The Big Picture

: THE BIG PICTURE

 - A quick reminder

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In 1966 (24/02/1966), Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown as president in Ghana.⠀

His country was the first in Africa to kick out British colonization, and in 1957, Nkrumah had emerged from prison, still wearing his prison cap, to deliver a blistering independence speech, fists pumping the air, to rancorous ovation.

Ghana’s independence had been attended by American civil rights leader Revd Martin Luther King, who had never seen a black man overthrow white people before. King now believed freedom was truly possible, and returned to America on fire. That fire grew into his 1963 mountaintop speech, I Have A Dream. 

By 1964 another civil rights leader, Malcolm X would arrive in Ghana. He was so inspired by Nkrumah, that he went back to America and set up a copy of Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist organization, the Organization of African Unity. Malcolm X called his own the Organization of Afro-American Unity, or OAAU. But on February 21, 1965, as Malcolm X mounted the rostrum to open the eyes of African Americans to this new idea, the CIA shot him dead.

That same 1965, Nkrumah had published a book with the title, ‘Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism’. 

In it, he outlined his ideological steps to freeing the economies of African countries from continuing European & American colonial control in spite of nominal independence.

Immediately the book was published, the CIA wrote a letter to the US President, analyzing the book chapter by chapter, and advising that these ideas were dangerous. 

The 280 page book led to immediate sanctions by the US, who froze $300 million dollars in aid, and placed Nkrumah on a CIA hitlist. 

Six months later, on 24 February 1966, President Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown in a coup by Ghanaian military officers while on a diplomatic mission to China.

In 1978, John Stockwell, a former chief of the CIA Angola task force, wrote that the CIA base in Accra maintained contact with the coup plotters and 'was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup.'⠀

Under its new leadership, Ghana went back on every policy Nkrumah outlined in his decolonization strategy, realigned itself with European interests, invited the IMF and World Bank to help manage its economy, and privatized many of its state corporations under American & European imperialist control.⠀

At the same time Ghana was becoming independent, a similar development was unfolding in the Congo. A young Patrice Lumumba had given a fiery speech, chastising the Belgian king publicly, and repudiating every claim the Europeans had made about how good colonialism was. 

Immediately, the CIA director in Washington, Dulles, sent a message to C.I.A. station chief in Congo, Lawrence Devlin, that an assassination of Lumumba was an “urgent and prime objective” and he gave him the authority to replace him with a “pro-Western group” with a budget of $100,000.

Sixty days after that independence ceremony, in Washington, President Eisenhower discussed Lumumba’s case at a meeting on 18 August 1960 with CIA boss Allen Dulles.

A scenario involving poisoning him with a special toothpaste was planned. 

A few weeks later, Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, the Belgian Minister of African Affairs, wrote this in a telex on 6 October: “The main objective to be pursued in the interests of Congo, Katanga and Belgium is obviously the definitive elimination of Lumumba.” 

He then approved the removal of the Prime Minister, by Belgian led forces, and the capture was set for 16 January 1961. 

Patrice Lumumba was slaughtered the next day, and neither Congo nor central and Eastern Africa, have rested since. 

Likewise, Burkina Faso’s outspoken anti colonial revolutionary president, Thomas Sankara, was assasinated in a 1987 coup sponsored by France & the US.

Before he was killed, in less than 4 years he had already organized a tree-planting campaign to push back the encroaching Sahara and a vaccination blitz where, in a little over two weeks, 2 million children in the country were inoculated against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever. 

Sankara believed girls should get the same education as boys, so he outlawed forced marriage and female genital mutilation and appointed more women to leadership positions than any of his predecessors.

By cutting dependence on aid, and imposing rigorous austerity for state officials (especially high-level bureaucrats), public spending on education under Sankara increased by 26.5% per person between 1983 and 1987, and on health by 42.3%.

But, immediately after Sankara was murdered, his replacement, Campaore, overturned Sankara’s economic policies, and rejoined the World Bank & IMF.

Despite many uprisings, Compaoré was kept in power for 27 years, by the powerful colonial interests he preserved.

And in Nigeria, the anti colonial party of Herbert Macauley, the NCNC, was strategically sidelined by both internal & external forces. The old man personally took the British government to court several times, and organized with market women’s associations under Alhaja Pelimotu Aliwura, and labour unions under Pa Michael Imoudu, to make life hard for the colonial government. 

Lagos colonial administrator Sir McPherson punished Macauley for his activism. Trumped up charges were leveled against the fervent anticolonialist, and twice,he spent many  months in colonial jail. 

Then, during his election campaign in northern Nigeria, Herbert macauley took ill suddenly, and died. 

His unexpected death thrusted party leadership upon his deputy, Nnamdi Azikiwe. The new NCNC leader was also a highly educated anti colonialist, and contemporary of Nkrumah during their education in the US, when they mingled with the evolving civil rights movement there. 

With party leadership upon him, Azikiwe was outmaneuvered by both colonial collusion in favor of more conservative northern elite politicians, and the ethnocentric politics that was more marketable among his own base. 

The politically important Prime Minister position then fell to the conservative northern ruling class, and Azikiwe settled for a ceremonial position as President.

More than a half century later, we can only imagine a world where the class of independence leaders, who birthed the ideology of full economic decolonization, were not interrupted, but allowed to lay a lasting foundation. 

On the other hand, what we got was a class of minions, imposed to block the rising. And from the 1960s till date, they’ve been entrenching and replacing themselves with themselves within a narrow elite of self serving big men, who have gotten so savvy with the political game, that uprooting them now seems Herculean.

We would have been in a different Africa, if instead of stooges & small minded men, the progressive & powerful ideas of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Sankara, Savimbi, Macauley and other anti colonial forces had been left to flourish into sustainable democracies, with systems & institutions that can be passed down from one generation to the next. 

And then this man JOHN MAGUFULI! 

EU recalled Its ambassador to Tanzania over Magufuli's LBGT Crackdown.

Magufuli Skipped the UN General Assembly!

Magufuli denounced UN human rights report.

Magufuli banned all foreign trips for public servants. 

Magufuli deported UNDP CR Head.

Magufuli deported Head of EU Delegate to Tanzania.

European Union Stopped its Financial Support to Tanzania.

Magufuli Denounced EU-East African Trade Deal as a form of Neocolonialism.

European Union declares Magufuli a Dictator.

Magufuli Refuses to bow to New World Order.

Magufuli refuses to put Tanzania under WHO Covid-19 guidelines.

Magufuli declares Covid a Scam.

Magufuli refuses to Take Loans and grants from World bodies to deal with Covid-19.

Magufuli Welcomes Madagascar's traditional Vaccine for covid.

Magufuli refuses that Tanzania will not order or buy any Covid -19 Vaccine from the West or anywhere.

Magufuli is Dead! 

Coincidence? You tell me.

CULLED