the UK Parliament declared a climate emergency, three young people, Adetola Onamade, 24, Marina Tricks, 20 and Jerry Amokwandoh, 22, two of whom are from our Afrikan heritage Communities, working with the climate litigation charity Plan B and ourselves in the Stop The Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! Campaign (SMWeCGEC), served legal proceedings on the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak and the Energy Minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, over the Government’s failure to honour its Paris Agreement commitments. The terminology of Planet Repairs is used by Claimants Adetola Onamade and Jerry Amokwandoh in their witness statements and publicity materials about the Global Majority case.
The following statement was issued by the Claimants:
Today we filed our claim as people of the Global Majority in solidarity with all communities resisting and suffering the violence of UK and Euro-Amerikan imperialism.
Today also marks the inauguration of Afrikan Liberation Awareness Month as well as International Worker’s Day. While the UK continues to claim international leadership in global justice, its inaction on the climate of injustice, its financial support of corporations responsible for our trajectory of genocide and ecocide, and the continuation of the Maangamizi, make us all complicit in the destruction of the Global South, colonised peoples everywhere, and the marginalised workers of the Global North. The UK must now respond to its criminal failure to safeguard our rights and the rights of our families in the Global South.
We demand the implementation in domestic law of the Paris Agreement. The domestication of international law obligations. Stopping the harm and funding repair in order to uphold Global Majority rights to life, family, self-determination, and the internationally recognised right to remedy and reparation.
All Afrikan Lives Matter, Global Majority Rights Matter.
This must include the killing of BOTH bills, the end to the selling of weapons of mass destruction, no more billions in Nuclear Weapons, and funding people led initiatives for community and Planet repairs.
GlobalMajorityvsUKGov
@GlobalMajorityV
Follow and support our action to stop the harm and fund repair.
The Government will have to reply by June as the battle continues
Aluta continua
Blessings, love, and guidance
The following video explains the rationale for the case by the Claimants
What is the role of the SMWeCGEC in the Global Majority Vs UK Govt case and campaign?
Our role as the SMWeCGEC in this collaboration is to apply our expert knowledge and practical organisational experience in indigenous Afrikan knowledge, culture, concepts, symbols, methods and traditions of justice, in harmony with critical legal praxis, to the law as resistance development of the Global Majority V UK Government case and campaign. Our modus operandi entails utilising our scholar-activist expertise of guerrilla-intellectualism in ensuring that this legal action develops law as resistance, in its Pan-Afrikan revolutionary perspective, to support using action-learning experiences from the centuries of rebellion against genocide and ecocide by Afrikan and other Global South Communities of Resistance in link with Communities of Resistance throughout the Global North; doing so in defence of Human, Peoples and Mother Earth rights. The SMWeCGEC will also ensure that such extra-legal efforts of law as resistance harmoniously complements the conventional legal aspects of the case, in terms of advocacy in the courts.
Since the 2003 Black Quest For Justice Campaign (BQJC) legal & extra-legal Strategy of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice supported by the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), the Black United Front (BUF), the Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) [between the years 2002-2003], and the International Front for Afrikan Reparations (IFAR), there has not been a reparations case initiated in the UK. The Global Majority case and campaign builds on the BQJC-led one by seeking to hold the British Government to account for the the crimes of genocide and ecocide that it is perpetrating and complicit in today as a key aspect in compelling a cessation of violations and guarantees of non-repetition of what we in the SMWeCGEC recognise as being the Maangamizi; all of which are necessary prerequisites for holistic repairs that will fruitfully result in our victorious building of MAATUBUNTUMAN in UBUNTUDUNIA*. The Claimants are very clear this is not just about what they and their immediate families are experiencing here in the UK, but also the harms that are being meted to their extended families and communities worldwide, especially in Afrika, Abya Yala, Asia and other parts of the Global South (read their witness statements linked below). This is a reparations case with a difference; it combines the struggles for holistic reparatory justice as a result of the impact of the Maangamizi on Afrikan Heritage and other communities with that of environmental and cognitive justice.
