Add Trayvon to the List and Keep on Fighting

Obi Egbuna of the Pan-African Liberation Organization (PALO) exposes the role of Barack Obama and other people in the US Congress in destabilizing Zimbabwe., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Add Trayvon to the list and keep on fighting

Thursday, 18 July 2013 00:00
Obi Egbuna Jnr
Zimbabwe Herald

WHEN Africans at home and abroad reflect on numerous lessons that are the cornerstone of our positive value system, the entire world, including our former colonial and slave masters, have come to respect the manner in which we maintain our dignity and resolve in the midst of a tragedy. What is most uplifting about this particular attribute

is we remain guided by a history and culture that the rich and powerful continue to attempt to hide and distort.

This is why as freedom-seeking and loving people all over the world express their anger concerning the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we as Africans must warn them to follow our trail of blood on the battlefield.

While this is a humble request, it is stern and deliberate because we are not seeking validation or approval from those external to our community, for the manner in which we choose to express ourselves concerning this matter.

Once that is understood and accepted, our next step is to educate our children, about the importance of having the last word concerning political developments that pertain to us as Africans.

In the information age a casual approach to this dynamic is suicidal as both white liberals and conservatives, from Bill Maher to Bill O’Reilly are becoming more audacious by the second, when it comes to sharing their opinions about our shortcomings as a people. At every phase of our front-line struggle for total liberation and human dignity, many a child has been sent to an early grave.

When the four little girls were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963, the naked terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen’s Council got placed on the world stage like never before.

This year marks the 52nd anniversary of the Sharpeville/Kwa Langa massacre in what is called South Africa, out of the 60 people brutally murdered 10 of them were children, that demonstration exposed what the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa feared more than anything was our call for self-determination and national liberation.

The defiance of our youth in what is called South Africa came full circle 16 years later when a teenager named Hector Peterson, was gunned down during the Soweto Uprising on June 16, 1976, a day now commemorated as the Day Of The African Child.

The 1960s generation remembers when the Student Non Violent Co-ordinating Committee decided to go into Emeritus, Georgia, after the savage beating and murder of Anna B. Hayes a 13-year-old who was kidnapped and raped, and died of complications because her parents were threatened by the rapists not to take her to the hospital or to alert the authorities. While Africans all over the world continue to pay homage to Rosa Parks and more recently Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old who was arrested in Montgomery, for refusing to relinquish their seats as part of the Montgomery bus boycott strategy and movement, the brutal and sadistic murder of Emmett Till that same numerical year remains on our minds.

We know that 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King rebellions, Africans in the Washington Metropolitan Area, will always remember Terrence Johnson and Deonte Rawlings, Johnson who served 16 years in prison for shooting racist police officers in self-defence, who intended on turning their interrogation room into a slaughterhouse.

The mysterious circumstances surrounding Johnson’s suicide in 1997 after claims he and his brother robbed a bank, have never sat well in our community, because in the final analysis being robbed of his childhood because of police terrorism scarred him for the rest of his life.

We are only five years removed from two police officers shooting Rawlings in the back of the head, after claiming the teenager was riding a stolen mini-bike that belonged to one of the officers. The FBI and Justice Department in conjunction with the MPD’s internal affairs branch cleared the two officers of any wrongdoing, which brings into question whether police review boards are simply exercises of futility.

Because Africans who live inside US borders are preparing for the upcoming presidential elections, it didn’t take any political genius to know that due to the racial make-up surrounding Trayvon Martin’s murder, it was only a matter of time before US President Barack Obama would make a statement aimed at boosting his campaign efforts.

The remark President Obama made was as follows: “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.” What Africans have to discuss are the broader ramifications of President Obama’s remarks, in order for our people to do this with substance and clarity, it cannot be done through the lens of the Democratic Party or the Homeland Security apparatus.

When President Obama inferred that Trayvon Martin’s death instinctively makes him think of his two daughters, was it because of his physical appearance in addition to his cultural make-up?

