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Tag Archives: U-PITGJ

2018 HAND-IN OF STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION

Posted on August 3, 2018 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

THABO P 1Thabo Downing StreetTHABO P 8

All images are the © copyright of  Thabo Jaiyesimi and must be accredited as such

14,590 Signatures of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Petition handed-in

 

The 6-member delegation for the 2018 hand-in of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Petition were:

From Right to Left

1. Hon. Prophet Kweme Abubaka (Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, Ethiopia African Black International Congress)

2. Dr Barryl Biekman, (Europe-wide NGO Consultative Council for Afrikan Reparations, Netherlands)

3. Mama Lindiwe Tsele (Pan-African Congress of Azania)

4. Ms Kambanda Veii (Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, Namibia)

5. Cllr Joshua Brown-Smith, age 12 (Office of the Young Mayor, London Borough of Lewisham)

6. Professor Gus John (Gus John Associates, Member of the African Union Technical    Union Technical Committee of Experts on the 6th Region).

The delegation which handed-in the 2018 ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide!’ Petition represents a selection of the diversity within our Afrikan Heritage Community. The Young, The Elders, Born on the Continent, Born in the Diaspora, Male and Female, and as in previous members some members flew in from Afrika and Europe!

#ReparationsMarch2018
#Parliament is a Crime Scene!
#StopTheMaangamizi!

 

See the following letter which accompanied the hand-in of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Petition

LETTER TO THERESA MAY 2018 FINAL-page-001LETTER TO THERESA MAY 2018 FINAL-page-002LETTER TO THERESA MAY 2018 FINAL-page-003

PAGE 4-1

LETTER TO THERESA MAY 2018 FINAL PAGE 5-5

 

PAGE 6 2018-1

Please note, the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Petition has been handed-in since 2015, in 2016 no signatures were handed in just the petition and a cover letter. In 2016, 5811 signatures were handed in, in 2017, 9636 signatures were handed in.

It is important to note that the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Petition is not the only tactic we are adopting, the petition signatures accompany a Maangamizi Crime Scene sticker operation and lobbying of MPs strategy via the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Postcard involving support for developing Afrikan Heritage Community advocacy on the points contained in the petition.

It is also important to note that we in the International Steering Committee Spearhead Team of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Campaign (ISC-SMWeCGEC) know that reparations will not be achieved simply by submitting this petition, if one reads the petition it is clear that this is not our thinking. In numerous articles and documents we talk about the March and the petition being part of revolutionary strategy and tactics that we are engaged in, which also involve all forms and levels of liberation struggle waged by various contingents of the International Social Movement for Afrikans (ISMAR).

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March and the annual hand-in of the petition is about building a broad public support base for consolidating the ISMAR in order to strengthen the harnessing and building of Afrikan people’s power to advance reparations to definitive victory; whiincluding the establishment of MAATUBUNTUMAN Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities.

See the following links for further info about the strategy and tactics of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Campaign in association with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee:

As we approach the 3rd year of marching, what has been achieved? (2016)

https://stopthemaangamizi.com/2016/07/13/approaching-3rd-year-of-marching-what-has-been-achieved/

After 4 years of marching, what has been achieved? (2017)

https://stopthemaangamizi.com/2017/08/07/after-4-years-of-marching-what-has-been-achieved/

Rationale for Afrikan Reparations March (2018)

 

This video is of a workshop which took place on Friday 27th July, 2018 and provides some elaboration on the revolutionary thinking and work into for the long-term results that the March is meant to produce and to which it is already contributing.

This is a link to the initial response that was received from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) in response to the 2017 ‘Stop of the Maangamizi!’ Petition and its covering letter, and also the further response from FCO Minister Lord Ahmad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in AEDRMC, AFRIKAN HELLACAUST, AFRIKAN RESISTANCE, ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION OF INQUIRY (APPCITARJ), INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOR AFRIKAN REPARATIONS, ISMAR, MAANGAMIZI RESISTANCE, POPSAR, PRIM, REPARATIONS, SMWeCGEC, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, THE 2018 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, UBUNTUKGOTLA/PITGJ, Uncategorized | Tagged 1st August, Activist Knowledge-Production, Afrika, Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March, Afrikan Heritage, Afrikan Heritage Community, Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination, Afrikan Liberation, Afrikan Reparations, Afrikan Sovereignty, Afriphobia, APPCITARJ, Black Radical Imagination, Bobo Shanti, British Colonialism, British Government, CHOGM 2018, Cllr Joshua Brown-Smith, Commission of Inquiry, Dr Barryl Biekman, EABIC, Ecocide, Education is Preparation for Reparations, Emancipation Day, ENGOCCAR, Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress, FCO, Genocide, Geopolitics, Global Apartheid, Grassroots Leadership, Grassroots lobbying, Hellacaust, Holocaust, ISMAR-Building, Kambanda Veii, Lindiwe Tsele, Lobbying, Lord Ahmad, Maangamizi, Maangamizi Crime Scene, Marching, Movement-Building, Namibia, Neocolonialism, Nothing About Us Without Us!, NothingAboutUsWithoutUs!, OGF, Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, Pan-Afrikan Revolution, Pan-Afrikanism, People Power, People's Power, Peoples Tribunal, Professor Gus John, Prophet Kweme Abubaka, REPARATIONS, Reparations Action-Learners, Reparations March, Reparatory Justice, Self-Repairs, SMWeCGE Petition, SMWeCGEC, Social Movement, Stop the Maangamizi, U-PITGJ, UK Reparations Activism, We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! | Leave a comment

REPAIRING THE COLONIALITY OF OUR MINDSET ON REPARATIONS

Posted on July 23, 2018 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI


 

“Pan-Afrika, and not Eurafrica, should be our watchword, and the guide to our policies.”

– OSAGYEFO KWAME NKRUMAH, ‘Africa Must Unite’, 1963.

 

“It will be gross self-delusive wishful thinking to believe that those wielding the reins of White racist supremacy are going to pay any serious heed to the Afrikan demand for Reparations, unless their hold on the machinery of global power is effectively challenged by the well-organised, upsurgent and self-empowering masses of Afrikan people, and their allied progressive forces throughout the World.”

Kofi Mawuli Klu ‘Charting an Afrikan Self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’: A Draft Paper for Presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the African Reparations Movement, UK, 1993.

 

“At this juncture in our history, there is no way forward in addressing the problems that Afrikans and people of Afrikan descent and all other Black peoples face without seriously grasping the truth of the necessity for holistic reparatory justice. This includes restoring self-determination and sovereignty, implementing measures of cessation of contemporary violations, restitution.”

Esther Stanford-Xosei, 2016

This workshop will explore the meaning of the theme for the 5th annual Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March on 1st August 2018: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us: Actualizing the Reparatory Justice Change We Envisage.’ The main question we will discuss is: What kinds of tackling of problems and injustices that Afrikan people encounter can be deemed as the everyday repairs starting point of reparatory justice work? In this regard, we will highlight the outreach and other mobilizational work of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC), in association with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) with a view to making people see themselves as the actual ‘makers’ and ‘drivers’ of reparatory justice rather than being passive recipients of the benevolence of government and other state actors. This kind of thinking in views expressed by the likes of CARICOM Reparations Commission, Chairperson, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles when he reportedly stated in a recent interview published in the Barbados Advocate (12/07/18):“…reparations is ultimately a government to government conversation. It is about how governments talk to each other. How governments sit down and work out strategies to resolve issues of this nature.”.

In this connection, this workshop will also further explain the revolutionary substance of the rationale for the Reparations March given in the following video.

 

 

The difficulty of grasping reparations differently from what the white supremacist racist establishment defines it to be for us as Afrikan people, is largely as a result of miseducation and the coloniality of our mindsets in even how we are made to think about the cause, nature, consequences and solutions to the problems and injustices that we are encountering as a result of the Maangamizi (Afrikan Hellacaust). It is still largely the case that many who claim to be pro-reparations are inadvertently merely ‘supporters’ or reparations; waiting for the day when someone is going to say “here is your reparations,” or when they and/or Afrikan and Caribbean nation states receive some award of compensation from the British and other European Governments. The whole notion of exercising agency in conceptualising, effecting, securing and taking reparatory justice is completely absent for most of our people, across the world, who are sympathisers or adherents of the cause of reparatory justice.

Taking into account the criticism some establishment scholars make of Black reparations activism, in terms of not seeing its revolutionary tendencies, this workshop will therefore highlight those constituencies of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR), like PARCOE and the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament (GAPP) that advance radical change-making perspectives. Examples of such perspectives are: the concept and methodology of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice which embraces the world revolutionary transformational strategy of ‘Maatubuntusa’ (the art of Pan-Afrikan revolutionary freedom- fighting) for achieving MAATUBUNTUMAN. MAATUBUNTUMAN is the name being popularised for the envisaged future Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities, championed by PARCOE and GAPP and the Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council (GAFRIC) in 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 promotes 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 Universe.

 

PRESENTERS

Esther Stanford-Xosei is a jurisconsult, community advocate specialising in the critical legal praxis of ‘law as resistance’ and internationally acclaimed Reparationist. She is the official spokesperson for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC) which organises the annual 1st August Reparations March in London. In addition, Esther is the co-initiator of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Petition and its wider campaign (SMWeCGEC). Esther also serves as the Co-Vice Chair of the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), co-founder of the Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament (GAPP), the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice (ARTCoP) and the Europe-Wide NGO Consultative Council on Afrikan Reparations (ENGOCCAR). On behalf of PARCOE, Esther and other PARCOE members are involved as an activist partner in the building process of the International Network of Scholars & Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR).

Oleye Gege is an emerging grassroots community scholar-activist, community radio broadcaster who promotes participatory approaches to effecting community self-repairs and addressing the intergenerational impacts of the psycho-social manifestations of the Maangamizi. He serves as the head of security and outreach facilitator on the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee and advocate of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC). He is also a member of Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice (ARTCoP) and the International Network of Scholars & Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR).

Kofi Mawuli Klu is Chief Executive Commissioner of PANAFRIINDABA, a grassroots Pan-Afrikan Community Advocacy, Research and Think Tank based in London, UK and Accra, Ghana. He is also co-Vice Chair, Pan-Afrikan Reparation Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) in London and Joint Co-ordinator of the Global Justice Forum based in London and a founding member of the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament. Bro Kofi runs his own Law-Related Educational Services Agency, UEQUIPOISE. His scholarly activism has and continue to make a significant contribution within institutions of education in and outside of the UK [various courses, seminars, workshops, conferences and Groundings on Afrika and Pan-Afrikanism] and serves Afrikan students/communities as a conscientising tool for grassroots resistance and social change.

For further info about the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March & the SMWeCGEC visit:

www.reparationsmarch.org

www.stopthemaangamizi.com

https://www.change.org/p/stop- the-maangamizi-we-charge- genocide-ecocide

Date: Friday 27th July 2018

Time: Prompt Start @ 7.00pm [Doors Open 6.30PM]

Venue: 336 Brixton Road, London SW9 7DA (over from Max Roach Park) DISABLED ACCESS

Donations Welcome

Please Spread The Word, Attend And Bring A Friend!

We look forward to welcoming you.
Bless,

Sis Maureen
On Behalf of PASCF (Pan Afrikan Society Community Forum

Posted in AEDRMC, AFRIKAN HELLACAUST, AFRIKAN RESISTANCE, INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOR AFRIKAN REPARATIONS, ISMAR, MAANGAMIZI RESISTANCE, MAANGAMIZI RESISTORS, PREFIGURATIVE POLITICS, REPARATIONS, SMWeCGEC, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI CAMPAIGN, THE 2018 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH | Tagged 1st August, Afrika, Afrikan Heritage, Afrikan Liberation, Afrikan Sovereignty, APPCITARJ, Black Radical Imagination, British Colonialism, British Government, CARICOM, Cognitive Justice, Commission of Inquiry, Ecocide, Education is Preparation for Reparations, Emancipation Day, GAFRIC, GAPP, Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council, Global Afrikan People's Parliament, Global Apartheid, Grassroots Leadership, Grassroots lobbying, Hellacaust, International Social Movment for Afrikan Reparations, ISMAR-Building, Maangamizi, Marching, Movement-Building, Neocolonialism, Pan-Afrikan Revolution, People Power, Peoples Tribunal, Rematriation, Reparations Action-Learners, Reparations Education, Reparations Footsoldiers, Reparations March, Reparatory Justice, Repatriation, Self-Repairs, Social Movement, Stop the Maangamizi, U-PITGJ, We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! | Leave a comment

‘STOP THE MAANGAMIZI!’ 2017-2018 CAMPAIGN MESSAGE

Posted on July 3, 2018 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

 

 

This is a video recording filmed by ‘joanjoan.london’ who attended the 2017 Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March on the 1st August. She recently released this edited version of the closing speech made at Parliament Square which is still relevant to the various aspects of the year-round mobilising and organising that the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) engages in and advocates in association with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee.

Posted in AEDRMC, AFRIKAN HELLACAUST, AFRIKAN RESISTANCE, ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION OF INQUIRY (APPCITARJ), EVENTS/TRAINING, INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOR AFRIKAN REPARATIONS, ISMAR, MAANGAMIZI RESISTANCE, MAANGAMIZI RESISTORS, PREFIGURATIVE POLITICS, PRIM, REPARATIONS, Reparatory Justice, SMWeCGEC, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI CAMPAIGN, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, THE 2017 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, THE 2018 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, UBUNTUKGOTLA/PITGJ | Tagged 1st August, Afrikan Heritage, Afrikan Liberation, Afrikan Sovereignty, APPCITARJ, Black Radical Imagination, British Colonialism, British Government, Commission of Inquiry, Ecocide, Emancipation Day, Genocide, Grassroots Leadership, Grassroots lobbying, Hellacaust, International Social Movment for Afrikan Reparations, ISMAR-Building, Lobbying, Maangamizi, Marching, Movement-Building, Pan-Afrikanism, People Power, Peoples Tribunal, Reparations March, Reparatory Justice, Self-Repairs, SMWeCGEC, SMWeCGEC Petition, Social Movement, Stop the Maangamizi, U-PITGJ, We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! | Leave a comment

HOW YOU CAN TAKE ACTION TO ADDRESS THE MAANGAMIZI

Posted on March 4, 2018 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

 

take action

 

Greetings Supporter/s of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! Campaign (SMWeCGEC)

Now that you have signed the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Petition, do you want to take action to get redress for the Maangamizi (Afrikan ‘Hellacaust’ of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial forms of enslavement) as it affects you, your family and community?

Here is an example of how you can do so; please see the ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Postcard template below, which we urge you to send to your MP.  You can find out details about your MP here.

We also attach a template letter which has been revised to include reference to the issue of ‘compensation to enslavers tax fraud’ which is the subject of a separate but connected ‘Refund Our Taxes To Compensate Enslavers!’ petition. You can print off and sign the following letter here: SMWeCGEC Template Letter to MP- Elected Official. The letter is also drafted in such a way that you can send to any publicly elected official, not just MPs.

 

The postcard and letter are tools aimed at enabling you to better lobby and engage with establishment decision-makers about including Maangamizi impact issues as they affect you, your family and community in the constituency representational work and local, national and international policy-making they prioritise.

Please keep us updated in the SMWeCGEC about any progress you make as we are beginning to map which MPs are responding positively to the campaign aims, our contacts can be found here.  This is very important because the experience we have so far is that MPs want to know who else is being lobbied and taking action on the campaign demands contained in the postcard and/or letter. It is essential for us to have this data and info about which individuals and groups are making what approaches to which publicly elected officials and in which geographical areas across the UK.

Check out this guidance on lobbying MPs and other elected officials.

You can also read this ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Postcard advocacy case-study.

See here for other ways that you can take action.

We look forward to hearing from you about any progress you make or any barriers you may encounter! We are developing a page to identify Maangamizi desecrators and deniers so are interested to know if you encounter any public officials that can be characterised as such.

