April 2, 2023

To Be Equal

"We want our brothers and sisters in South Africa to know that we are with them today, we will be with them tomorrow, and we will be with them until their final freedom." – Randall Robinson, 1985 National Urban League Conference, Washington, D.C.

Thousands had gathered to hear TransAfrica founder and president Randall Robinson address the National Urban League’s 75th Anniversary Conference.

He almost didn’t make to his own speech. Earlier in the day, he and then-National Urban League President John E. Jacob, along with dozens of other Urban Leaguers, had been arrested at the South African Embassy during a peaceful mass protest against apartheid.

I was arrested during a protest at the same embassy just a few months later. It remains among the great honors of my life to have stood in that movement alongside the man who was singularly responsible for forcing the United States to confront the apartheid regime in South Africa. 

Robinson died last week at the age of 81.

That July 1985 protest drew 1,500 people, most of whom were there to take part in the National Urban League Conference where U.S. policy toward South Africa was a major theme.  During the demonstration, before he and Jacob were arrested, Robinson said they were delivering ''the knock of freedom on the door of the South African Embassy.”

Within a little more than a year, Congress would override President Ronald Reagan’s veto and impose economic sanctions against South Africa. The resulting withdrawal of large, multinational corporations crippled the South African economy. 

Robinson and the organization he founded in 1977 are best known for their role in ending apartheid. But the movement grew out of opposition to U.S. policy toward the former Republic of Rhodesia, then under white minority rule.

"It was 1976, and I was working for Charlie Diggs [then-chairman of House foreign affairs subcommittee on Africa], when several of us became concerned about the administration's handling of the Rhodesia issue," https://default.salsalabs.org/T5bc65c6d-4128-48eb-af25-e1b2fcdf1a68/15b47f7f-8b80-4de7-8022-dd87a1f304c0. Click or tap to follow the link." data-auth="Verified" data-linkindex="0">Robinson said in 1993. "Diggs and Andy Young called together some 120 black leaders to figure out what we ought to do. I was named chair of a working group charged with organizing an institution to galvanize black public opinion in support of U.S. Africa policy. That was the beginning of TransAfrica.”

Robinson’s 27-day hunger strike in 1994 pressured the Clinton Administration into changing its policy of turning away Haitian refugees without a hearing.

“My view has always been ... it doesn’t matter whether a country is black or white, left or right, you judge human rights observance with the same yardstick,” https://default.salsalabs.org/T42a919d8-b3dc-402c-a317-0f8575dc65f3/15b47f7f-8b80-4de7-8022-dd87a1f304c0. Click or tap to follow the link." data-auth="Verified" data-linkindex="1">he told his hometown newspaper, “And where I have seen human rights abuse, I have criticized it with as much tenacity as I can muster. And that’s been the case in Ethiopia, it’s been the case in Liberia, it’s been the case in Zaire, it’s been the case, of course, in South Africa. And it’s been the case in Haiti.”

Though I still was a teenager when Robinson founded TransAfrica and focused the nation’s attention on human rights abuses there, he inspired me as few others before or since. In the early 1980s, I was part of a leadership team of National Black Law Students Association that pushed for divestment of South African investments by U.S. companies.

I had the privilege of serving with Robinson as a panelist for Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union forum in 2009.  By then he had been living for several years in St. Kitts, where he emigrated out of frustration toward the nation’s exploitation of people of color and the poor.

"I tried to love America, its credos, its ideals, its promise, its process," Robinson wrote in Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land. "I have tried to love America but America would not love the ancient, full African whole of me."

The National Urban League mourns his passing and honors his legacy by striving to hold America to its credos, its ideals, and its promise.

 

Feb. 20, 2023
Historic gathering to deal with Black issues in the U. S. and the World
By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A five-day conference aimed to “assess the condition of Black people in the U. S. and globally” is expected to produce possible solutions to some of the most daunting problems facing the Black world at this moment in history. 

The State of the Black World Conference V, set for Baltimore April 19-25, is confirmed to draw iconic Black leaders from around the world, says Dr. Ron Daniels, president/CEO of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW21), the organization that is hosting the event. The conference, being organized around the theme, “Global Africans Rising: Empowerment, Reparations & Healing,” will seat African-American, African and diasporic leaders together at a historic table, he describes. 

“There has never been a gathering of this type around this theme in the history of the United states of America and we predict that it will have global impact because of the gathering and the way we have formulated it. Not to mention all of the issues” that will be address, Daniels said in an interview. “There’s likely to be nothing in recent history more powerful than what we’re doing at the State of the Black World Five.” 

Among the issues to be dealt with, he listed reparations, which is a central issue of IBW21; water as a human right; crime and violence in our community, “which is not just a U. S. issue, but one that people are confronting across the globe,” he said. 

