The Slave is the Colonial Subject
The United States of America cannot continue to be separated from Europe. The “lifeblood” that this settler colonial state was built on was and continues to be built on the dehumanizing subjugation of African people and the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty.
The oppressive social, political, and economic structures that sustain the U.S and its European national counterparts are born out of imperialism and colonialism. The economic system of imperialism is capitalism, the political system of imperialism is anti-democratic, and the societal norms of imperialism are Western social constructs. Each system reflects a European culture, and by extension, the culture of the U.S. In turn, they subjugate and commodify the culture of their subjects. Mama Marimba Ani argued that these systems “work as a consistent machine for the achievement of European power and total control over the universe, ” and she was right.
The U.S operates as an extension of Europe. On the world stage, they share the same interests, goals, and benefits of imperialism; this makes their power in tandem, not in separation. European power, as it is expressed through colonialism, seeks total control of the lives of anyone deemed non-European, from ethics, values, ideas, language, education, and religion.
Colonialism has created within African people an internal battle of spirit. The present programs of de-culturalization and de-politicization of our people in the U.S work to sustain the settler colony as a falsely progressive and democratically led nation. We have allowed this country to redeem itself with concessions like elevating a few handpicked house Negroes to serve as linchpins for African success. We accept these false prophets as mouthpieces for the masses of African people instead of rejecting them and working toward the attainment of legitimate power over our collective destiny.
Our first step is to recognize that we are connected to Africa. The longer we procrastinate on rejecting a Euro-American identity and accepting an African one, the longer the U.S and its European counterparts can operate as an international force of violence. Imperialism’s quest for material domination of land and people stretches beyond just the resources extracted, it preys on a people’s historical and cultural memory. European imperialism accomplishes its extractive mission by fracturing a people’s historical and cultural connection to the land of their ancestors.
The struggles across the diaspora are interconnected. African armed resistance to U.S slavery was inspired by African resistance to British slavery in Jamaica and French slavery in Ayiti. Maroon communities in colonized South America are metaphysically connected to Maroon communities in the U.S, all of which practiced communalism and regenerative agriculture.
Both expressions of resistance are African ways of existing and they strengthen the identification with Africa. African resistance to the European-imposed reality has always involved a re-centering of African identity through African value systems, practices, rituals, and an African-centered consciousness.
Since enslavement, the U.S. government has acted as a hegemonic European power to protect European interests on the international stage. A prime example is how Thomas Jefferson supported the French domination efforts over Ayiti (Haiti). At the height of the Ayitian revolution, Jefferson enacted economic and political policies that isolated Ayiti in response to the revolution, inspiring revolutions on U.S. soil. He protected the interests of France, Western Europe, and the U.S by suppressing the Ayitian revolution.
Jefferson’s suppressive efforts could not suppress the ability of Africans to unify, however, and the organization of the Stono rebellion by Africans in the U.S proves the failure of the suppression attempts. Africans on lowcountry plantations identified with the conditions of Africans in Ayiti and organized the largest African slave revolt in the South. Our African ancestors in both Ayiti and the lowcountry identified their common struggle early on: to free themselves physically and spiritually from the system of forced labor, sexual exploitation, spiritual deprivation, and cultural demonization.
There is a clear effort from the U.S to isolate the history of enslaved Africans in the U.S from the histories of enslaved Africans elsewhere. It is the job of Africans across the U.S, especially, to find that the histories of Africans in the U.S are connected to Africans across the diaspora. Wherever European colonization existed, Africans commonly resisted. Imperialism has never been a single colony or plantation system but an interconnected system that requires an opposite and even more unified struggle to end.
The organizing of American African revolts like Stono Rebellion would have been inconceivable if our 18th century ancestors from various Lowcountry plantations could not identify with each other in not just similar conditions, but in aims and purpose which were to free themselves both physically and spiritually from a system of forced labor, sexual exploitation, spiritual deprivation, and cultural demonization. When we begin to understand that we are intentionally taught to believe that slavery in North America was simply a confined happenstance unrelated to a larger geographical violent system, it will become plain to see that English plantations in Charleston, South Carolina were the same in structure and functionality as Portuguese Fazendas in Brazil and the systems of organized labor corvée in French and Portuguese colonies in West Africa.
In each of these expressions, we see the recurrence of enslavement, extraction, and land acquisition, where African labor was used to enrich Europe and her people. African revolts throughout the world are proof that the struggle against imperialism could not be confined to a singular plantation or colony. Organized unity is a transcendence of coming together in likeness, and rather a formation of a political oneness that answers for our sovereignty as a global people. This has always been the greatest threat to European imperialism.
Pan-Africanism must be strengthened by actively working and struggling towards the mass organization of African people. We do that by recalling the memory of our ancestors to understand the development of imperialism over time. In collaboration with the work of memory and organizing, Africans must also expose the active contradictions of the systems they’ve been told to be grateful for.
A policing system murders and brutalizes African people daily, a medical system that seeks profit over wellness, a housing system that seeks displacement and land-grabs of African communities, and educational institutions that reduce African history and pervert the innocence of our spirits.
These are not the qualities of a functioning society, instead, they reek of a colonial reality. The African experience today in the United States is a colonial one. The African experience across the diaspora today is a colonial one. In this three-part series, we are going to retrace a story of inevitable victory and re-establish the willpower of an oppressed people. Connecting to Source aims to directly address how after the obliteration of the internal colonies in the Western Hemisphere and the neo-colonies in Africa, European imperialism will cease to exist as the blood sucking entity that is.
Revolutionary Pan-African organizing has always addressed the aftermath of an America and a Europe, and focused moreso on the reality that will exist after our humanity as African people has been righteously defended.