 

In Service

‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! Campaign (SMWeCGEC) Spearhead Team

 

Posted in AFRIKAN HELLACAUST, AFRIKAN RESISTANCE, ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION OF INQUIRY (APPCITARJ), INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOR AFRIKAN REPARATIONS, ISMAR, MAANGAMIZI RESISTANCE, MAANGAMIZI RESISTORS, REPARATIONS, Reparatory Justice, SMWeCGEC, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI CAMPAIGN, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, THE 2017 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, THE 2018 AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, UBUNTUKGOTLA/PITGJ | Tagged Afrikan Heritage, Afrikan Liberation, APPCITARJ, British Colonialism, British Government, Commission of Inquiry, Ecocide, Genocide, Grassroots Leadership, Hellacaust, International Social Movment for Afrikan Reparations, ISMAR, Maangamizi, Movement-Building, People Power, Reparations March, Reparatory Justice, Social Movement, Stop the Maangamizi, STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, Tax Fraud, U-PITGJ, We Charge Genocide/Ecocide! | Leave a comment

‘LIBYA SLAVE AUCTIONS’: UPDATING OUR ‘STOP THE MAANGAMIZI!’ RESPONSE

Posted on December 4, 2017 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

CLARKE NKRUMAH

 

“To be a slave was to be a human being under conditions in which that humanity was denied.
They were not slaves. They were [Afrikan] people.
Their condition was slavery.
They looked upon themselves and their servitude with the eyes and minds of human beings, conscious of all that went on around them”.
Julius Lester

 

“Most human behaviour is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power”
John Henrik Clarke

 

LIBYA COLLAGE

 

“Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.”
John Henrik Clarke

 

They say silence speaks louder than words; in what has been perceived to be our silence, we have also been speaking volumes. It is not that we have not been responding, it is simply that some are looking for us to respond in typical sorts of ways. We in the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) do not pander to obscurantism, more so with misguiding populist decorations. Our priority focus is on educating, organising and mobilising people to ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ through their own reparatory justice action-learning in order to build their own power to effect holistic reparatory justice. This is why we concur with Dr John Henrik Clarke as quoted above. What is happening in and around Libya is more than enslaved Afrikans being sold on auction blocks. Rather, this is one of the symptoms of an increasingly decadent, rotten and stinking neocolonialism as being perpetuated in Afrika by the Global Apartheid racist forces of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism which is making our own homeland terribly more impossible to live in. If our own countries have not become hell on earth why wouldn’t Afrikans want to stay in Afrika?

Some people are making lots of noise and taking sporadically reactive actions about Afrikans being sold on auction blocks in Libya. It is not lost upon us that some of these noises and actions are being orchestrated and paid for from dodgy sources inimical to the best interests of Afrika. As justified in their spontaneity as some of such actions may appear, they raise lots more questions than answers. After these sorts of protests that we are seeing being organised in response largely to the imperialist corporate mouthpiece CNN reporting and dissemination of ‘controlling images’ of Afrikans being sold on auction-blocs, what do most of the participants who attend such protests, (including those who simply do so simply because they are paid bogus NGO bureaucrats and poverty-pimps, whose job it is to orchestrate and profit from such wild-goose chases), do as follow-up actions of every-day resistance to effect change in eradicating the root causes of such horrors? How long shall we continue to run helter-skelter in spontaneous protests actions, without taking effectively organised actions to prevent the killing of our freedom-fighting prophets and the violent destruction of the movements of resistance they have been trying to build? It would seem that there are some in our Afrikan Heritage Communities that seek to limit our activism to aimless protests, outside of the context of movement-building, with no clear goals or agreement on who should be the targets of our actions, the change we are seeking to bring about and no plan to build principled organizational unity or the capacity to facilitate such potentially change-making endeavours.

Why are those concerned not crying out and protesting louder about the mess being made of our Afrikan homeland by Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism through its neocolonial Afrikan and Arab elitist puppets; the stinking mess with all the brutalities of white-supremacy racist barbarism that is driving ordinary Afrikans away from their homes? Please be more critically aware, discerning and vigilant. Take the kind of well-planned ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ for Reparatory Justice! action/s that will prevent Afrikans from fleeing our own homeland in the first place and vacating it for more foreign setter-colonialists to move in, racially cleanse and occupy for nefarious geopolitical ends. It is high time that our people once again focused on the kinds of systematic actions that will effect systemic change and not simply respond in knee-jerk fashion to the various symptoms of the same system in such a way that these symptoms become the main focus of our protest actions.

A more useful starting point would be to target Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism and its agencies, institutions and quislings, including their Black puppets of neocolonialism, that are masterminding such horrific crimes of the Maangamizi; particularly with a view to shutting down the Maangamizi Crime Scenes that you can find anywhere near you or close to communities you can be engaged constructively with. For people in Afrika ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ is not just a slogan, it is a life and death matter, hence why we initiated the SMWeCGEC with specific aims and objectives towards stopping the Maangamzi which manifests itself in the current system of neocolonialism with symptoms including variations of ‘modern-day slavery’, such as is becoming more highlighted currently in Libya. In our justified outrage about this form of modern-day enslavement of Afrikans, we must be mindful of who is pushing and profiting from this particular narrative and proliferation of ‘slave-auction controlling images’ and whose agenda is our people’s very predictable-spontaneous reactions to such narratives serving? It is indeed the same forces today as was the case yesteryear. After all, those that are most pushing the ‘modern day-slavery’ agenda and ‘it is Afrikans that are at it again‘ agenda are those actually responsible for creating, fuelling and perpetuating those conditions which continue to make it possible, including violently killing those freedom-fighters of ours who organise and build movements so stop such manifestations of the Maangamizi.

How comes this was not occurring under a Colonel Gaddafi led-Libya? Modern-day enslavement of Afrikans in Libya, in this aggravated form, is happening because NATO forces deliberately have chosen to make it happen in order to lend credence to their governments propaganda about us forgetting our intergenerational reparatory justice demands and rather begging them to clean up the Euro-Amerikkkan ‘mess’ they have created in Libya; and save us from horrors they contrive all the time in different ways and means. After all, isn’t Libya and its current neocolonial puppet-government a territory that is absolutely controlled in military and all other forms by the same forces of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism and their creation of reactionary counterinsurgency terrorist forces like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State?

We must not allow ourselves to fall into the Hegelian Dialectic i.e. Roman Emperor Diocletian’s age-old problem-reaction-solution method for securing geopolitical interests. This highlighting of the modern-enslavement of Afrikans in Libya, divorced from the context and continuum of the Maangamizi, is an attempt by the Euro-Amerikkkan imperialist Establishment to assert its geopolitical interests in Afrika and to shift and misdirect the masses attention away from the task of every-day resistance movement building for Pan-Afrikan Power through effecting Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice by our own People’s Power.

Directing our protests at forces which right now have no interests in stopping the trafficking, incarceration and enslavement of Afrikans in Libya is the classic way we give up our own change-making power by thinking that ‘WE THE AFRIKAN PEOPLE’ do not have the power to set our own agenda and organise to achieve it. Our time, and difficult to harness resources, are better utilised in self-determinedly organising according to our own Pan-Afrikan Liberation agenda to put a full-stop to the Maangamizi in the process of effecting holistic reparatory justice by our own people’s power; a global force those of us in the Diaspora have the responsibility first and foremost, to develop through building Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination (AHC’s NSDs/Maatubuntujamaas) to organically generate the MAATUBUNTUMANDLA Pan-Afrikan Government of Peoples Power Abroad which in our contemporary times will be the most effective way to uphold, defend and promote the best collective geo-political interests of Afrikan people throughout the World.

What is happening now in Libya and the disgraceful inability of governments and other state officials throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika to do anything effective in addressing the situation makes it more imperative for Afrikans, outside of the Continent of Afrika, to prioritise the building of such MAATUBUNTUMANDLA as a step towards achieving MAATUBUNTUMAN (Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities at Home & Abroad); so that we are able to not only ‘substantively’ represent’ ourselves in positive action to make our Afrikan Lives actually matter in deed; but also amplify the voices of our Communities of Resistance on the Continent and support them in freedom-fighting actions that will enable them to stop such crimes of the Maangamizi upon their own initiatives. This is how best we in our time can fulfil our ‘mission’ and not betray it, as others have and are still doing, so as to win and guarantee our collective security and thereby provide a brighter future for us and our progeny on Planet Earth.

‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign International Steering Committee (ISC-SMWeCGEC)

04/12/17 revised from original statement of Kofi Mawuli Klu on 28/11/17

“The neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage. In the past it was possible to convert a country upon which a neo-colonial regime had been imposed — Egypt in the nineteenth century is an example — into a colonial territory. Today this process is no longer feasible. Old-fashioned colonialism is by no means entirely abolished. It still constitutes an African problem, but it is everywhere on the retreat. Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, ‘Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’

 

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana

 

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REPARATIONS INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE HIGHLIGHTS ‘STOP THE MAANGAMIZI!’

Posted on November 23, 2017 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

AN ISMAR UK DIALOGUE IN LONDON WITH CARICOM – NATIONAL COUNCIL ON REPARATION IN JAMAICA (JNCR): AN INITIAL REPORT-BACK

DIALOGUE DATE : 14 NOVEMBER 2017

 

 

*ISMAR stands for International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations

 

Including:

1. Professor Verene Shepherd: Scholar-Activist Co-Chair of the Jamaica National Council on Reparation (JNCR), Director of the UWI – Centre for Reparation Research, Independent Expert at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

2. Bert Samuels: Pan-Afrikanist Attorney-at-Law, Head of JNCR Legal Working Group.

3. Lord Anthony Gifford QC: Attorney-At-Law, Member of Queen’s Commission, Member of JNCR, Citizen of Jamaica since 1990’s, involved with reparations since days of mentor Bernie Grant, MP.

“Dialogue is a form of struggle. It is not a chit chat. Create a dialogue that focuses not just on the vulnerability of all groups, but on those larger issues of justice, democracy and the crisis within our own communities then try to hammer out some everyday problems that relate to the everyday lives of those groups”

Professor Cornel West

 

Purpose of the Meeting

The meeting started with introductions and a reminder of the purpose of the deliberations:

1: The status of the reparatory justice movement in the UK and Jamaica (update on both sides);

2: What strategies have worked and why? What strategies have not worked and why?;

3. The way forward.

It was reiterated that this meeting is a dialogue and, notwithstanding the limits of time, participants should adhere to and help reinforce the principles of dialogue. Communication agreements were highlighted: it was emphasized that people should speak from their own reality, speak in their name, from their own point of view and also realise that we are here to share as well as listen to others; and that in doing, so we do not all have to agree with each other.

 

From the JNCR

Professor Shepherd made some preliminary comments. She recognised that there were some misgivings and acknowledged that some of the participants had previously sent in their issues of concern in advance of the meeting. She stated that they would not be able address all the points and issues that had been sent in advance from some parties in the dialogue but emphasized that this is not the only trip the delegation will make. She informed the gathering that she is head of the JNCR Diaspora and International Engagement Working Group. There is another JNCR working group which is the Internal Reparations and Internal Engagement Working Group for Postcolonial Wrongs committed by post-colonial regimes like Coral Gardens. So, the JNCR is working externally and internally.

Professor Shepherd acknowledged that there were lots of questions about the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC). The Chair of the CRC, she explained that Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, wanted to join on this trip and was not able to but has committed to a separate trip here next year on behalf of the CRC. She reiterated that this engagement is part of the JNCR terms of reference point 6, which is “to engage the international community in Afrika, the Americas and Europe in discussion on reparations and build a global coalition of reparations activists”. It was pointed out that the experience in the UK can guide in what they are doing in Jamaica. After all, many in the United Kingdom are part of Jamaica and have been calling for closer collaboration. She acknowledged that reparations conversations in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean cannot continue to exclude us in UK.

Professor Shepherd explained that the JNCR was first established in 2009, but this version of the JNCR is the 3rd version of it. She explained that the JNCR is preparing a report on its activities of the last few years, in order to advise on the way forward, including what forms reparations should take. It is currently consulting on this with a view to better comprehending what reparations would be like internally and externally.

First reason being the need to ally itself with civil society, including Rastafari organisations, as governments should not stand aside from the movement. Secondly, was their own conviction that the Maangamizi (Afrikan holocaust/hellacaust) is a Crime against humanity and that Western European nations have failed to repair damage done by the Afrikan holocaust.

Professor Shepherd commented on the recent visit to Jamaica by Lord Tariq Ahmad, the current UK Government Minister responsible for the Caribbean, Commonwealth and the United Nations Affairs. During his visit, Lord Ahmad insensitively stated that it was better for Jamaica to look ahead and maximise its potential rather than to peer into history at a time when everyone was peering into history at Remembrance Day. She pointed out that similar comments were made by Lord Ahmad’s predecessor, Mark Simmonds, as well as former UK Prime Ministers, David Cameron and Tony Blair. She mentioned the letter of Barbados PM Fruendel Stuart, QC. to Lord Tariq Ahmad proposing a meeting to discuss the evidential basis of Caribbean Reparations Initiative to which there was a response that the British Government “does not believe that reparations are the answer”.

Professor Shepherd referenced the reparations context from a state perspective, within which the movement is growing and why the Jamaican government felt it should establish the JNCR. It was highlighted that Gordon K. Lewis reminded us in ‘The Growth of the Modern West Indies’ that Britain “sought withdrawal from the Caribbean area without providing the sort of economic aid to which, on any showing, the colonies were entitled.” In addition, Sir Ellis Clarke, who was the Trinidadian Government’s United Nations representative to a sub-committee of the Committee on Colonialism in 1964, had made this point in his statement: “An administering power… is not entitled to extract for centuries all that can be got out of a colony and when that has been done to relieve itself of its obligations…. Justice requires that reparation be made to the country that has suffered the ravages of colonialism before that country is expected to face up to the problems and difficulties that will inevitably beset it upon independence.”

Professor Shepherd spoke about challenges that the JNCR has had in implementing its workplan in relation to receiving submissions, undertaking public consultations, conducting hearings and receiving testimonies to guide a national response on reparations and consulting various constituencies. Nevertheless, they have tried to reach people by conducting a media blitz, utilising the ‘Running African’ show of Ka’bu Ma’at Kheru on IRIE FM and big public events where reparations are promoted and discussed such as:

• Establishment of a memorial for the ‘Zong Massacre’ in Black River to commemorate the lives of the 133 enslaved Afrikans who were thrown overboard by the crew of the ‘slave ship’ Zong in 1781 for insurance purposes);

• Play on the ‘Trial of Governor Eyre’ written by Bert Samuels, directed by Michael Holgate; the play addresses what would happen if Edward John Eyre, governor of Jamaica during the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, was tried for murder, including the deaths of National Heroes Paul Bogle and George William Gordon;

•  It was acknowledged that the Jamaican Government must follow through on obligations to pay compensation to Coral Gardens victims and deal with responsibilities to family members where victims have died;

• Committing to youth engagement as youth are not significantly engaged;

• Highlighted the regional ‘run for reparations’ baton relay, which is going around the country, to end on 27th December in St. James, where war of 1831-2 started. So, the focus is on the youth using media and events;

• Professor Shepherd informed the gathering that she had helped to revise history on the syllabus in schools; over much objection, reparations is now on the syllabus; having to take applied history perspectives i.e. using history to address a modern concern.

She concluded her comments by sharing other challenges that they are working with in the JNCR including:

• 49% in a 2011 poll by the Jamaica Gleaner suggested most Jamaicans believe the country would be better off today if it had remained a British colony;

•”Reparations are another begging bowl”;

• “Governments cannot be trusted and only a grassroots movement will succeed”;

• People don’t trust academics, elite Rastas and lawyers and worse CARICOM;

• People do not agree on forms of reparations and only individual reparations with a personal benefit will appeal to them;

• People are not too happy how £350 million distributed in the region, not part of reparations.