The reason this question has to be raised by the African community worldwide, because it can be argued with conviction that thousands of the children who were killed during the US-Nato alliance 2011 bombing campaign in Libya, draw a striking resemblance to Trayvon Martin. If we fail to make this connection we allow President Obama and his family to function from the understanding, it is okay to condemn the shooting of an African child in the US for political gain, but at the same time slaughter African children on our mother continent whenever him and his cabinet see fit.

Since the 2011 bombings of Libya by circumstance served as a working tribute to Ronald Reagan, because last year marked the 25th anniversary when he bombed Libya on April 15th 1986, one wonders if Muammar Gaddafi’s two-year-old daughter Hana who died at the hands of Reagan’s bombs makes President Obama and his wife Michelle think of his children.

For the fourth year in a row President Obama has used executive orders to extend US-EU sanctions against Zimbabwe, in each of the years the president supported this repressive measure against Zimbabwe, at no point did he think about his children or the children who may die before their time due to his decision. The murder of Trayvon Martin took place in Florida which is exactly 90 miles from Cuba, which is in the 50th year of a monstrous blockade originally imposed by the Kennedy administration, on the heels of a failed invasion of Cuba by the CIA, commonly referred to in the history books as the Bay Of Pigs invasion, not only has this genocidal measure cost Cuba $96 billion, it endangers the lives of African children who look just like Trayvon Martin.

The Africans who have been completely stripped of their core identity will give the same predictable response, voicing displeasure with President Obama’s Africa and Foreign Policy, plays right into the hands of the Republicans therefore maintaining silence is only temporary until we gain more political leverage. What is troubling about this point of view, is this year marks the 40th anniversary of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah’s passing and the 25th anniversary of Thomas Sankara’s assassination in Burkina Faso, and we have yet to take a stand about their CIA coup that ousted Nkrumah or Sankara’s assassin, an ally of the US and EU still presiding over that country. For that matter every African or Caribbean and Latin American nation that has been bombed and invaded by US imperialism since the Second World War, all of them have one thing in common, children who resemble Trayvon Martin were killed in the process. The irony of this tragedy is Trayvon Martin was interested in a career in military aviation, and if he wasn’t gunned down in Florida, he might have been brainwashed into believing it is heroic to drop bombs, on the usual targets of US imperialism countries and people who they can’t politically control or manipulate.

One of the most unique organisations in our community is the Children’s Defence Fund who are the architects of the concept Leave No Child Behind, however, many of our bravest freedom fighters who were assassinated in cold blood left their children with their family and community. We have never looked at the psychological impact that political assassinations have had on the children of warriors like Malcolm, Martin, Lumumba, Medgar Evers, Walter Rodney and countless others who died on the battlefield fighting for our liberation. This also impacts on the entire family especially if they decide to shield their children from front-line political activity, due to fear they would be an automatic target because of the family name.

The other issue that the die-hard democrats in our community have failed to touch, is that Trayvon Martin fits the current profile of a domestic terrorist. What has been sugar-coated as racial profiling was only scratching the surface, while mainstream media has made the label of a terrorist synonymous with people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, inside the US so-called African-American males from 15 to 40 are the first image that comes to the minds of US citizens like Mr Zimmerman.

What this tells our people collectively is Trayvon’s death must be connected to the poverty and violence, that sends daughters and sons of Africa to the cemetery, whether we are dealing with the children in Africa who die of hunger every 15 minutes, or the fact that each day in the US eight children or teenagers are killed by firearms. While this is the busy season for Africans who swear by the Democratic machine, and take pride in being their watchdogs in our community, we must send a statement to them that Africans plan to ensure we are the beneficiaries of our organisational genius and genuine resistance.

In 1992 Bill Clinton benefited from the Rodney King rebellions, JFK benefited from the death of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, and Barack Obama seeks to benefit from Trayvon Martin.

We are obligated by history to add Trayvon to the list of African children who died at the hands of our former colonial and slave masters, and keep on fighting which means changing the ultimate contradiction of all, that 95 percent of us are not politically active today.

Because we appear to be suffering from political hypnosis which has led us to vote Democrat for the last 100 years, the only way to reverse this tide is to get organised at the grassroots level, which is how all our major victories from attaining the right to vote to smashing the mandatory draft during the Vietnam War.

Obi Egbuna is a US-based Herald correspondent and a member of the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association.