After grappling with these issues and a string of others, Daniels says a “results-oriented declaration of intent” will be issued. “We do not claim that we will be able to implement all of the items. But there will be a declaration of intent that will be determined from the plenary sessions and the eight issue areas. And IBW will look through that and find out which ones we can prioritize for action” and then partner with other organizations to move forward. 

This will be the fifth State of the Black World Conference, but this one - to be held at the Baltimore Convention Center - will be the first with such broad reach, he said. Key highlights include: 

• Ghana President Nana Addo Danka Akufo-Addo; Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley; Former Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson; and Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell are among top level international leaders expected to interface with academics, activists U. S. Black leaders. 

• A national and international town hall meeting will focus on building the U. S. and Global Reparations Movements.

• There will be a special tribute to Maurice Bishop, the assassinated leader of the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada. Grenada Prime Minister Dikon Mitchell has been invited to lead that tribute. 

• National Urban League President Marc Morial will host a global Black leadership summit, reflecting on the approximate 100 days since the 118th Congress has been dominated by Republicans in the House of Representatives. 

• Black Women’s Roundtable Convenor Melanie Campbell, president/CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, will co-facilitate a global Black women’s summit breakfast along with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who is the current lead sponsor of HR40, the reparations bill. The honored guest will be Colombian Vice President Francia Marquez.

• DaQuan Lawrence, a Graduate student in African Studies at Howard University, will be in charge of outreach to university/college students and community based young leaders. 

• The event will close with a keynote speech and final charge by Dr. Julius Garvey, Global Pan African advocate/leader, the son of Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., the famous activist, orator and author. 

Also in attendance will be NAACP Vice President Hilary Shelton; activist and actor Danny Glover; members of Congress, including new House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.); and a string of Black leaders from Maryland, including Gov. Wes Moore are expected to attend. 

“So we will have the who’s who of Black America there;” says Daniels. “We must become better organized to do what Dr. King said at the end of his life. We must use what we have in our hands.” 

For registration, full agenda and more detailed information: IBW21.org. or call 1-888.774.2921.

Sept. 13, 2022

 

Mixed Emotions Stirred in Africa at the Passing of Queen Elizabeth

 

Queen Elizabeth and the late South Africa President Nelson Mandela

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com/GlobalInformationNetwork) - The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has not gone unremarked in Africa where local television and radio stations interrupted normal broadcasting in order to relay events happening in the United Kingdom.

 

Across the world, nations are paying tribute to the 96 year old monarch. President Biden described her as “a stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy who deepened the bedrock alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States.”

 

Queen Elizabeth embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties, observed Harvard Professor Maya Jasanoff.  “She was a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world.”

 

But we should not romanticize her era, Jasanoff cautioned. “For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence.”

 

Britain “lost an empire, and (has) not yet found a role” - commented American statesman Dean Acheson. The deep and painful traumas and confusions that the loss of empire produced helped many years later to produce Brexit, and enduring and dangerous British fantasies about playing the role of a great power on the world stage.

 

Others showed little sympathy for the fallen empire and demanded amends for colonial-era crimes. Carnegie Mellon professor Uju Anya had the sharpest criticism of the queen. The Nigerian-born professor wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.”

 

“I guess it depends what you think a good job of being queen is,” opined Birmingham City University Professor Kehinde Andrews of British African Caribbean heritage. “So, if a good job of being queen is to represent white supremacy and to represent that link to colonialism, then, yeah, I think she’s done a very good job.”

 

“Let us remember,” added University of Cambridge professor Priya Gopal, “that when she became queen at Treetops (Hotel) in Kenya, Britain had just commenced a brutal, vicious insurgency that carried on for several years. In recent years, we have had Kenyans who were tortured by the British raise lawsuits, successfully in some cases, around the vicious violence of the British state at that point.

 

“I do wonder whether we actually live in a deeply different world,” she continued. “We live in a world where formally the British crown is no longer an imperial crown, but Elizabeth II was, in a sense, obsessed with the Commonwealth, made sure that Charles III would also be head of the Commonwealth.”

 

“I think, as Maya just suggested, much of that order has not changed.”

 

Gopal said she found herself appreciating the circumstances in which Elizabeth passed - good medical care, in a secure shelter in a place she loved. But how many British retirees would have the same easeful passing this winter? She answered her own question. “I think many will be in insecure housing, without heat, potentially without food, and certainly without access to good medical care.”

 

Amid the strait-laced protocols of the position, the Queen enjoyed one rare privilege - a relationship on a first name basis with Nelson Mandela.

 

The exchanges between these two great figures were warm, recalls this statement of the Mandela Foundation.