Professor Shepherd closed her comments by asking “So how do we overcome the challenges, how do we go forward, what has worked for you and what lessons can be learned?”

 

Lord Anthony Gifford QC

Lord Gifford commenced by stating that he sees the delegation and their colleagues in the JNCR as being “independent thinkers” with connections and skills who have been asked to advise the Jamaican government. In this regard, firstly, it must be continually emphasized that reparations is a legally sound just cause for crimes against humanity, and reparations have never been addressed. This case was made in Abuja in 1993 and in Durban at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). He highlighted that there has been at least a verbal acceptance by CARICOM governments that this case is made out. He pointed out that lots of strides have thus far been made in the Caribbean by mobilising people in support of reparations.

Secondly, it is important to work out what reparations mean and if possible agree upon what forms reparations will take. He explained that this point of unity among pro-reparations forces has not as yet been arrived at. Hence why it is important to consult people and friends in other countries as well as consult with the wider Diaspora.

One of most important things on which to give honest and correct advice to the JA government is the necessity to consult the people. Gifford explained that we cannot just have a scheme that just looks good on paper; adding: “you can’t even just have a scheme that is good on paper because government can be destabilised by all kinds of forces, and there are many working against reparations in a vicious way. He pointed out that it is no coincidence that Lord Ahmad was visiting the Caribbean at the same time while their JNCR delegation is in the UK; and also surmised that part of Chief Abiola’s downfall in Nigeria was because he spoke out on reparations on behalf of Afrika and her Diaspora.

Lord Gifford concluded by highlighting that it seems that in the UK we are in a potentially life changing situation, with a possibility of a Corbyn led- government; stating that he was, interested to know how the gathering, in attendance, thought a change in UK government will assist the cause of reparatory justice.

 

Attorney Bert Samuels

Bert Samuels raised the case of Somerset v Stewart highlighting contradictions within the British legal system, (as well as between Britain and Jamaica), concerning the whole idea of slavery being a crime against humanity. He sees internal reparations as very important, and is proud to be lead adviser to the Coral Gardens group, helping to win $10 million Jamaica Dollars for the Rastafari community. He believes we must “tidy our own houses” before we can approach others to say they should help tidy ours. He also spoke of what happened at the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, where 400+ persons were killed by militia and that historical-legal research was being done to include various dimensions to the Jamaican reparations case.

Samuels concluded by highlighting the role of legal actions in ‘demystifying the law’ and also creating avenues for public education and mass mobilisation which are part of the power-building to institute alternative legal and extra-legal measures.

 

To demystify law is to make people lose their awe before the law as it being something ‘sacrosanct’ by simplifying and summarizing legal principles, concepts and decisions/judgements for those not critically schooled or untrained in the disciplines of law ultimately leading to a democratisation of law-making and legal practice.

 

UK ISMAR Report Back

It was stressed that we need to recognise the fact that the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) is the way it is here in the UK because of the radical ground-up anti-imperialist approach, led from the grassroots, by non-state actors that we have inherited in terms of the global legacies of the Pan-Afrikan Congresses, the Garveyite Movement, the Black Power and Rastafari Movements as they have developed in the UK. We endeavour to maintain fidelity to such legacies that have been shaped by the roles of Afrikans from both the continent and diaspora of Afrika such as Attobah Kwodjo Enu (aka Ottobah Cuguano), Olaudah Equiano, Henry Sylvester-Williams, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, John Archer, Paul Robeson, C.L.R. James, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Peter Abrahams, George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Ras Makonnen and Jomo Kenyatta in advancing together from Britain the Pan-Afrikan Movement to enhance the global harmonisation within the Pan-Afrikan Congresses of the reparatory justice demands that Afrikan people have been making for centuries from their own homeland and extending throughout the World.

It was further emphasized that it is with their precious blood, sweat and tears from exertions not only of brawn but also of brain power, wherever our Afrikan people were compelled to endure the dispossessions, degradations and dehumanization of various forms of enslavement, that they have bequeathed to us a most treasurable arsenal of intellectual and organisational weapons that we continue to utilise in updating our ISMAR-building and its strategy and tactics here in the UK, with input from all those contingents of the ISMAR and its interconnected Peoples’ Reparations International Movement (PRIM) throughout the World, particularly Afrikan Communities of Reparations Interest and their allies, with which we keep networking. Therefore, most of the leading Afrikan Heritage Community activists who identify with the ISMAR and are conscious of its history and true legacies see ourselves as custodians of a Reparations Movement which is informed by a global and glocal, rather than country national, or even regional perspectives. Most of such leading activists see reparations as inextricably connected to global Afrikan Liberation, recognising that it is through such total liberation in Pan-Afrikan revolutionary perspective that we can glocally effect truly meaningful reparatory justice by our own Black People’s Power.

However, it was also recognised that there was a need for this history to be more accessible and widely known by ordinary members of the public who are largely miseducated about this history due to state schooling; more so since ordinary members of the public are recipients of a state-miseducation system which continues to perpetuate the disconnection of generations of Afrikan Heritage Communities from their history and the neglected social history that Afrikan people have made in the UK, particularly since the so-called World War I and II. In addition to the failure of the education system to equip Afrikan people to see the connections between their current reality, in relation to deaths in custody, school exclusions and colonialism and neocolonialism, i.e. the failure to see the domestic colonised/neocolonised status of people of Afrikan heritage in the UK. In this regard, it was recommended and strongly advocated that we cannot approach Afrikan reparatory justice from the perspective of sentimentality but that there was a need for serious scholarly work to be done which was put in service of building a people-centred mass movement for reparatory justice.

At the same time there was also a need for scholars/intellectuals whether they are establishment scholars or grassroots scholars to become or stay community engaged and accountable. In this regard, the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) was highlighted as an approach to non-extractivist research and scholarship which is accountable to the ISMAR. Just as is being done by some constituencies of the PRIM in various countries of Abya Yala (the so-called Americas), including Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, the USA and Canada, the INOSAAR is supporting the ISMAR-promoted development of endeavours towards building a more egalitarian, equitable and pluriversal Global Academy Commons by giving recognition to scholars not only in Establishment Academia but also those of Grassroots Academia, including those engaged in scholarship utilising Afrikan Indigenous Knowledge Systems that indigenous communities of Afrika are revitalising on the continent as well as other systems of knowledge production developed by Afrikan Heritage Communities of the Diaspora.

It was further recommended that the JNCR as well as the UWI-based Centre for Reparations Research (CRR) should link into the work and replicate some of the approaches of the INOSAAR.

ISMAR activists in the meeting articulated their defence of advocating for activists in the UK to work from the non-negotiable standpoint of critical support for some reparations state actors, while maintaining that it is non-state actors of civil society that remain the foremost driving force of the ISMAR. Hence taking the uncompromising standpoint that it is the grassroots of Afrikan Civil Society that leads the ISMAR, with its own independent programme of action arising from its anti-establishment strategy and tactics of total Pan-Afrikan liberation as the process through which we can best take, effect and secure holistic reparatory justice, by our own people’s power, in pursuit of this strategy and tactics.

• It was pointed out that the 1993 Abuja first Pan-Afrikan conference on Reparations for chattel enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism was appealing to many of us who identify as being part of the ISMAR in the UK, because of its interconnection of the past with present systemic injustices of the Maangamizi, unlike the CARICOM position which emphasizes reparations for the past of chattel enslavement and native genocide only. Accordingly, very good note must be taken of the popularisation of the 1993 Abuja Declaration, and its related documents such as the very enlightening paper of Professor Chinweizu, by the likes of the late Bernie Grant MP in his parliamentary and extra-parliamentary work. Noteworthily, Bernie Grant drew together both state and non-state actors within and beyond the UK, to buttress the African Reparations Movement (ARM) with the active involvement and support of some of the participants in the 14th November 2017 Dialogue in London. The remarks about this made in the meeting by Lord Anthony Gifford are therefore of very important significance. These legacies from before and beyond the Abuja Declaration are what have left deep imprints upon the landscape of reparations movement-building in the UK, which most of us committed to advancing the ISMAR to its definitive victory continue to energetically promote.

It was explained that, notwithstanding this fact, there are some in the movement here in Britain that still do not appear to be taking reparations for neo-colonialism seriously and it was pointed out that some of the pro-reparations forces were reluctant to countenance any critical appraisal of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Initiative including its 10-Point Plan for this reason. Some groups and individuals appear therefore to be taking neocolonialism off their reparations agenda. It follows that some of the standpoints of uncritical support for the CARICOM position on Reparations were devoid of objectively critical people-centred appraisal of CARICOM because they do not see reparations for neocolonialism and the role of CARICOM states in the still ongoing perpetuation of neocolonialism. Therefore, it was reasoned that such elements do not want to interrogate neocolonialism because of what others see as ‘complicity’ in aiding and abetting it in the desire to be what is perceived to be ‘economically successful’ within the Global Apartheid status quo of the ongoing Maangamizi against Afrikan and all other oppressed “Wretched of the Earth“.

“The neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage. In the past it was possible to convert a country upon which a neo-colonial regime had been imposed — Egypt in the nineteenth century is an example — into a colonial territory. Today this process is no longer feasible. Old-fashioned colonialism is by no means entirely abolished. It still constitutes an African problem, but it is everywhere on the retreat. Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, ‘Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’

 

• Disapproval of ‘Caribbean citizenship by investment programmes’ was expressed. The creation of such Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programmes have mainly driven by the Caribbean governments desire to find new ways to raise revenue and are currently operating in St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and St Lucia. In particular, concern was raised by what is currently happening in Barbuda where politicians and investors are taking advantage of the island’s devastation after Hurricanes Irma and Maria to grab land from people displaced by the recent series of hurricanes. It is feared that the government will overturn Barbuda’s communal land system by introducing land privatisation. Prime Minister Gaston Browne recently proposed changing the law to privatise the land by selling it for a dollar a plot to leaseholders. But, local people, activist groups and even some politicians are saying that it is really commercial leaseholders of large plots such as those for hotels, who will benefit from the move. This is even more worrying given that no land has been bought or sold on Barbuda since the abolition of slavery more than 180 years ago, so in this era it was stated that Antigua & Barbuda were going back to the days of English ‘slave trader’ and plantation developer Christopher Codrington! It was asserted that this and other failures to interrogate the operation of neocolonialism leaves doubts about where heads of government are finding the ‘collective consciousness’ through which to authentically champion true reparatory justice on behalf of their Afrikan Caribbean citizenries.

• Concerns were raised about the impact of neocolonialism on Afrikan Heritage Communities in Europe which has the purpose of seeking to assimilate and co-opt Afrikan and other Black peoples into the system of white supremacy within and outside the imperialist metropolis. It was pointed out that this is occurring through the whitening of Black spaces through the spatial racism and Afriphobia of gentrification such as is occurring in Brixton. Initiatives such as those of Brixtonics@Brixton, which are seeking to counter the erasure of Brixton’s association with the legacies of CLR James, Olive Morris and their associated militant traditions of Revolutionary Pan-Afrikanism and Black Power resistance, were highlighted, including the work now happening to bring together Black traders and their allies who are seeking to develop a glocal economic base. It was pointed out that the success building of such a glocal economic base in the Diaspora to impact effectively on reparatory justice transformations on the continent of Afrika will require the development of a global Pan-Afrikan Government in waiting hosted by the Afrikan Diaspora. It is this kind of governance body that some refer to as the MAATUBUNTUMANDLA – Pan-Afrikan Government of People’s Power Abroad.

• Challenging questions were asked about the outcomes of existing CARICOM legal and diplomatic strategies and a discussion ensued about conventional legal strategies and their effectiveness in securing reparatory justice gains to our people. It was highlighted that a key feature of the ISMAR in the UK is that there is not a prioritization of conventional Eurocentric legal strategies, hence the strong critique of Leigh Day & Co which came from many activists in the UK. There was a recognition that the settlement in Mutua & Others V FCO (Mau Mau case) was a not a precedent that could or should be replicated in the global Afrikan reparations case. In this regard, there was a discussion about Lord Gifford’s legal opinion on the Leigh Day advice and some of the ‘legal insurmountables’ that his advice indicated. There was an exploration of the limitations as well some benefits of the uses of conventional legal strategies in terms of public conscientisation and mobilisation. The approach of ‘Law as Resistance’ was highlighted, from the standpoint of which grassroots legal and extra-legal initiatives in Britain, such as the 2003 Black Quest for Justice Campaign case for the Queen Elizabeth II to answer was advocated. From this precedent was identified the need to enhance the international popularisation of ‘Law as Resistance’ and also to support the proposal for partnership with the INOSAAR in training younger legal practitioners and activists to utilise community-engaging forms of lawyering as well as alternative mechanisms to the International Court of Justice such as the Ubuntukgotla-Peoples’ International Tribunal for Global Justice (U-PITGJ), as advocated by the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC).

• The question of London-centrism was raised and the need for outreach to and participation of activists, communities and other stakeholders outside of London. It was agreed that greater attention should be paid to broadening engagement within the ISMAR by doing outreach, community education and mobilisation etc. It was also highlighted that due recognition of the reparations movement-building work that is being spearheaded from London, which is also informed by activists from outside London; and also to recognise the rich intellectual sophistication and greater audacity of perspectives and praxis emanating from activists who have taken advantage of the global positioning of London and its Black demographics in order to shape London-based and glocally rippling Pan-Afrikan liberatory activism, rooted in militant intellectual and organisational traditions cultivated from the Global Apartheid anti-racism of anti-imperialist dimensions. It was pointed out that such historically conscious advancements were possible because of the presence and central role in contemporary ISMAR-building of London-based and London influencing activists with specially privileged elevation from gains of ‘Struggle’ made by those from previous generations that provide considerably advantageous ramparts more than is currently possible to have in other places within Britain and even throughout Europe.

It was agreed that there should be regular report-back sessions which included the various regions where people were organising for reparations and jointly collaborating and publicising each other’s initiatives and programmes for reparations. It was highlighted that there needed to be greater information sharing and planning among and between reparations organisations and stakeholder groups in the UK especially when it came to matters such as initiatives being taken at the United Nations, the African Union, and especially in relation to meetings regarding the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (IDPAD) and the Committee for the Convention of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). GACuk highlighted some of the work they have been doing in relation to the CERD.

• There was a reiteration of the importance of voluntary Repatriation, which some of us prefer to call Rematriation, given the fact that conceptually, we refer to Afrika as our Motherland rather than Fatherland. Rematriation/Repatriation should be central to all we do, in addition to recognition of the need to include renewal of Afrikan material cultural as well as integration and restoration of independent Afrikan community and nationhood. This must be pursued being sensitive to and cognisant of the perspectives of formations like the Global Afrikan Family Reunion International Council: the developing network of Chiefs, other traditional leaders and activists in Ghana/West Afrika who are demanding, in accord with the legitimate reparatory justice interests of indigenous Afrikan Communities on the continent of Afrika, particularly those arising from their still ongoing freedom-fighting against neocolonialism and its related vestiges of colonialism and the devastating impact of chattel enslavement, as manifestations of the continuing Maangamizi; such as land rights and the divisive borders of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, among all other concerns of their inalienable human, peoples‘ and Mother Earth rights.

• The question of the inadequacy of existing internal reparations initiatives, including compensation for the Tivoli Gardens Massacre was reiterated. In addition, concerns were expressed about the role of lawyers in what was stated to be the “cover up” process of the ensuing 2016 West Kingston Commission of Enquiry was expressed as a cause of concern.

• There needed to be greater recognition of the importance and role of sites of community organising and activity where masses of our people are engaged to focus on in seeking to advance the cause and build the movement for reparations. Such sites of organising including, trade unions, faith groupings, youth and student groupings as well as women-focused and other sites of social justice activism.