The Claimants have innovatively utilised law as resistance which seeks to hold the UK Government to account for its failure to honour its international obligations to implement the Paris Agreement; arguing that such failure violates their rights to life and to family life, which are protected by Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Claimants further argue that while the UK Government’s climate failures threaten us all, they as young people, with families in the Global South are exposed to disproportionate and discriminatory impacts and risks pointing out that the UK Government’s complicity in the climate crisis also breaches ECHR Article 14, the prohibition of discrimination.
The case recognises that we cannot just seek to be compensated, outside of a wider strategy to stop the harms of the Maangamizi, redistribute ill-gotten gains and resource the self-repairs that our communities all around the world are working on. This approach takes into consideration the SMWeCGEC’s aim of catalysing the mobilisation and self-organisation of advocates for ‘Stopping the Maangamizi’ as a force within the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations, (ISMAR) as the first step to redressing the crimes and repairing the harms of the Maangamizi.
THE SMWeCGEC also has the role of liaising between the Global Majority Vs the UK Government campaign and the emergent formation of support for its case called the MAATUBUNTUSAFO Pan-Afrikan Global Network of Communities of Resistance which includes the MAATUBUNTUMITAWO-Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the ABLODEDUNOVISIHA Gbetowo Global Union for Pan-Afrikan Community Regeneration, the KIZEZEMEGBA LIKPORKPEKPE of the Kideame of Avatime, the HEDZOLEHEWAMI GaDangme Association for Pan-Afrikan Community Regeneration, the POLONIACOWAWYA Network of Abya Yala, among others.
SMWeCGEC Guidance by Way of a Call to Action
Despite the fact that the courts are becoming a critical site of resistance against climate breakdown and ecocide, we in the SMWeCGEC believe that it is equally important to wage this fight for governmental accountability in the international courtroom of public opinion. Upon hearing about this case and campaign, the natural question is, so what has this case got to do with me and what can I do to assist the progress of the campaign? The simple answer is, become an International Court of Opinion Advocate for the Global Majority Vs UK Government campaign, this simply means studying particularly, the extra-legal work on the case, engaging in law as resistance action-learning with the support of the Maangamizi Educational Trust and encouraging others to do the same.
This will also lead to you learning how to demystify law to others and assist them to raise their own legal consciousness to enable them to actively play their global citizenship role in exercising their right to be the actual makers of domestic and international law. Furthermore, you can be actively engaged, in which ever country you reside, in the creation and advancement of domestic and international law, for example, particularly in pressurising to ensure the criminalisation of ecocide and the outlawing of eco-fascism, defending our collective (group) rights to Self-determination and protecting our geopolitical interests as Afrikans. It is important for us to organise within our communities glocally to be the reparatory, environmental and cognitive justice changes we wish to see in terms of Afrikan Heritage Communities taking responsibility for leading in the development of a participatory democratic PEMPAMSIEMPANGO Glocal Reparations Action Plan for Planet Repairs Alternative Progression (PEMPAMSIEMPANGO-GRAPPRAP). Such plans can be developed locally, regionally and internationally through joining or seeking advice to create, wherever you are, units of the PEMPAMSIESAFO Pan Afrikan Reparatory Justice Special Task Action Research Forces (PEMPAMSIESAFO-PARJSTARFs). Your unit can contribute its work to developing, in your own locality, proceedings towards the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ). By the time the APPCITARJ is established it is expected that the Pempamsiempango(s) will form part of the proposals for redress and repair which the UK Government will be compelled to adhere to, according to the dictates of how well we can harness and deploy our own Afrikan People’s Power glocally.