 

"They spoke frequently on the phone, calling each other by their respective first names as a sign of mutual respect and affection," said the statement, issued the day after the British monarch died at 96.

 

“In the years following his release from prison, he cultivated a close bond with the Queen," the text said. "He received her in South Africa and visited her in England, not shying away from exploring Buckingham Palace.”

 

He also gave the Queen the nickname "Motlalepula" - "come with the rain" - after a state visit in 1995, when Elizabeth arrived with torrential rain, "the like of which had not been seen for a long time".  It is now a song by the world renowned artist Hugh Masekela.

 

The Mandela foundation "joins the multitude around the world in saying +hamba kahle+ (go in peace) to the Queen".

 

GLOBAL INFORMATION NETWORK creates and distributes news and feature articles on current affairs in Africa to media outlets, scholars, students and activists in the U.S. and Canada. Our goal is to introduce important new voices on topics relevant to Americans, to increase the perspectives available to readers in North America and to bring into their view information about global issues that are overlooked or under-reported by mainstream media.

March 8, 2021

Biden Calls for Help in Conflict-torn African Horn

 

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com/GIN) – In what may be President Biden’s first major test in Africa, a key U.S. ally stands accused of undertaking a campaign of ethnic cleansing, massacring hundreds of unarmed civilians and threatening the fragile stability of the region.

 

President Joe Biden, confronting the scenario linked to U.S. ally Ethiopia, shared his concerns in a telephone call this week to Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.

 

Biden’s phone call comes as the international community reels from the horrific details in a new report by Amnesty International describing the massacre of unarmed civilians in less than 48 hours by Eritrean troops in the restive northern Ethiopian province of Tigray last year.

 

Testimonies by over 40 witnesses described the systematic killing of civilians by soldiers in the northern city of Axum, opening fire in the streets and conducting house-to-house raids in a massacre that may amount to a crime against humanity, according to an internal United States government report obtained by The New York Times.

 

The U.S. government report written in early February, echoed some of the Amnesty findings. It documents in stark terms a land of looted houses and deserted villages where tens of thousands of people are unaccounted for.

 

Survivors and witnesses described extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate shelling and widespread looting after Ethiopian and Eritrean troops led an offensive to take control of the city during the conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in mid-November.

 

Satellite imagery analysis supported reports of indiscriminate shelling and mass looting in the ancient city of Axum, said Amnesty, and appeared to reveal the sites of new mass burials near two of the city’s churches.

 

“The evidence is compelling and points to a chilling conclusion,” said Deprose Muchene, Amnesty’s director for east and southern Africa. “Ethiopian and Eritrean troops carried out multiple war crimes in their offensive to take control of Axum. Above and beyond that, Eritrean troops went on a rampage and systematically killed hundreds of civilians in cold blood.”

 

Ethiopian authorities issued a statement on Friday referring to “complex challenges in the region” and reasserting their intention to arrest senior members of the TPLF, which it described as a criminal “rogue group”.  Ethiopia’s ambassador to Belgium, Hirut Zemene, told a webinar on Thursday that the alleged massacre in November was a “very highly unlikely scenario” and “we suspect it’s a very, very crazy idea.”

 

Eritrea’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, on Friday said his country “is outraged and categorically rejects the preposterous accusations” in the Amnesty report.

 

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, launched the military campaign on Nov.4, accusing the TPLF of attacking federal military camps in Tigray and seeking to destabilize the country. Communications to the northern state were cut and journalists and humanitarian organizations were denied access.

 

But thus far Mr. Biden and other American officials have been reluctant to openly criticize Mr. Abiy’s conduct of the war, while European leaders and United Nations officials, worried about reports of widespread atrocities, have been increasingly outspoken.

 

The African Union has been unable to resolve any of these issues, not least because other member states are leery of antagonizing the country that hosts their organization, according to a regional expert. The EU has suspended nearly $108 million in aid to the government in Addis Ababa, to no apparent effect. The UN has done little more than wag a disapproving finger.

 

Abiy, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for making peace with neighboring Eritrea, declared victory against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) after federal troops seized the city of Mekelle in late November, and said no civilians had been killed. His government denies the presence of thousands of soldiers from Eritrea.

 

It is hoped that Kenyatta will use his bully pulpit to address this and other major crises when he takes the chair of the African Union Security Council this month. 

GLOBAL INFORMATION NETWORK creates and distributes news and feature articles on current affairs in Africa to media outlets, scholars, students and activists in the U.S. and Canada. Our goal is to introduce important new voices on topics relevant to Americans, to increase the perspectives available to readers in North America and to bring into their view information about global issues that are overlooked or under-reported by mainstream media.