• A point was made about the representativeness of the meeting and other groups that ought to have been represented in the deliberations. Explanations offered highlighted the request of Professor Verene Shepherd and others who had asked for the meeting to be convened to restrict this initial meeting to a selected group of about 10-12 activists capable of engaging in mutually respectful discussions on the agenda proposed by the National Council on Reparations in Jamaica (JNRC) initially; in accordance with which request the Convenor diligently acted as best as she could with the necessary serious consideration in the careful choice of the participants in this meeting. Attendees to the dialogue with reparesentatives of the JNCR were identified on the basis of those who were considered, with appropriate consultations, as not only representative of our Afrikan Heritage Communities and groups of reparations interest in and around London, in addition to having an organisational/ track-record on reparations organising as groups and associated individuals; but also who are most capable at this initial stage of engaging meaningfully with due respect for the required best practice and rules of meaningful dialogue.

This was added to by emphasizing the wider terrain of representation and the need for Afrikan Heritage Community representation outside of narrow activist circles which were not representative of wider Afrikan, Afrikan Caribbean and other Afrikan Diaspora communities, including Afrikan and Caribbean country Diaspora representative groups and organisations who are doing work relevant to reparatory justice. It was emphasised that we all had to do more to broaden our outreach work to much wider embrace our Afrikan Heritage Communities (AHCs) in their rich diversity from all over the World that make up the Diaspora and our mother-continent of Afrika. In doing so, we must always remember that it was on our mother-continent of Afrika that the ISMAR began; when the first captured Afrikans immediately started raising their Reparatory Justice demands, with insistence upon recovering their inalienable freedom and other human, peoples’ and Mother Earth rights according to their own values and worldviewpoints. They did so in full cognisance of their Cognitive Justice right to their own self-determination of whom they regarded themselves and their own communities and systems of being, knowledge and societal organisation and progress to be; with what they regarded as their own civilizational systems of morality, law and Justice, for which reason they, there and then, started their freedomfighting against the Maangamizi crimes of denial of their humanity, enslavement and colonisation in various forms.

• It was advocated that there needed to be a ‘truth’ process among various representatives and groupings of the ISMAR in the UK; because, in spite of our lofty declarations and the grandstanding of some amongst us, there were not only commendable strengths but also some despicable weaknesses among us, including negative tendencies such as unscrupulous pandering to Establishment power no matter how unjust it is, sycophancy, sectarian competitiveness, male-chauvinistic and other egoistic posturings that are at variance with the ethics of the very reparatory justice we claim to be standing up for and demanding of others to honour! It was also pointed out that recognition should be given to initiators of initiatives like what has now developed to become the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March which takes place annually on the 1st August, now has specific aims and objectives and is organised in such a way as to promote and strengthen ISMAR-building. Equally it was stressed that is necessary and truthful to recognise when there are developments and improvements on such initiatives especially when they are abandoned by initiating groups. It was pointed out that history was relevant here, as often the consequences of actions taken historically often have unforeseen consequences which must also be acknowledged and reflected upon when surveying and assessing the current state of the ISMAR in the UK. It was emphasized that in all our endeavours, we must listen to the wishes of our communities to guide our organising actions and that there should be transparency and accountability to the constituencies we represent.

 

Way forward

• We as the Civil Society grassroots from diverse Afrikan Heritage Communities of Reparations interest in the UK, shall work with all non-state actors in and beyond Britain on our terms; as such, we shall also work in critical engagement with those state actors that are prepared to engage in honest dialogue with us. We will proactively engage such state actors, with whom, we will identify in such dialogue; and maintain our right to be critical of those positions taken and/or advocated which we find detrimental to the interests of the majority of Afrikan people all over the World and therefore not conducive to the kind of victory for holistic reparatory justice that we are pursuing.

• We ask those who represent or are accountable to CARICOM states (e.g. national commissions and councils for Reparations) to make it clear that, as state actors or organising as state-appointed and accountable actors, they do not control or speak for civil society in and beyond their respective countries. It should be recognised that Afrikan Heritage Community civil society, via their own autonomous organisations, is freely pursuing and should be encouraged and where possible facilitated to carry out its own programmes, strategies and tactics in doing what it has to do independently locally, nationally and internationally, with due respect for human, peoples’ and Mother Earth rights. Further that they, as state actors, should seek to increase overstanding for, and in certain circumstances, even critical support for, what the non-state actors of civil society can do, mindful of the strengths and weaknesses on both sides, and with particular attention in all honesty to the realities of neocolonialism and therefore the limitations it imposes upon all those located within the state machinery, even with the best of their intentions to advance the goals of reparatory justice.

• We will recognise points of convergences and differences between state and non-state actors. Accordingly, we will be mindful of each other’s strengths, weaknesses and resources, as state and non-state actors as well as within and between various groups of non-state actors.

• Our independence is non-negotiable as non-state actors of the ISMAR, located at the grassroots of Afrikan Heritage Civil Society in the UK, and therefore, in thinking globally and acting locally in fidelity to the legacies bequeathed to us by some of the very best of the sons and daughters of Mother Afrika, committed in firm principledness to working glocally for holistic Reparatory Justice from the fundamental global Pan-Afrikan liberatory perspective of our “Wretched of the Earth”.

• There is a need to recognise the importance of such dialogue that we entered into and institutionalise such dialogue between state and non-state actors, as for example with the establishment of the kind of forum mentioned below.

• It is important to promote diligent reparations study and application of knowledge through praxis by way of action-learning conducive to cognitive justice for Afrikan people at home and abroad as integral to true reparatory justice.

• It is necessary to pay greater attention to how we harmonise strategy and tactics; and therefore, recognize that such a process of harmonisation should be in the form of knowing what state actors can do most effectively and equally what non-state actors can do most effectively. For example, non-state actors are best able to build people’s power from the ground upwards through initiatives like the SMWeCGEC in association with mass mobilisation and community unifying processes like the street column of the ISMAR which is being strengthened through organisation and mobilisations towards the annual Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparation March as spearheaded by the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC). It was therefore important to recognise, support and implement the SMWeCGEC campaigning operations such as advocating and defending human, peoples’ and Mother Earth rights to the point of working towards shutting down Maangamizi crime scenes on the continent and Diaspora of Afrika. It was proposed that this should be done also being cognisant that state actors will feel unable to openly advocate such operations.

• It was advocated that this issue of shutting down Maangamizi crime scenes is key in relation to stopping the ongoing pillage of Afrikan resources and despoliation of lands and destabilisation of Afrikan communities as can be seen to be the manifestations of the ongoing Genocide/Ecocide of the present-day phase of escalating neocolonial enslavement against Afrikan people throughout the World. This point was further elaborated on in the ‘Britain’s New Colonialism’ report by War on Want. If we can stop the Maangamizi, resources can be used for Afrikan people’s self-empowerment, self-emancipation and self-development in Afrika and throughout the Diaspora all over the World. The importance of abandoning dehumanising enslaver-mentality terminology like ‘slave’ and ‘slave trade’ was emphasized. It was proposed that there should be a greater usage of terminology such as Maangamizi and the awareness-raising popularisation of its contemporary manifestations as well as the imperative to stop this phase of the Maangamizi in order to effect genuine reparatory justice, hence the clarion call to ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’

• It was further asserted that unless we have an ‘or else’ dimension to our advocacy and relations when dealing with European powers, they will not respond seriously to our respective campaigning demands; there is ample global historical evidence that the forces of white supremacy never seriously respond to merely gentlemanly and diplomatic approaches because there is no threat factor in that and powerless groups do not subject themselves to less powerful groups. This would also impact on our ability to capture the imaginations of and attract the youth, who often see our people as powerless in relation to other peoples who are able to flex their power on the international stage. ‘Separation’ was advocated in terms of carrying this reparatory justice struggle to its logical conclusion, which entailed separating our Black/Afrikan selves from the stranglehold of white supremacy racism instead of appealing to the absent morality of the European Establishment and pursuing a course of reparations which is palatable to and on the terms of our historical and contemporary oppressors. The self-repair process of reclaiming, recreating and reinforcing our Afrikan Personality and ‘Black selves’, was key to realising the intergenerational goals of the re-establishment of the sovereignty of Afrikan people; given that the question of Afrikan reparatory justice, even for people of Afrikan origin in the Caribbean, is premised upon a global Afrikan solution to the Afrikan National Question at home and abroad.

• Common areas of possible joint work between state and non-state actors identified include education, mass Mobilisation and international community diplomacy. In this regard, it was proposed that a joint Memorandum of Understanding should be developed to include joint working protocols in furtherance of principled operational unity, including adherence to principles of reparaBerlntions ethics.

• Whilst our approach to International Community Diplomacy as non-state actors is “Grassroots People-to-Peoples’ Internationalist Solidarity and Ground-up Diplomacy Action Learning” through the ISMAR as a vital column of (PRIM); that of state and state-aligned actors is working through governmental organisations and other state institutions at local, national and international levels. A relevant action point in this connection is targeting, with our soft as well as hard power, the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in London and Windsor in April 2018.

• A Forum of State and Non-State Actors for Reparatory Justice (FOSANSARJ) will be established as a UK-wide formation, with local branches as deemed necessary, to keep the dialogue going towards concrete aims and objectives flowing from the above matters as well as other relevant issues to be determined in a ‘summit of solutions’. In light of the concerns about what diplomatic missions of the CARICOM member countries, in London, are failing to do with regard to desirable public engagement with its Reparatory Justice Framework, it is envisaged that such a forum (the FOSANSARJ) shall include duly mandated representatives of high commissions and other embassy officials from member-countries of the CARICOM, the African Union (AU) and other such bodies in the UK representing countries with significant Afrikan Heritage Communities.

• Practical steps can be taken to counter anti-reparations propaganda by reading Caribbean/UK/European newspapers to get a sense of the extent of such anti-reparations propaganda and that activists and other stakeholders should also counter such negative propaganda by writing rebuttals and giving alternative perspectives by way of a corrective to counter media disinformation. One such example that was highlighted was Professor Shepherd’s response to statements made by the UK Minister of state with responsibility for the Caribbean, the Commonwealth and the United Nations, Lord Tariq Ahmad, on his recent trip to the Caribbean, where he denounced the call for reparations.

• In guiding our reparations activism as activists, scholar-activists, civil society groups/organisations and members of communities of reparatory justice interest, we must be mindful of the need to ‘ground’ with the masses as advocated by the late Dr Walter Rodney who explained the relevance of the term “grounding” to the Black Power Movement and his manner of activism in Jamaica. This included the need for the Black/Afrikan intellectual to “attach himself/herself to the activity of the masses”, by facilitating public and open critical dialogue at the level of the society and engaging in free, popular education sessions beyond Establishment Academia with workers, the dispossessed and ostracized groups, where the classroom takes on any form as a site for organising cells of popular resistance in his ‘Groundings with my Brothers’: “I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen.  Because, that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the Brothers say…We have to ground together [Groundings, pg.78]” As well as adhere to the admonition best articulated by Amilcar Cabral that: “we should always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas [about reparatory justice], for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” In this regard, what should unite us is our focus and prioritisation of efforts to create a better world; and, in doing so, to be conscious of the varying and various strengths that we have; strengths to which we should work, whilst at the same time struggling together, individually, collectively and organisationally, against our own weaknesses.

“We must begin by asking ourselves: What weaknesses on our side made the holocaust possible? Weaknesses of organization? Weakness of solidarity? Weaknesses of identity? Weaknesses of mentality? Weaknesses of behaviour? If we do not correct such weaknesses, even if we got billions of billions of dollars in reparations money, even if we got back all our expropriated land, we would fritter it all away yet again, and recycle it all back into alien hands. We must therefore find out what deficiencies in our sense of identity what quirks in our mentality, what faults in our feelings solidarity made it possible for some of us to sell some of us into bondage; still make it possible for us to succumb to the divide and conquer tactics of our exploiters; make it possible for all too many of us to be afflicted with Negro necrophobia- our counterpart of the self-hating disease of the anti-Semitic Semite. Twenty years ago, when I was writing The West and the Rest of Us , I gave it a subtitle: ‘White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite.’ That was to serve notice that we cannot overlook our complicity, as Black Slavers and as the African Elite, in what happened, and is still happening to us. We must, therefore, change ourselves in order to end our criminal complicity in perpetuating our lamentable condition.”

‘Reparations and A New Global Order: A Comparative Overview’ by Professor Chinweizu 

 

 

Sis Esther Stanford-Xosei
Convenor of the Dialogue

23 November 2017

 

Meeting Venue: May Day Rooms @Fleet Street

 

Attendees

1. Abu Akil, Global Afrikan Congress, uk (GACuk)

2. Judy Richards, GACuk

3. Sorena Francis, GACuk

4. Jendayi Serwah, Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC)

5. Dulani Masibuwa Dumisai, (AEDRMC)

6. Chief Gege, Stop the Maangamizi’: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign (SMWeCGEC)

7. Kwame Adofo Sampong, Pan-Afrikan Fora International Support Coordinating Council (PAFISCC)

8. Leo Muhammad, Nation of Islam, London Study Group (NOI)

9. Althea Gordon Davidson, Pan-Afrikan Community Educational Service (PACES)

10. Daniel Solomon, Brixtonics@Brixton

11. Simeon Stanford, Global Afrikan People’s Parliament (GAPP)

12. Ras Shango Baku (Contributed in absentia), Nyabinghi National Council (NNC), IDPAD UK

13. Sugar Dredd, Rastafari Movement UK (RMUK)

14. Prophet Kweme Abubaka, Ethiopian Afrika Black International Congress (EABIC)

15. Cecil Gutzmore, Pan-Afrikan Society Community Forum, (PASCF)

16. Professor Gus John, Gus John Associates, Member of the African Union Technical Union Technical Committee of Experts on the 6th Region

17. Esther Stanford-Xosei, Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE)

18. Kofi Mawuli Klu, (PARCOE)

19. Rosemarie Davidson-Gotobed, Founding-Member of Sam Sharpe Project, Jamaica Baptist Union, Founder and Direct of Sam Sharpe Lectures

 

 

 

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AFTER THE 2017 REPARATIONS MARCH: WHAT NEXT?

Posted on August 5, 2017 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

 

no 9

 

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March, as the street column of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) is a vehicle for mass mobilisation and education as part of our self-repair and people’s power-building process. It is also a conduit as part of an on-going parliamentary and extra-parliamentary strategy, hence the delivery of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide‘ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) Petition charging the British State with the crimes of Genocide and Ecocide and demanding an end to their role in the continuing Maangamizi. The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC), in association with the SMWeCGEC, will continue the year long process of march planning, mobilisation and organisation alongside its ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations‘ programmes in preparedness for the establishment of All-Party Parliamentary (People’s) Commissions of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJs), also contained within the SMWeCGEC Petition.

You are encouraged to continue to mobilising and self-organising. The March is NOT the entire Reparations Movement so YOU need to develop complimentary reparatory justice strategies in your own groups, organisations and networks. If you would like to get more information about and/or be more involved in the ISMAR, please read on…

Given that the AEDRMC as facilitators of the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March organising process in partnership with the SMWeCGEC are in pursuit of comprehensive holistic land-based reparations. This means our reparations as Afrikans in the Diaspora is umbilically connected to the liberation of our Motherland Afrika, restoration of her sovereignty and the self-determination of Afrikan people worldwide including the establishment of forms of non-territorial forms of autonomy in the Diaspora. We are working for the achievement of the kind of reparations that we can ALL be truly proud of. This is necessary to ensure that all of our people, (not just a few) get ‘satisfaction’ out of the results (that also includes our predecessors, our contemporaries and our posterity, i.e. those yet to be born).