Now, the process itself of developing the Pempamsiempango needs to be one in which Afrikan Heritage Communities of Resistance are able to collectively organise to develop by way of consensus-decision making as part of the institutionalisation of MAATUBUNTUMI Pan-Afrikan Assemblies of Peoples Power (MAATUBUNTUMI-PAPPs) feeding into Global Citizens Assemblies of Peoples Power. These organising mechanisms are ways of contributing to organisational repairs in redressing Afrikan Peoples disempowerment and advancing Substantive Afrikan Representation by way of governance and political repairs that are necessary for the geopolitical restoration of our Afrikan People’s Sovereignty; doing it in such ways that will enable us to deliver to ourselves, as a global superpower, the victorious building of MAATUNTUMAN IN UBUNTUDUNIA.
Developing such mechanisms will redress the democratic deficit and creatively foster self-governance and forms of autonomy which Afrikans within and beyond the UK are self-actualising in their campaigning for Pan-Afrikan Reparations to win Planet Repairs in its Global Justice meaningfulness. This is being done in accordance with the Blackprint of the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah; with emphasis upon the Pempamsiempango planning for Glocal Pan-Afrikan Community Regeneration, by our own People’s ‘Black Power’, of our Community Resistance Zones such as ‘Maatubuntujamaas‘ (Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination) in the Diaspora, indivisibly linked organically to ‘Sankofahomes‘ inside our indigenous Afrikan Communities of Resistance throughout the continent of Afrika.
In this regard, that is why we are also utilising pertinent lessons from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, in order to advance in Freedomfighting without physical weapons, under the Spearhead Leadership of our own grassroots community-embedded valiant Pan-Afrikan Organic Revolutionary Guerrilla Intellectuals, both old and young, including the “Beautyful Ones” that are being born, steeled and tempered inside the Pagya of our Ogyataana furnaces (forever-burning flames in Twi) of ever raging Soweto Fire, such as the new breed of eco-warriors emerging from the Global Majority Versus the UK Government court case and campaign.
The significance of the 1976 Soweto Uprising to the Global Majority Campaign is that this generation of Claimants are doing Sankofa and going back to take the rebellion torch of Soweto fire forward.
Further info:
For the Plan B Press Release, see here:
https://planb.earth/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PR-1-May-2021.pdf
See these press articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/30/uk-students-sue-government-human-rights-climate-crisis
The government is back in court over the climate crisis | The Canary
To meet the Claimants, see their short film here:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CI6JowBh2nl/?igshid=ne5spl7k598b
The Claim in full is here:
https://planb.earth/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SFG-FINAL-WITH-FOOTNOTES.pdf
For a case chronology see here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SeEOy-5lVWktvzZG5Ww7uWPbSa-358huJ7D1WdAA4Rw/edit
If you would like to know and discuss more about the contents of this article and the types of action that we ourselves can be taking, please contact the SMWeCGEC Spearhead Team as follows: Email – stopthemaangamizi@gmail.com Tel- + 44 (0) 7956431498.
* Pan-Afrika, and not Eurafrica, should be our watchword, and the guide to our policies”
– OSAGYEFO KWAME NKRUMAH, Africa Must Unite , 1963.
MAATUBUNTUMAN is the name and concept being popularised for the envisaged future Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities by various organisations, networks and campaigns associated with the AMANDLA Global Assemblies of Afrikan People’s Power (AMANDLA-GAAPP), based in Accra, Ghana. Coined from the conjunction of “Maat” (the holistic Justice concept from Kemet, Ancient Egypt), with “Ubuntu” (the Bantu concept of the Communion of Humanity from Southern Afrika) and “Oman” (the Akan concept of egalitarian Polity from West Afrika), MAATUBUNTUMAN is meant to promote the concept of a global Afrikan polity (“Oman”), which is an organic embodiment of “Maat”, and therefore practices “Ubuntu” in relation to her own citizens and the entirety of Humanity, Mother Earth and the Pluriverse. Upon the initiative of the Pan-Afrikan Forum of Ghana (PAFOG) in conjunction with the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) and adopted by the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament (GAPP) and the MAATUBUNTUMITAWO – Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council (GAFRIC), it has been adopted as one of the key rallying objectives of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice.
UBUNTUDUNIA (Ubuntu+dunia) is a combined Nguni & Kiswahili word which means a Multipolar World of Global Justice.