 

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For these reasons, our means of achieving and securing this kind of reparations is by revolution starting with enhancing and developing our independent people’s power, from the ground-up, so as to ‘effect’ this kind of reparations by our own power. There is no shortcut to the freedom true reparations shall deliver to us. We want the majority of our people in the Diaspora and on the Continent of Afrika involved, as this will ensure that we collectively and cooperatively harness our people’s power to effect and secure reparatory justice in our own self-determined best interests. This is why the following are are all steps in the revolutionary achievement of true holistic reparatory justice:

  • 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March;

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  • Implementation of the aims & objectives of the March and the SMWeCGEC, its sister campaign, which continue to be relevant and worked on all year-round;

 

SM AIMS MARCH

 

  • AEDRMC ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations‘ mobilisation programmes including local and regional March Outreach Teams;
  • Establishment of the APPCITARJs at the levels of the UK and European Parliaments;vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart
  • Establishment of the Ubuntukgotla (U-PITGJ);vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart
  • Development of a nuclei of Afrikan communities of reparatory justice interest into MAATUBUNTUJAMAAs which are communities of reparatory justice interest into interconnected Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD’s) all over the Diaspora. Such MAATUBUNTUJAMAAs are meant to be glocal Afrikan family regenerations of AHC-NSDs purposely meant for development of the Diasporan interconnections into the future MAATUBUNTUMAN;

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  • MAATUBUNTUMAN: Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika expressing Maatubuntu dignity integrated into a holistic global superpowerful polity of Maat which practices Ubuntu in relation to her people, all of humanity and the cosmos. 
  • The AHC-NSDs are focused on the holistic regeneration of Afrikan communities; mindful of the fact that, at present, such Afrikan communities exist within and beyond the UK as a multiplicity of different and even conflicting nation-state, ethnic, racial, class, gender, age and other socio-cultural configurations brought from all over the world;vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart
  • AHC-NSDs seeks to strengthen links with similar communities of resistance in contested and liberated zones (as explained by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah) on the Continent of Afrika. Doing this is also in line with the imperatives for us as Afrikan people coming out of the BREXIT crisis in Europe, necessitating a Pan-Afrikan reparatory justice response by way of a PAFREXIT.

 

PAFREXIT KOFI 2

 

By PAFREXIT we mean, the Pan-Afrikan exit out of the global system of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism! The more people in Europe find it difficult to endure the systemic malaise of their own European Union, as much as increasing numbers of people in North Abya Yala, (the so-called USA), are crying about the ‘American dream’ becoming more of an ‘American nightmare’, the more it becomes untenable for Afrikan people to work for their salvation as an integral part of the Euro-American Empire. So, PAFREXIT becomes necessary for Afrikan people getting out of the Babylon of Euro-America and stepping towards our MAATUBUNTUMAN: Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika expressing Maatubuntu dignity integrated into a holistic global superpowerful polity of Maat which practices Ubuntu in relation to her people, all of humanity and the cosmos.

Whilst everyone is free to choose their own path, those who want and are committed to achieving this holistic and transformative kind of reparatory justice for our people (and not just for us as individuals and parochial groups committed to the status quo), in the quickest possible time, are called upon to work their hardest in educating, organising and mobilising around these tasks of everyday resistance and transformative people’s power-building. This can be initiated as part of the various local and regional March Outreach Teams and Task Action Groups operating under the auspices of the AEDRMC and in support of the March in addition to the SMWeCGEC as an integral part of the ISMAR.

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March is not just a March, it is organised to advance reparations social movement-building of various constituencies within the Afrikan Heritage Communities. Priority is given to mobilising our own individual and collective ‘power to’ effect and secure reparatory justice through community organising, reparations social movement-building and institution-building.

 

strategies

Social movement-building is the long-term, coordinated effort of individuals and organised groups of people to intentionally spark and sustain a (reparations) social movement.It entails: “the creation of movement infrastructures required for sustained organising and mobilisation, including social relationships, organisational networks and capacity, affective solidarity, as well as movement-related identities, frames, strategies, skills, and leadership.” There is a difference between organisation/institution-building and social movement-building, see here for an explanation.

See here for what has been achieved thus far after 4 years of marching.

 

The ISMAR is not a spectator movement that we watch others build, sacrifice for, and be repressed whilst we sit back and wait for the benefits. It demands active participation by all those who have a stake in the outcome, not only to walk its talk, but also to become, be and live the self-repairs change we desire. There are many things that you can do to get more involved and strengthen the ISMAR, through mobilising and organising as part of the various constituencies within the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations community of interest. The following are some suggestions:

  1. Adopt the reparations ethics standpoint of recognising and learning to discern and distinguish between the various contributions that others have and are making to reparations-social movement-building, from many different ideological persuasions, and organising traditions. In the same way that we may critique the actions of others, we too must be prepared to have our own reparations actions, (be they individual, organisational/institutional or inter-movement), subjected to scrutiny in the best interests of improving the focus and effectiveness of our move-ment-building endeavours. This struggle for reparatory justice is an intergenerational one. We stand on the soldiers of many greats from among us past and present who have individually and collectively played their role in the line of March.vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipartflaws 2
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    These are some of the various representatives of the ISMAR past and present that have and are making a contribution to reparations social movement-building

    PARCOE OLDPARCOE NEW

 

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Ossie Davis‘ words below are relevant to us all in seeing ourselves as part of the continuity of our intergenerational long March to the true freedom that Reparatory Justice will give all of us.

“We gotta fight!, the March to freedom, and the March to equality was in process when I was born, I just got on board. I suspect when they let me off and put me in one of those quiet places forever, the March will still be going on, and I will be able to tell history that, at least, when I was alive, there was a place for me in the line of March. You should be happy to say as much. That’s the reward for being alive, to be part of the struggle.”

 

ossie dais

Ossie Davis, Activist, Actor, Author

 

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  1. Defend the integrity of the March which is a people’s reparations march. Many from within and outside our Afrikan Heritage Communities and even from within some Afrikan Reparations Communities of Reparations Interest and their allied organisations, networks and structures have made various attempts to liquidate the March, to counter it and deny its role in ISMAR-Building. Others have sought, in various ways and means, to diminish the significance of its contribution to raising the visibility and profile of the UK contingent of the ISMAR, which those ordinary members of the Afrikan public who contribute to organising and providing community service in support of the March, have been labouring to achieve.

 

mAANGAMIZI MARIMAANGAMIZI -mine-shootings-reaction-horizontal-large-gallery

Protesters at Marikana in Azania (South Afrika)

 

3. Amplify the voices and defend the actions of those members and groups within specific Afrikan Heritage Communities and our various and diverse communities of reparatory justice interest who are engaged in civil disobedience and taking forms of direct action to shut down ‘Maangamizi Crime Scenes’ in Afrika and other locations in the Afrikan Diaspora. It is also important to support Afrikan liberation movements in Afrika and wherever they are found in the Diaspora, including those with operation in the UK.

4. Engage in acts of everyday resistance to the Maangamizi as it is affecting you or other Afrikan Heritage Community members. The specific manifestations that are highlighted in the SMWeCGEC Petition include:

  • The dismemberment of Afrikan People’s sovereign peoplehood, in familyhood with our kith and kin in other Afrikan heritage communities throughout the continent and Diaspora of Afrika;
  • enduring legacy of epistemic, physical, structural and racial violence, including reproductive and sexual violence against women and children and the totality of all that we see as Maangamizi violence;
  • denial of Black and Afrikan ‘Mother Earth’ (Nana Asase Yaa), human and peoples’ rights to national self-determination as an oppressed People;
  • expanding health/medical, prison, psychiatric, economic, development, academic and military industrial complexes, which are making political prisoners of increasing numbers of Afrikan people in their diverse ways of engaging in resistance to the Maangamizi;
  • brutality by police and security agents including deaths in custody;
  • unemployment and mal-employment;
  • mentacide of Afrikan heritage youth and adults through the state mis-education system;
  • racist immigration patrols and policies;
  • extractive industries, abuse of our natural resources, free trade agreements and privatisation schemes, including private finance initiatives (PFI’s), public-private partnerships (PPP’s), and Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA’s) of the European Union (EU) being forced on Afrikan, Caribbean & Pacific countries;
  • proliferation of HIV/Aids, ebola and other bioweapons of mass destruction
  • denial of genomic, food and seed sovereignty by enforcing GMO products resulting in nutricide;
  • crimes against humanity inherent in the wars of aggression and proxy wars committed against Afrikan and other Majority World Peoples.

 

Everyday resistance in Azania

southafricanstudentprotests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/south-africa-pretoria-high-school-for-girls-afros

5. Keep in touch with the AEDRMC and listen out for announcements about the Public Evaluation Meeting on Sunday 3rd September 2017 (venue to be confirmed), when we would like to here from you your feed-forward (reflections on and community evaluation of) the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March. We would also like to hear more about the work you are doing towards effecting and securing reparatory justice, remember it is not either or, but both and much more!

 

Contribute to March bloc-building

6. Between the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches, contribute to building and sustaining the organisation of the following blocs:

Mwakalenkonso – Revered Ancestors
Pamoja – Community
Ujamaa – Global Afrikan Family
Fiankra – Repatriation
Imani – Interfaith
Sankofasuafo – Students
Ujima – Trade Unionists
Kuumba – Artists
Ubuntu – Non-Afrikan Allies.

These blocs will continue to operate, mobilise and organise throughout the year as part of reparations social movement-building, at the core of which is the intergenerational Afrikan Liberation Movement. If this bloc-building work is sustained between the Marches, the annual Reparations March then becomes the culmination point of our year round reparations campaigning and other forms of activism, in addition to being a vehicle for publicly showcasing the strength of our organising, networks and capacity-building to advance the ISMAR.

As part of the bloc-building, please remember that the costs of emancipating ourselves from the modern-day Maangamizi are not free. Social-movement building needs resourcing, and the ISMAR is a movement that is self-funded. Fundraising to build and sustain this street colum of the ISMAR must also go on all year round. See below for how you can support the work towards facilitating the March and its related campaigning aspects by donating to the ASR fund (Afrikan Self-Repairs) of the AEDRMC: https://www.gofundme.com/ukmarch

 

SM March Committee Bank Details

 

Mwakalenkonso (Revered Ancestors) Bloc

MARCH ANCESTORS BLOC

Participate in the Mwakalenkonso (Revered Ancestors) Bloc by coming to the March appropriately dressed as or otherwise symbolically representing a heroic ancestor from your own family line or a community Ancestor who has in some way been involved in resistance to the Maangamizi or advocating some form of reparatory justice. We must always remember that our people’s claims and right to reparations are based on the principle of intergenerational justice and therefore have transgenerational, transnational and intercultural dimensions. By appearing on the March visually representing or otherwise imaging revered Ancestors, one will be doing so in remembrance, honour and recognition of the interconnectedness of our Ancestor’s foundational struggles to resist the Maangamizi with our own.

This will not detract from the serious nature of the protest that we will be undertaking, however does introduce a more creative element to protest actions that are typical of marches and other forms of street action. Claims to reparations have to move beyond merely calling on the name of our Ancestors as justification for the genesis of our entitlements to redress today to truly recognising the personhood, worldviews and visions of reparatory justice of the Afrikans that were enslaved in various parts of the world. In addition, we have a duty to past generations and future generations to ensure that our reparatory justice objectives, programmes and actions bring about the holistic and transformatory redress; empowerment, repair and restoration of our people’s sovereignty. Being visually reminded of our Ancestors activism and struggles to emancipate us compels us to uphold the reparations ethics and standards of the past generations of our clan, family, or community freedom-fighters.

 

Imani – Interfaith Bloc

ED POPSAR 6

          Bishop Joe Aldred @ 2016 Reparations March 

You can organise a church service for ‘Reparations Sunday’ on the second Sunday, or the Sunday closest to 12th October, the European Union (EU) Day for Reparations Related to Colonisation. If you are part of another faith community then you can organise a similar activity on your preferred day of worship closest to 12th October. This action is particularly relevant for people who are interested in building the Imani-Interfaith Bloc of the March.

Those from faith communities who attend churches, mosques, temples and other religious/spiritual organisations are also encouraged to come on the March with placards displaying messages relevant to their liberation theology work, in their respective places of worship and fellowship, which are relevant to reparatory justice.

 

Kuumba -Artists Bloc

You can add your creative talent to producing art forms which popularise and promote the messages of the ISMAR.

An example is this track by Akala entitled Maangamizi

 

 

 

 

For further info about the blocs and how you can get involved contact the AEDRMC           Tel: 07922035446/ 07597592889
Email: getinvolved@reparationsmarch.org                    FB page: ReparationsMarchUK

 

7. Continue to do as much as possible to educate yourself and your families about reparations, the history of the Movement, the diversity of the Movement, the goals, tactics and strategies of the Movement, even the internal contradictions of the Movement. One of the best ways apart from increasing your theoretical knowledge base is to engage in praxis (a cycle of theory, action and reflection that helps us analyze our efforts in order to improve our ideas) and action-learning (learning through doing). Theory without action and testing out that which we have theoretically learned produces armchair critics and/or revolutionaries. However, action without reflection produces ineffective or counter-productive activism. That’s why we advocate praxis. To assist in this process, we encourage you to look at some of the suggestions made under the ‘Take Action’ tab on the SMWeCGEC website.

This is a short article about the importance of learning within the ISMAR: https://reparationsscholaractivist.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/learning-and-education-for-a-post-african-reparations-world/.

 

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8. If you are part of an organisation, or work add a specific reparations objective to your organisation’s aims and work on its practical realisation.

9. Engage in discussions with the support the SMWeCGEC Team on how best to support the SMWeCGEC in the realisation of its campaign goals which will take year-round activism. See if there are any of these actions that you are willing to take.

10. Continue to sign, discuss and disseminate the SMWeCGEC Petition which calls for the establishment of a UK All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ). This petition is being used as a political tool and tactic to accompany reparations conscientisation, mobilisation and organisation.

 

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Begin preparing yourself for the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice

11. Prepare yourself for the APPCITARJs by beginning to do family and community research on how we and our immediate families each have suffered, continue to suffer and have also challenged the various crimes of the Maangamizi. In this regard, see the aims of the SMWeCGEC:

Afrikans in the UK and Europe organising towards establishing commissions of inquiry for truth and reparatory justice and local, national and international people’s tribunals to hold the governments of Britain, and other European countries to account. If you are able to gather such evidence you can assist us  to arrive at a comprehensive assessment and a full picture of what our journeys and experiences of the Maangamizi have been across the Diaspora, as well as on the Continent of Afrika. Each person and representative of families and their communities have to become our own advocates and experts on your own situation and then we can bring all these experiences together as part of us becoming ‘reparations enforcers’ who are building the power and capacity to hold to account all those who are continuing to profit from the ill-gotten gains of the Maangamizi and are also complicit in its perpetuation today.

See the video below from the documentary ‘Freedom Summer’ for some AAPCITARJ lessons from our Shero Fannie Lou Hamer.

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanExperience/videos/10154189386704122

Hamer’s testimony had such a huge impact upon the government and public in and outside the USA, and was so powerful, that President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. This is a recording of the full testimony and also a transcript of that testimony. Her testimony provides an example of what we envisage could be the impact similar ISMAR-coordinated grassroots testimonies by our Afrikan Survivors, Resistors and Challengers of the Maangamizi, from all over the World to the APPCITARJs in the UK Parliament of Westminster and the European Parliament. We surmise that the ‘holding to account’ referred to above can best be done in a collective way by supporting the establishment of the Ubuntukgotla, court of peoples humanity interconnectedness, otherwise known as the Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (U-PITGJ), which we encourage you to support the development of. This can be done through hosting sittings of the tribunal, locally, nationally and internationally. If you would like to know more about the APPCITARJ/U-PITGJ contact PARCOE on info@parcoe.com or 07751143043.

As part of the rationale for this approach, it is important to have a better sense of the historical antecedents of the SMWeCGEC in the UK, see these historic recordings from 2003 of Esther Stanford-Xosei speaking about the 2003 Black Quest for Justice Campaign (BQJC) legal & extra-legal strategy for reparations; the need for a UK commission of inquiry to address the legacies of the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement); and the commencement of the UK version of the ‘We Charge Genocide petition and campaign’ under the auspices of then then Black United Front-Parliament (BUF-P). The second set of videos where Stanford-Xosei is interviewed, precedes in order and time the first video where Stanford-Xosei is speaking to camera.

 

 

Set up a Maatzoedzaduara

12. Set up a MAATZOEZADUARAs (i.e. Maat action-learning circles or ‘Maat Training Practice Rings’) which is a reparatory justice circle of Maat practitioners who learn to be the self-repairs change at the levels of their person, home, family, neighbourhood, workplace, school, places of leisure and worship, etc. These Maat Training Practice Rings encompass a number of families and lineages, across geographical boundaries and generations. For example, a home or family based Maat Training Practice Ring will entail getting a selected number of people in your family interested in unravelling family histories and using this knowledge to recognise and gather evidence of the harm that has been done to you as a family. the Practice Rings will also explore how such harms have been passed down throughout the generations, resulting in increasing levels of disrepair. We are looking for case studies of some of these family stories documenting family member’s lived experiences of the Maangamizi and resistance to it. This unravelling of these stories is part of the process of repairing the harm and continuing damage being done within our own families.maat-balance

                                                             ©www.zengarner.com

 

13. Creatively utilise SMWeCGEC Petition Soulsquestathons (SMWeCGE-PS), which is literally a collection of souls, for spark-rippling MAATZOEZADUARAs. The aim is to link chains of MAATZOEZADUARAs together encompassing a number of families, across geographical boundaries and generations, all over the place, as Grassroots Afrikan Reparatory Justice Action Learning Praxis Exercising Rings (GARJALPERs) of the U-PITGJ. This means that they will share their stories and practice not only testifying with these stories but also putting their cases through trial rehearsals. The key point about the Soulsquestathons is that the various participants connect to, compare and contrast their self-repairs reparatory justice work as families within these MAATZOEZADUARAs. Basically, these are intergenerational connections, not only of family members of the present, but also the past. It therefore becomes necessary for us to keep records about and bring the lives and work of our revered Ancestors into our everyday lives of the present.

It is important to see ourselves as belonging to an intergenerational continuum of Survivors, Resistors and Challengers of the Maangamizi that unless it (the Maangamizi) is stopped, will stretch indefinitely into the future. We are reminded that our society today is not merely an association of contemporaries, it extends forward and backwards in time and encompasses our family members and people of the past who sought to provide us with a just inheritance, as well as those entities who unjustly conspired to deny them their rights to pass on the fruits of their labour and sacrifices, thereby denying future generations their rightful inheritance. As Afrikan liberation leader Amilcar Cabral reminded us, “As Afrikans we firmly believe that the dead continue to walk beside us. We are a society of both the living and the dead.” Our society also consists of people of the future who will inherit what we have achieved, good and bad as well as what we have failed to redress and repair. In our justice-seeking endeavours we remain duty-bound to our revered Ancestors on whose behalf we act today, as the temporary caretakers of lineages and prosperity.

 

The work we can do within our own families, the SMWeCGE-PS sparkrippling and proliferation of MAATZOEZADUARAs, are the first strides of ‘Global Afrikan Reparations How Steps of Positive Action’ (GARHSOPA), which can be taken by Afrikans and all people of Afrikan heritage everywhere. This speaks to positive action steps as part of a process or methodology for moving beyond making a demand for holistic reparations to seeking to enforce such demands. This is done by us building the power and collective capacity to effect and secure reparatory justice, starting with personal and interpersonal change collectivized until it contributes to social change. Positive action therefore refers to the adoption of all legitimate democratic means by which we can cripple the pro-White supremacy forces of European imperialism and similar powers, from within and outside our communities, obstructing the free exercise of our right to effect and secure reparatory justice, by any means necessary, for ourselves.

The methods of positive action include:

(1) legitimate political agitation;
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(2) media and educational campaigns; and

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(3) the democratic exercise of our rights to protest, to organise agitational rehearsals of our people’s reparatory justice case through the MAATZOEZADUARAs as part of the process of establishing the U-PITGJ and pressurising the establishment at UK and European levels, resorting to various actions of non-cooperation and civil disobedience, such as the application of strikes, boycotts, occupations, declarations of expropriation of the expropriated etc. based on the principle of non-violence and organising constitutionally towards participatory democratic ‘upstandings’.

There must be clearer overstanding of the signing of the SMWeCGE Petition in a “Soulsquestathon” as meaningful only when a signatory proceeds not only to promote the diligent comprehensive study of its contents to encourage participatory mass education, but also the use of the contents for the glocal practical training and rehearsal of court proceedings in his/her home, workplace, spaces of worship, leisure sites, etc., of our Global Afrikan Family Case for Holistic Reparatory Justice, as it ought to be heard by the future U-PITGJ.

Likewise, the MAATZOEZADUARAs should also be utilised to very well prepare, by way of rehearsals and other training and educational practices, e.g. ‘SoulTruth Barings’, (where we bear our soul truthfully), and other kinds of presentations to parliamentary commissions of inquiry at local, national and international levels by Afrikan Heritage Community groups and individuals, as well as interested others from diverse communities, who desire the truthful public telling of their own germane personal, family and community stories relating to the Maangamizi. The creative popular democratic utilisation of the SMWeCGE-PS, in propelling the mass educational wide-spreading of the MAATZOEZADUARAs, ought therefore to be the kickstarting point for conscientisational agitation in stepping forward towards various self-empowering measures of self-determination to effect and secure holistic reparatory justice, by our own sovereign Afrikan people’s power throughout the continent and Diaspora of Afrika.

 

ANCESTORS EGBE

©Egbe Egun-Ancestral Society

 

The MAATZOEZADUARAs are extremely important in ensuring that we proceed in our pursuit of reparations mindful of the fact that the claims and case of Afrikan reparations are based on the principle of intergenerational justice and therefore have transgenerational, transnational and intercultural dimensions. The point about any struggle including the struggle for reparations is that it comes with its own heritage, knowledge foundations and social justice traditions. So those of us in this generation who seek to be integrated into the ISMAR should not pretend as though we are coming with new ideas which have not been forged at the heart of our Afrikan and Diaspora communities of resistance seeking to reclaim our true sovereignty, wealth, livelihoods and custodianship of and the ‘right to belong’ to our Motherland and benefit from the resources generated from such land.

As the descendants and heirs of Afrikans, some of whom were martyrs, that were enslaved in previous phases of the Maangamizi, we are mindful of our ancestral responsibility to ensure that when we speak in their names we do not allow our enslaver’s visions of justice to prevail in advocating what are considered to be adequate reparatory justice. The discourse on reparations therefore has to move beyond merely calling on the name of our ancestors as justification for the genesis of our entitlements to redress today, to truly recognising the personhood, worldviews and visions of justice of our Afrikan predecessors that were kidnapped, trafficked and enslaved in Abya Yala (the so-called Americas, including the Caribbean).

We have to remember that they were sentient and rational human beings who lived under conditions in which that humanity as well as their Afrikan personalities, legal and political heritages were denied. It is no longer tenable to assume that the practice of law was alien to Afrikan peoples prior to chattel enslavement and colonisation and they operated on the basis of cultural, legal and political logics of their own. To give primacy to their enslaved status and legal and justice frameworks of their enslavers and their descendants continues their deracination, invisibilisation and dehumanisation.

According to Jurisconsult, Kofi Mawuli Klu, the use of law is one of the most important instruments of our Afrikan struggle for reparations. For Klu, the need to locate our claim to restitution for the damages caused by gross violations of Afrikan sovereignty raise for us the essential questions of whose framework, whose law and whose justice? Such an approach of social justice/community/movement lawyering includes recognising how Afrikans have and continue to exercise legal agency, define law, assert alternative conceptualisations of law and legality in addition to how resistance to unjust laws contributes to the everyday legal meaning-making and justice restoring practices that we engage in. Albeit that there are different legal models as to how to use law to create the desired reparations outcomes that we seek to achieve, the idea that reparations will ultimately be something that will be ‘won’ in a European court of law by ‘hot shot’ lawyers needs to be re-evaluated in the face of what reparations social movement history reveals.

 

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“Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics
and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great
poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new
society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way.”

Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedoms Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002, p.23

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In the view of the SMWeCGEC, and its related organisational pillars, justice for Afrikan people, our ancestors and the required legal transformation to ensure it can only really happen with the political education and mobilisation of large numbers of people to challenge the systemic and structural legacies of Afrikan enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Such collective action must ultimately disrupt the Eurocentric norm of lawyers being seen as saviours or gatekeepers and seek to exceed the limits of existing law by forcing progressive change through direct action. This requires utilising legal advocacy to build and mobilise the power and leadership of grassroots communities. It does not come from the top-from legal, political or academic elites assuming that it is their ‘brain power’ that will result in a negotiated settlement or simply receiving pay-outs through legislation or courts. In fact, there are multiple tactics that social justice lawyers genuinely working to advance the cause of reparations can engage in to support the goals of the ISMAR.

Accordingly, we take the view that by charting and combining an Afrikan self-determined path of ‘legal’ recourse and struggle for reparations and community organising, it is possible to effect and secure reparations holistically defined as part of a broader social change strategy generally referred to as ‘social justice’ ‘community lawyering’ or ‘movement lawyering’. Community lawyering encourages lawyers to critically and creatively examine non-traditional forms of advocacy such as community organising and other grassroots actions as a way of addressing the unmet legal and non-legal needs of clients and stakeholders of strategic litigation. This entails engaging lawyers and other law and justice practitioners who are willing to de-emphasise litigation as the primary tool for advancing reparations goals and outcomes at the systemic, group and systemic level.

The role of a “community lawyer” also includes working in partnership with community ‘clients’ and utilising multiple forms of advocacy, including community organising, litigation, media events, community education workshops and public demonstrations to address their individual, group as well as systemic outcomes. Movement lawyering is a type of community lawyering whereby lawyers work in partnership with social movement organisations trying to bring about reparatory justice social change. Such lawyers work with organisations within a Movement to build their ‘agency‘, rights awareness and take back their power in the process of building a sustainable reparations movement.

It follows that in building our family cases as part of our Global Afrikan Case for Reparatory Justice, we have a responsibility to future generations to ensure that the decisions we make today do not negatively impact the interests or well being of the unborn and each generation to come. All of these factors should be prime considerations in establishing MAATZOEZADUARAs.

If you would like support or further guidance on setting up a MAATZOEZADUARA or initiate any other action, you think appropriate at your own individual or group effort towards reparatory justice positive action, then you can seek assistance from the OSORJALs (Open Surgeries of Reparatory Justice Action Learning) of PARCOE https://www.facebook.com/parcoeinfo, email info@parcoe.com or call: 07751143043.

 

ANCESTORS CABRAL (2)

 

Help us gather evidence of the Maangamizi

14. Help us gather evidence of and document the Maangamizi (hellacaust of chattel, colonial, and neocolonial forms of enslavement) as well as resistance to it, as it is genocidally and ecocidally impacting on our various Afrikan heritage communities today. In this regard, please share such knowledge and experiences with the SMWeCGE Campaign. Gathering such data is essential because we are building a dossier of Maangamizi crimes and resistance them in the modern era. We aim to produce a version of the original 1951 We Charge Genocide Petition edited by Afrikan American communist lawyer William L. Patterson which documents the various manifestations of genocide against Afrikan Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. This document will provide undeniable evidence of the Global Afrikan Family Case for Holistic Reparatory Justice citing the various contemporary manifestations of genocide and the ecocide that we and our lands and environment are being subjected too.

 

WE CHARGE GENOCIDE

 

Lobby MPs and other elected public officials

15. Do what you can to implement relevant aspects of the ‘SMWeCGE Guidance For Proposals on Parliamentary Actions‘ including the Stop the Maangamizi Postcard Campaign which targets MPs for action towards establishing the APPCITARJ.

16. Vote in accordance with pro-reparations choices of candidates for elected public offices, lobby elected public officials to support reparations and the establishment of the UK APPCITARJ as contained in the SMWeCGEC Petition. For support in taking this kind of action visit https://globalafrikanpeoplesparliament.org/policy-positions/.

 

Prepare yourself for participating in the 2018 March

17. Begin speaking with family members, friends or colleagues about getting involved with the March & SMWeCGEC organising processes. You can start thinking and preparing for getting a group of you to attend the 2018 1st August Emancipation Day Reparations March from Windrush Square (Brixton, London) to the Houses of Parliament. Simultaneous marches take place in Afrika, the Caribbean and so-called North America.

Here are a few examples of how you can prepare yourself, families, friends, groups, organisations and communities for effectively participating in the March: prepare yourself to come with placards which visually portray and promote:

  • images of Afrikan heroes, sheroes, Maangamizi Resistors and Martyrs that have made a contribution to Afrikan people’s struggles for freedom from the Maangamizi, both in the past and in the present;
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  • slogans and quotations which speak to the various campaigns and struggles Afrikan people worldwide have been waging for reparatory justice, both in the past and in the present;

 

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  • the reparatory justice programmes and initiatives you, your family, organisation or campaigning group are involved in. Of particular reparatory justice interest is work that is being planned and done with reference to Afrikan Community Self-Repairs needs and aspirations such as work in education, health, employment, parenting and social care, (particularly for children, the elderly and the differently-abled), sports, recreation, social enterprise and cooperative economic development.

 

Afrikan Community Self-Repairs are the self-determined efforts that need to be made in building our own power, in such a way, that Afrikan heritage communities are able to identify and enhance ongoing work towards stopping the contemporary manifestations of the Maangamizi, which are putting the individuals, families and other social groups that make up our communities into a state of disrepair; as well as reasoning and consciously carrying out the alternative solutions for glocally rebuilding our power base as communities, in such a way that that they are eventually transformed, in accordance with the principles and programmatic demands of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice.

So, for example:

  • You may be running a care home for children, differently-abled or elderly people, if so, you could bring along a placard that not only profiles your bespoke service, but also demands appropriate resources for the Afrikan culturally competent care of those you are serving;

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  • Students are encouraged to come on the March with placards addressing the Afriphobic and anti-Black racism they suffer in their institutions and the activities they are carrying out to resist their unjust situation and effect institutional change.

 

For further info about the March and how you can get involved contact the AEDRMC         Tel: 07922035446/ 07597592889
Email: getinvolved@reparationsmarch.org                    FB page: ReparationsMarchUK

18. Organise local, regional and international Reparations March Outreach Teams between the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches to continue the street education and mobilisation work for reparatory justice for more info about how to go about this and ‘Education is Preparation for Reparations’ teach-ins and workshops please contact: education@reparationsmarch.org or call 07922035446/ 07597592889 .

 

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CALUM 23 (2)
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HEREO JS OJF
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19. Start rehearsing arguments in support of reparatory justice for the People’s Open Parliamentary Session on Afrikan Reparations (POPSAR), which was first introduced as a feature for the 2016 March. The POPSAR is a mass concientisational forum for public debate and discourse on Afrikan Reparations as a matter of critical social importance. The purpose of the POPSAR is to engage audiences in action-learning on participatory democratic parliamentary debate on critical issues such as Afrikan Reparatory Justice. Each year a different reparations related motion will be debated and people are encouraged to engage in practical rehearsals in preparation for the annual POPSAR on 1st August which takes place as part of the programme for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March.

 

Get involved with the grassroots acadaemia column of the ISMAR

20. Join the ARTCoP which promotes the development of grassroots scholar activists on reparations and harnesses the co-production of activist and other forms of knowledge between advocates, activists and academics on reparations. To contact ARTCoP email: artcop.edu@gmail.com.

21. Among the opportunities that the ARTCoP can open for interested participants in its activities, is training to become a volunteer researcher or advocate for the APPCITARJ and/or the U-PITGJ. This will be particularly beneficial to participants of the Sankofasuafo – Students Bloc of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March who would like to keep themselves engaged with grassroots scholar-activist work and activities relevant to their normal academic studies in between the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches.

22. For more info about the reparations activist research, (PhD in history at the University of Chichester), that is being undertaken on the history of the ISMAR in the UK and other matter relevant to reparations learning, advocacy and scholarship please visit: https://reparationsscholaractivist.wordpress.com/about/.

 

Help to internationalise the cause of reparatory justice!

23. Contribute to the development of the Europe-wide NGO Consultative Council For Afrikan Reparations, (ENGOCCAR)  and its work programmes including signing its various European language versions of the SMWeCGEC Petition in Europe addressed to the European Parliament. For further info contact engoccar@gmail.com or UK representative organisation, PARCOE or email info@parcoe.com.

24. For those from other communities (non-Afrikan) who wish to show solidarity with the cause of Afrikan reparations, you can

  • Help build the Allies Bloc and its programmes for the year, to find out more email Fe Haslam or Althea Gordon-Davidson on gjfgong@yahoo.comvintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart
  • Get involved with the relevant programmes and activities of the Global Justice Forum, (GJF), you can email: gjfgong@yahoo.com and the Intercommunity Forum for Lifelong Learning carat.cafa @gmail.com.

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  • Mobilise and self-organise your own reparations struggles as part of the Peoples Reparations International Movement (PRIM), i.e. the reparations movement that consists of all other people’s reparations causes and find common cause with those of us in the ISMAR. This can be done by bringing along your allied progressive forces into exploring the building of neighbourhood renewal Communities of anti-racist resistance that share joint combativeness against Afriphobia and all other forms of racial discrimination as well as commonalities of Reparatory Justice interests strongly enough to forge mutually self-repairing bonds of decolonizational restitution under the banner of the PRIM.

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“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
-Lilla Watson-

 

SM GHILLAR
SM FIJI (2)

First Nation 

Brother from Australia, Ghillar Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Nations and Peoples in Australia and Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic

Sister from Fiji, Oni Kirwin, Fiji Native Government in Exile

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If you are from other Black Majority World communities, that do not necessarily define as Afrikan but would like to work in solidarity with the March as non-Afrikan allies, please connect with PECOBEAL by emailing pecobeal.ac.net@gmail.com

 

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“It will be gross self-delusive wishful thinking to believe that those wielding the reins of White racist supremacy are going to pay and serious heed to the Afrikan demand for Reparations unless their hold on the machinery of global power is effectively challenged by the well-organised, upsurgent and self-empowering masses of Afrikan people and their allied progressive forces throughout the world.”

Kofi Mawuli Klu ‘Charting an Afrikan Self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’, a draft paper for presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the African Reparations Movement, UK, 1993.

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In Livicated Service

Esther Stanford-Xosei

Coordinator-General of the International Steering Committee of the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign (SMWeCGEC)
Esther Stanford-Xosei is also the Official Spokesperson for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC)

 

 

 

SM BANNER HEADWARP

©#TobyLaurentBelson

Produced in 2016 as part of the Kuumba- Artists Bloc of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March

Posted in AEDRMC, ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION OF INQUIRY (APPCITARJ), STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, THE 2016 1ST AUGUST AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, UBUNTUKGOTLA/PITGJ | Tagged Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination, Afrikan Liberation, AHC-NSD, APPCITARJ, BREXIT, Commission of Inquiry, International Social Movment for Afrikan Reparations, Land based reparations, MAATUBUNTUMAN, MAATUBUNTUMANDLA, PAFREXIT, Pan-Afrikan Revolution, People Power, Peoples Tribunal, REPARATIONS, Reparatory Justice, Stop the Maangamizi, U-PITGJ | Leave a comment

AFTER THE REPARATIONS MARCH: WHAT NEXT?

Posted on August 6, 2016 by STOP THE MAANGAMIZI

 

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The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March, as the street column of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) is a vehicle for mass mobilisation and education as part of our self-repair and people’s power-building process. It is also a conduit as part of an on-going parliamentary and extra-parliamentary strategy, hence the delivery of the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide‘ (SMWeCGE) Petition charging the British State with the crimes of Genocide and Ecocide and demanding an end to their role in the continuing Maangamizi. The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC), in association with the SMWeCGE Campaign, will continue the year long process of march planning, mobilisation and organisation alongside its ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations‘ programmes in preparedness for the establishment of All-Party Parliamentary (People’s) Commissions of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJs), also contained within the SMWeCGE Petition.

You are encouraged to continue to mobilising and self-organising. The March is NOT the entire Reparations Movement so YOU need to develop complimentary reparatory justice strategies in your own groups, organisations and networks. If you would like to get more information about and/or be more involved in the ISMAR, please read on…

Given that the AEDRMC as facilitators of the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March organising process want and are in pursuit of comprehensive holistic land-based reparations. This means our reparations as Afrikans in the Diaspora is umbilically connected to the liberation of our Motherland Afrika, restoration of her sovereignty and the self-determination of Afrikan people worldwide including the establishment of forms of non-territorial forms of autonomy in the Diaspora. We are working for the achievement of the kind of reparations that we can ALL be truly proud of. This is necessary to ensure that all of our people, (not just a few) get ‘satisfaction’ out of the results (that also includes our predecessors, our contemporaries and our posterity, i.e. those yet to be born).

 

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For these reasons, our means of achieving and securing this kind of reparations is by revolution starting with enhancing and developing our independent people’s power, from the ground-up, so as to ‘effect’ this kind of reparations by our own power. There is no shortcut to the freedom true reparations shall deliver to us. We want the majority of our people in the Diaspora and on the Continent of Afrika involved, as this will ensure that we collectively and cooperatively harness our people’s power to effect and secure reparatory justice in our own self-determined best interests. This is why the following are are all steps in the revolutionary achievement of true holistic reparatory justice:

  • 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March;
  • Implementation of the aims & objectives of the March and its sister Campaign ‘Stop the Maangamizi‘, which continue to be relevant all year-round;

 

SM MARCH AIMS 2017

 

  • AEDRMC ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations‘ Mobilisation Programmes including Grassroots Reparations Education and Outreach Teams (GREOTs);
  • SMWCGE  and the campaign around it, including the APPCITARJs at the levels of the UK and European Parliaments;
  • Ubuntukgotla Peoples International Tribunal For Global Justice (U-PITGJ);
  • Development of a nuclei of Afrikan communities of reparatory justice interest into interconnected Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD’s) all over the Diaspora. The AHC-NSD is focused on the holistic regeneration of Afrikan communities; mindful of the fact that, at present, such Afrikan communities exist within and beyond the UK as a multiplicity of different and even conflicting nation-state, ethnic, racial, class, gender, age and other socio-cultural configurations brought from all over the world. The AHC-NSD seeks to strengthen links with similar communities of resistance in contested and liberated zones (as explained by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah) on the Continent of Afrika. Doing this is also in line with the imperatives for us as Afrikan people coming out of the BREXIT crisis in Europe, necessitating a Pan-Afrikan reparatory justice response by way of a PAFREXIT.

 

PAFREXIT KOFI 2

 

By PAFREXIT we mean, the Pan-Afrikan exit out of the global system of Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism! The more people in Europe find it difficult to endure the systemic malaise of their own European Union, as much as increasing numbers of people in North Abya Yala, (the so-called USA), are crying about the ‘American dream’ becoming more of an ‘American nightmare’, the more it becomes untenable for Afrikan people to work for their salvation as an integral part of the Euro-American Empire.So, PAFREXIT becomes necessary for Afrikan people getting out of the Babylon of Euro-America and stepping towards our Maatubuntuman: Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika expressing Maatubuntu dignity integrated into a holistic global superpowerful polity of Maat which practices Ubuntu in relation to her people, all of humanity and the cosmos.

Whilst everyone is free to choose their own path, those who want and are committed to achieving this holistic and transformative kind of reparatory justicefor our people (and not just for us as individuals and parochial groups committed to the status quo), in the quickest possible time, are called upon to work their hardest in educating, organising and mobilising around these tasks of everyday resistance and transformative people’s power-building. This can be initiated as part of the various Street Outreach Teams and Task Action Groups operating under the auspices of the AEDRMC and in support of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March in addition to the SMWeCGE Campaign as an integral part of the ISMAR.

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March is not just a March, it is organised to help advance reparations social movement-building of various constituencies within the Afrikan Heritage Communities. Priority is given to mobilising our own individual and collective ‘power to’ effect and secure reparatoty justice through community organising, reparations social movement-building and institution-building. Social movement-building is the long-term, coordinated effort of individuals and organised groups of people to intentionally spark and sustain a (reparations) social movement.It entails: “the creation of movement infrastructures required for sustained organising and mobilisation, including social relationships, organisational networks and capacity, affective solidarity, as well as movement-related identities, frames, strategies, skills, and leadership.”

See what has been achieved thus far: https://stopthemaangamizi.com/2016/07/13/approaching-3rd-year-of-marching-what-has-been-achieved/

The International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations is not a spectator movement that we watch others build, sacrifice for, and be repressed whilst we sit back and wait for the benefits. It demands active participation by all those who have a stake in the outcome, not only to walk its talk, but also to become, be and live the self-repairs change we desire. There are many things that you can do to get more involved and strengthen the ISMAR, through mobilising and organising as part of the various constituencies within  the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations community of interest. The following are some suggestions:

1.Keep in touch with the AEDRMC and listen out for announcements about the Public Meeting in September 2016 (date to be confirmed), when we would like to here from you your feed-forward (reflections on and community evaluation of) the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March. We would also like to hear more about the work you are doing towards effecting and securing reparatory justice, remember it is not either or, but both and much more!

2. Continue to do as much as possible to educate yourself and your families about reparations, the history of the Movement, the diversity of the Movement, the goals, tactics and strategies of the Movement, even the internal contradictions of the Movement. One of the best ways apart from increasing your theoretical knowledge base is to engage in praxis (a cycle of theory, action and reflection that helps us analyze our efforts in order to improve our ideas) and action-learning (learning through doing). Theory without action and testing out that which we have theoretically learned produces armchair critics and/or revolutionaries. However, action without reflection produces ineffective or counter-productive activism. That’s why we advocate praxis. To assist in this process, we encourage you to look at some of the suggestions made under the ‘Take Action’ tab on the ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ (SMWeCGE) website.

This is a short article about the importance of learning within the ISMAR: https://reparationsscholaractivist.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/learning-and-education-for-a-post-african-reparations-world/.

3. Continue to sign, discuss and disseminate the SMWeCGE Petition which calls for the establishment of a UK All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ). This petition is being used as a political tool and tactic to accompany reparations conscientisation, mobilisation and organisation.

 

commission of inquiry 3

 

4. Between the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches, contribute to building and sustaining the organisation of the following blocs:

  • Mwakale/nkonso – Revered Ancestors
  • Pamoja – Community
  • Ujamaa – Global Afrikan Family
  • Fiankra – Repatriation
  • Imani – Interfaith
  • Sankofasuafo – Students
  • Ujima – Trade Unionists
  • Kuumba – Artists
  • Ubuntu – Non-Afrikan Allies.

These blocs will continue to operate, mobilise and organise throughout the year as part of reparations social movement-building, at the core of which is the intergenerational Afrikan Liberation Movement. If this bloc-building work is sustained between the Marches, the annual Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March then becomes the culmination point of our year round reparations campaigning and other forms of activism, in addition to being a vehicle for publicly showcasing the strength of our organising, networks and capacity-building to advance the ISMAR.

As part of the bloc-building, please remember that the costs of emancipating ourselves from the modern-day Maangamizi are not free. Social-movement building needs resourcing, and this is a movement that is self-funded. Fundraising to build and sustain this aspect of the ISMAR must also go on all year round. See below for how you can support the work towards facilitating the March and its related campaigning aspects by donating to the ASR fund (Afrikan Self-Repairs) of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC): https://www.gofundme.com/ukmarch

 

SM March Committee Bank Details

 

For further info about the blocs and how you can get involved contact the AEDRMC             Tel: 07922035446/ 07597592889
Email: getinvolved@reparationsmarch.org                    FB page: TheMarch August

5. Prepare yourself for the APPCITARJs by beginning to do family and community research on how we and our immediate families each have suffered, continue to suffer and have also challenged the various crimes of the Maangamizi. In this regard, see the aims of the SMWeCGE Campaign: https://stopthemaangamizi.com/

Afrikans in the UK and Europe organising towards establishing commissions of inquiry for truth and reparatory justice and local, national and international people’s tribunals to hold the governments of Britain, and other European countries to account. If you are able to gather such evidence you can assist us  to arrive at a comprehensive assessment and a full picture of what our journeys and experiences of the Maangamizi have been across the Diaspora, as well as on the Continent of Afrika. Each person and representative of families and their communities have to become our own advocates and experts on your own situation and then we can bring all these experiences together as part of us becoming ‘reparations enforcers’ who are building the power and capacity to hold to account all those who are continuing to profit from the ill-gotten gains of the Maangamizi and are also complicit in its perpetuation today.

See the video below from the documentary ‘Freedom Summer’ for some AAPCITARJ lessons from our Shero Fannie Lou Hamer.

 

 

Hamer’s testimony had such a huge impact upon the government and public in and outside the USA, and was so powerful, that President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. This is a recording of the full testimony and also a transcript of that testimony. Her testimony provides an example of what we envisage could be the impact similar ISMAR-coordinated grassroots testimonies by our Afrikan Survivors, Resistors and Challengers of the Maangamizi, from all over the World to the APPCITARJs in the UK Parliament of Westminster and the European Parliament. We surmise that the ‘holding to account’ referred to above can best be done in a collective way by supporting the establishment of the Ubuntukgotla, court of peoples humanity interconnectedness, otherwise known as the Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (U-PITGJ), which we encourage you to support the development of. This can be done through hosting sittings of the tribunal, locally, nationally and internationally. If you would like to know more about the APPCITARJ/U-PITGJ contact PARCOE on info@parcoe.com or 07751143043.

As part of the rationale for this approach, it is important to have a better sense of the historical antecedents of the SMWeCGE Campaign in the UK, see this video for some further insight:

 

 

6. Set up a MAATZOEZADUARAs (i.e. Maat action-learning circles or ‘Maat Training Practice Rings’) which is a reparatory justice circle of Maat practitioners who learn to be the self-repairs change at the levels of their person, home, family, neighbourhood, workplace, school, places of leisure and worship, etc. These Maat Training Practice Rings encompass a number of families and lineages, across geographical boundaries and generations. For example, a home or family based Maat Training Practice Ring will entail getting a selected number of people in your family interested in unravelling family histories and using this knowledge to recognise and gather evidence of the harm that has been done to you as a family. the Practice Rings will also explore how such harms have been passed down throughout the generations, resulting in increasing levels of disrepair. We are looking for case studies of some of these family stories documenting family member’s lived experiences of the Maangamizi and resistance to it. This unraveling of these stories is part of the process of repairing the harm and continuing damage being done within our own families.maat-balance

                                                                 ©www.zengarner.com

7. Creatively utilise SMWeCGE Petition Soulsquestathons (SMWeCGE-PS), which is literally a collection of souls, for sparkrippling MAATZOEZADUARAs. The aim is to link chains of MAATZOEZADUARAs together encompassing a number of families, across geographical boundaries and generations, all over the place, as Grassroots Afrikan Reparatory Justice Action Learning Praxis Exercising Rings (GARJALPERs) of the U-PITGJ. This means that they will share their stories and practice not only testifying with these stories but also putting their cases through trial rehearsals. The key point about the Soulsquestathons is that the various participants connect to, compare and contrast their self-repairs reparatory justice work as families within these MAATZOEZADUARAs. Basically, these are intergenerational connections, not only of family members of the present, but also the past. It therefore becomes necessary for us to keep records about and bring the lives and work of our revered Ancestors into our everyday lives of the present.

It is important to see ourselves as belonging to an intergenerational continuum of Survivors, Resistors and Challengers of the Maangamizi that unless it (the Maangamizi) is stopped, will stretch indefinitely into the future. We are reminded that our society today is not merely an association of contemporaries, it extends forward and backwards in time and encompasses our family members and people of the past who sought to provide us with a just inheritance, as well as those entities who unjustly conspired to deny them their rights to pass on the fruits of their labour and sacrifices, thereby denying future generations their rightful inheritance. As Afrikan liberation leader Amilcar Cabral reminded us, “As Afrikans we firmly believe that the dead continue to walk beside us. We are a society of both the living and the dead.” Our society also consists of people of the future who will inherit what we have achieved, good and bad as well as what we have failed to redress and repair. In our justice-seeking endeavours we remain duty-bound to our revered Ancestors on whose behalf we act today, as the temporary caretakers of lineages and prosperity.

 

 

The work we can do within our own families, the SMWeCGE-PS sparkrippling and proliferation of MAATZOEZADUARAs, are the first strides of ‘Global Afrikan Reparations How Steps of Positive Action’ (GARHSOPA), which can be taken by Afrikans and all people of Afrikan heritage everywhere. This speaks to positive action steps as part of a process or methodology for moving beyond making a demand for holistic reparations to seeking to enforce such demands. This is done by us building the power and collective capacity to effect and secure reparatory justice, starting with personal and interpersonal change collectivized until it contributes to social change. Positive action therefore refers to the adoption of all legitimate democratic means by which we can cripple the pro-White supremacy forces of European imperialism and similar powers, from within and outside our communities, obstructing the free exercise of our right to effect and secure reparatory justice, by any means necessary, for ourselves.

The methods of positive action include:
(1) legitimate political agitation;
(2) media and educational campaigns; and (3) the democratic exercise of our rights to protest, to organise agitational rehearsals of our people’s reparatory justice case through the MAATZOEZADUARAs as part of the process of establishing the U-PITGJ and pressurising the establishment at UK and European levels, resorting to various actions of non-cooperation and civil disobedience, such as the application of strikes, boycotts, occupations, declarations of expropriation of the expropriated etc. based on the principle of non-violence and organising constitutionally towards participatory democratic ‘upstandings’.

 

 

There must be clearer overstanding of the signing of the SMWeCGE Petition in a “Soulsquestathon” as meaningful only when a signatory proceeds not only to promote the diligent comprehensive study of its contents to encourage participatory mass education, but also the use of the contents for the glocal practical training and rehearsal of court proceedings in his/her home, workplace, spaces of worship, leisure sites, etc., of our Global Afrikan Family Case for Holistic Reparatory Justice, as it ought to be heard by the future U-PITGJ.

Likewise, the MAATZOEZADUARAs should also be utilised to very well prepare, by way of rehearsals and other training and educational practices, e.g. ‘SoulTruth Barings’, (where we bear our soul truthfully), and other kinds of presentations to parliamentary commissions of inquiry at local, national and international levels by Afrikan Heritage Community groups and individuals, as well as interested others from diverse communities, who desire the truthful public telling of their own germane personal, family and community stories relating to the Maangamizi. The creative popular democratic utilisation of the SMWeCGE-PS, in propelling the mass educational wide-spreading of the MAATZOEZADUARAs, ought therefore to be the kickstarting point for conscientisational agitation in stepping forward towards various self-empowering measures of self-determination to effect and secure holistic reparatory justice, by our own sovereign Afrikan people’s power throughout the continent and Diaspora of Afrika.

 

ANCESTORS EGBE

©Egbe Egun-Ancestral Society

 

The MAATZOEZADUARAs are extremely important in ensuring that we proceed in our pursuit of reparations mindful of the fact that the claims and case of Afrikan reparations are based on the principle of intergenerational justice and therefore have transgenerational, transnational and intercultural dimensions. The point about any struggle including the struggle for reparations is that it comes with its own heritage, knowledge foundations and social justice traditions. So those of us in this generation who seek to be integrated into the ISMAR should not pretend as though we are coming with new ideas which have not been forged at the heart of our Afrikan and Diaspora communities of resistance seeking to reclaim our true sovereignty, wealth, livelihoods and custodianship of and the ‘right to belong’ to our Motherland and benefit from the resources generated from such land. As the descendants and heirs of Afrikans, some of whom were martyrs, that were enslaved in previous phases of the Maangamizi, we are mindful of our ancestral responsibility to ensure that when we speak in their names we do not allow our enslaver’s visions of justice to prevail in advocating what are considered to be adequate reparatory justice. The discourse on reparations therefore has to move beyond merely calling on the name of our ancestors as justification for the genesis of our entitlements to redress today, to truly recognising the personhood, worldviews and visions of justice of our Afrikan predecessors that were kidnapped, trafficked and enslaved in Abya Yala (the so-called Americas, including the Caribbean).

 

ED DULANI 11

 

We have to remember that they were sentient and rational human beings who lived under conditions in which that humanity as well as their Afrikan personalities, legal and political heritages were denied. It is no longer tenable to assume that the practice of law was alien to Afrikan peoples prior to chattel enslavement and colonisation and they operated on the basis of cultural, legal and political logics of their own. To give primacy to their enslaved status and legal and justice frameworks of their enslavers and their descendants continues their deracination, invisibilisation and dehumanisation.

According to Jurisconsult, Kofi Mawuli Klu, the use of law is one of the most important instruments of our Afrikan struggle for reparations. For Klu, the need to locate our claim to restitution for the damages caused by gross violations of Afrikan sovereignty raise for us the essential questions of whose framework, whose law and whose justice? Such an approach of social justice/community/movement lawyering includes recognising how Afrikans have and continue to exercise legal agency, define law, assert alternative conceptualisations of law and legality in addition to how resistance to unjust laws contributes to the everyday legal meaning-making and justice restoring practices that we engage in. Albeit that there are different legal models as to how to use law to create the desired reparations outcomes that we seek to achieve, the idea that reparations will ultimately be something that will be ‘won’ in a European court of law by ‘hot shot’ lawyers needs to be re-evaluated in the face of what reparations social movement history reveals.

 

vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart

“Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics
and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great
poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new
society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way.”

Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedoms Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002, p.23

 

In our view, justice for Afrikan people, our ancestors and the required legal transformation to ensure it can only really happen with the political education and mobilisation of large numbers of people to challenge the systemic and structural legacies of Afrikan enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Such collective action must ultimately disrupt the Eurocentric norm of lawyers being seen as saviours or gatekeepers and seek to exceed the limits of existing law by forcing progressive change through direct action. This requires utilising legal advocacy to build and mobilise the power and leadership of grassroots communities. It does not come from the top-from legal, political or academic elites assuming that it is their ‘brain power’ that will result in a negotiated settlement or simply receiving pay-outs through legislation or courts. In fact, there are multiple tactics that social justice lawyers genuinely working to advance the cause of reparations can engage in to support the goals of the ISMAR.

Accordingly, we take the view that by charting and combining an Afrikan self-determined path of ‘legal’ recourse and struggle for reparations and community organising, it is possible to effect and secure reparations holistically defined as part of a broader social change strategy generally referred to as ‘social justice’ ‘community lawyering’ or ‘movement lawyering’. Community lawyering encourages lawyers to critically and creatively examine non-traditional forms of advocacy such as community organising and other grassroots actions as a way of addressing the unmet legal and non-legal needs of clients and stakeholders of strategic litigation. This entails engaging lawyers and other law and justice practioners who are willing to de-emphasise litigation as the primary tool for advancing reparations goals and outcomes at the systemic, group and systemic level. The role of a “community lawyer” also includes working in partnership with community ‘clients’ and utilising multiple forms of advocacy, including community organising, litigation, media events, community education workshops and public demonstrations to address their individual, group as well as systemic outcomes. Movement lawyering is a type of community lawyering whereby lawyers work in partnership with social movement organisations trying to bring about reparatory justice social change. Such lawyers work with organisations within a Movement to build their ‘agency‘, rights awareness and take back their power in the process of building a sustainable reparations movement.

It follows that in building our family cases as part of our Global Afrikan Case for Reparatory Justice, we have a responsibility to future generations to ensure that the decisions we make today do not negatively impact the interests or well being of the unborn and each generation to come. All of these factors should be prime considerations in establishing MAATZOEZADUARAs.

If you would like support or further guidance on setting up a MAATZOEZADUARA or initiate any other action, you think appropriate at your own individual or group effort towards reparatory justice positive action, then you can seek assistance from the OSORJALs (Open Surgeries of Reparatory Justice Action Learning) of PARCOE https://www.facebook.com/parcoeinfo, email info@parcoe.com or call: 07751143043.

 

ANCESTORS CABRAL (2)

 

8. Help us gather evidence of and document the Maangamizi (hellacaust of chattel, colonial, and neocolonial forms of enslavement) as well as resistance to it, as it is genocidally and ecocidally impacting on our various Afrikan heritage communities today. In this regard, please share such knowledge and experiences with the SMWeCGE Campaign. Gathering such data is essential because we are building a dossier of Maangamizi crimes and resistance them in the modern era. We aim to produce a version of the original 1951 We Charge Genocide Petition edited by Afrikan American communist lawyer William L. Patterson which documents the various manifestations of genocide against Afrikan Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. This document will provide undeniable evidence of the Global Afrikan Family Case for Holistic Reparatory Justice citing the various contemporary manifestations of genocide and the ecocide that we and our lands and environment are being subjected too.

 

WE CHARGE GENOCIDE

 

9. Organise a group of family members, friends or colleagues to attend the 2017 1st August Emancipation Day Reparations March from Windrush Square (Brixton, London) to the Houses of Parliament. Simultaneous marches take place in Afrika, the Caribbean and so-called North America. For more info about the march or if you would like to organise a solidarity march/action in other parts of the world please contact Tel: 07922035446/ 07597592889,  Email: info@reparationsmarch.org, FB page: TheMarch August.

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

See here for more pictures from the 2016 Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March.

vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart

10. Organise local, regional and international Grassroots Reparations Education and Outreach Teams (GREOTs) between the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches to continue the street education and mobilisation work for reparatory justice for more info about how to go about this and the GREOT inductions and ‘Education is Preparation for Reparations’ teach-ins and workshops please contact: education@reparationsmarch.org or call 07922035446/ 07597592889 .

11.Start rehearsing arguments in support of reparatory justice for the People’s Open Parliamentary Session on Afrikan Reparations (POPSAR), which was introduced as a feature of the 2016 March. The POPSAR is a mass concientisational forum for public debate and discourse on Afrikan Reparations as a matter of critical social importance. The purpose of the POPSAR is to engage audiences in action-learning on participatory democratic parliamentary debate on critical issues such as Afrikan Reparatory Justice. Each year a different reparations related motion will be debated and people are encouraged to engage in practical rehearsals in preparation for the annual POPSAR on 1st August which takes place as part of the programme for the Afrikan Emanipation Day Reparations March.

12. Do what you can to implement relevant aspects of the ‘SMWeCGE Guidance For Proposals on Parliamentary Actions‘ including the Stop the Maangamizi Postcard Campaign which targets MPs for action towards establishing the APPCITARJ.

 

sm postcard

 

13. Agree to host an ‘Education is Preparations for Reparations’ workshop organised by the AEDRMC. Other advanced courses available are the ‘Introduction to the Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations’ course, the ‘Stop the Maangamizi Advocates Course’ or the ‘Reparations Advocacy Training for Allies’ courses delivered by PARCOE, in association with the SMWeCGE Campaign, Momentum Black ConneXions and the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Commuity of Practice (ARTCoP) See this early promo video here as well as this interview with Akala which references the aforementioned training course. For more info about the AEDRMC ‘Education is Peparation for Reparations’ workshops contact the AEDRMC. For more info about the other courses contact: info@parcoe.com.

14. Vote in accordance with pro-reparations choices of candidates for elected public offices, lobby elected public officials to support reparations and the establishment of the UK APPCITARJ as contained in the SMWeCGE Petition. For support in taking this kind of action visit https://globalafrikanpeoplesparliament.org/policy-positions/.

15. Join the ARTCoP which promotes the development of grassroots scholar activists on reparations and harnesses the co-production of activist and other forms of knowledge between advocates, activists and academics on reparations. To contact ARTCoP email: artcop.edu@gmail.com.

16. Among the opportunities that the ARTCoP can open for interested participants in its activities, is training to become a volunteer researcher or advocate for the APPCITARJ and/or the U-PITGJ. This will be particularly beneficial to participants of the Sankofasuafo – Students Bloc of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March who would like to keep themselves engaged with grassroots scholar-activist work and activities relevant to their normal academic studies in between the annual 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations Marches.

17.Contribute to the development of the Europe-wide NGO Consultative Council For Afrikan Reparations, (ENGOCCAR)  and its work programmes including signing its various European language versions of the SMWeCGE in Europe addressed to the European Parliament . For further info contact engoccar@gmail.com or UK representative organisation, PARCOE https://www.facebook.com/parcoeinfo or email info@parcoe.com.

Please also read the ENGOCCAR statement in response to the recently published ‘Public Statement by Civil Society Organisations in Europe and the United States Representing People of African Descent on Britain’s Historical Involvement in the Transatlantic Traffic of Enslaved Africans and Its Far Reaching Impacts’.

18. Organise a church service for ‘Reparations Sunday’ on the second Sunday, or the Sunday closest to 12th October, the European Union (EU) Day for Reparations Related to Colonisation. If you are part of another faith community then you can organise a similar activity on your preferred day of worship closest to 12th October. This action is particularly relevant for people who are interested in building the Imani-Interfath Bloc of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March.

19. For more info about the reparations activist research, (PhD in history at the University of Chichester), that is being undertaken on the history of the ISMAR in the UK and other matter relevant to reparations learning, advocacy and scholarship please visit: https://reparationsscholaractivist.wordpress.com/about/.

20.For those from other communities (non-Afrikan) who wish to show solidarity with the cause of Afrikan reparations, you can get involved with the relevant programmes and activities of the Global Justice Forum, (GJF).

If you are interested in mobilising as part of the Peoples Reparations International Movement (PRIM), i.e. the reparations movement that consists of all other people’s reparations causes. It is also recommended that you get involved with the Intercommunity Forum.

SM GHILLAR

 First Nation Brother from Australia, Ghillar Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Nations and Peoples in Australia and Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic

If you are from other Black Majority World communities, that do not necessarily define as Afrikan but would like to work in solidarity with the March as non-Afrikan allies, please connect with Momentum Black ConneXions (MBC).

If you would like to get more involved with the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March please contact
Tel: 07922035446/ 07597592889
Email: getinvolved@reparationsmarch.org Twitter: @uk_march.

Or for further info visit:www.stopthemaangamizi.com

 

In Livicated Service

Esther Stanford-Xosei

Coordinator-General of the International Steering Committee of the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide (SMWeCGE) Campaign

Esther Stanford-Xosei is also the Official Spokesperson for the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC)

 

vintage-calligraphic-elements-1nyoWZ-clipart

“It will be gross self-delusive wishful thinking to believe that those wielding the reins of White racist supremacy are going to pay and serious heed to the Afrikan demand for Reparations unless their hold on the machinery of global power is effectively challenged by the well-organised, upsurgent and self-empowering masses of Afrikan people and their allied progressive forces throughout the world.”

Kofi Mawuli Klu ‘Charting an Afrikan Self-Determined Path of Legal Struggle for Reparations’, a draft paper for presentation to the 11th December 1993 Birmingham Working Conference of the African Reparations Movement, UK, 1993.

Posted in AEDRMC, ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION OF INQUIRY (APPCITARJ), STOP THE MAANGAMIZI PETITION, THE 2016 1ST AUGUST AFRIKAN EMANCIPATION DAY REPARATIONS MARCH, UBUNTUKGOTLA/PITGJ | Tagged Afrikan Liberation, APPCITARJ, Commission of Inquiry, International Social Movment for Afrikan Reparations, Land based reparations, Pan-Afrikan Revolution, People Power, Peoples Tribunal, REPARATIONS, Reparatory Justice, Stop the Maangamizi, U-PITGJ | Leave a comment

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