"Black" Africans hiding from racist "rebels" in Libya

Aljazeera report on Black immigrants stuck in Libya and in fear of their lives. Early on I felt Gaddafi might be at least partially responsible for fomenting this situation, but I don't think I can blame Gaddafi for these assaults. The immigrants were apparently making a go of it until anti-Gaddafi factions began generalized racist attacks on "blacks" perceived to be Gaddafi supporters. 

One interviewee seems to agree with the rumors claiming Gaddafi hired what some in the media have called "black African mercenaries." But I take that to mean that Gaddafi has recruited lots of reinforcements, including black reinforcements. "Blacks" in Libya have become easy targets of anti-Gaddafi rage. These racist attacks aside, I think it is worth noting that, as far as I can tell--and it is impossible to know for certain-- most of the dead in Libya are not "black" Africans, they are "Arabs" and "Berbers."  View the video @ YouTube - Libya: Scared and in Hiding

Also see:

• Is Africa a breeding ground for terrorism?? April Ryan says yes.
• Thoughts of a ghetto intellectual ™: Muammar Gaddafi Brokers Peace Deal
• "Brother Leader" Muammar Gaddafi in human rights quandary as African Union files complaint to stay execution of 20 Nigerians in Libya

Libya, Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective | Black Agenda Report

Is Gaddafi : (1) a friend or a (2) foe of the pan-Afrikan world? (3) Is he just opportunistic? Or is he (4) a complicated amalgam of all of these? This essay argues for # 1 but I am leaning more towards #4. GI

Muammar Gaddafi during happier times throwing up deuces

Libya, Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective 

 by Gerald A. Perreira 

Thousands of Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, Filipinos, Turks, Germans, English, Italians, Malaysians, Koreans and a host of other nationalities are lining up at the borders and the airport to leave Libya. It begs the question: What were they doing in Libya in the first place? Unemployment figures, according to the Western media and Al Jazeera, are at 30%. If this is so, then why all these foreign workers?

For those of us who have lived and worked in Libya, there are many complexities to the current situation that have been completely overlooked by the Western media and 'Westoxicated' analysts, who have nothing other than a Eurocentric perspective to draw on. Let us be clear - there is no possibility of understanding what is happening in Libya within a Eurocentric framework. Westerners are incapable of understanding a system unless the system emanates from or is attached in some way to the West. Libya's system and the battle now taking place on its soil, stands completely outside of the Western imagination.
 

News coverage by the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera has been oversimplified and misleading. An array of anti-Qaddafi spokespersons, most living outside Libya, have been paraded in front of us – each one clearly a counter-revolutionary and less credible than the last. Despite the clear and irrefutable evidence from the beginning of these protests that Muammar Qaddafi had considerable support both inside Libya and internationally, not one pro-Qaddafi voice has been allowed to air.  The media and their selected commentators have done their best to manufacture an opinion that Libya is essentially the same as Egypt and Tunisia and that Qaddafi is just another tyrant amassing large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts. But no matter how hard they try, they cannot make Qaddafi into a Mubarak or Libya into Egypt. 

“Libya's system and the battle now taking place on its soil, stands completely outside of the Western imagination.”

The first question is: Is the revolt taking place in Libya fuelled by a concern over economic issues such as poverty and unemployment as the media would have us believe? Let us examine the facts.

Under the revolutionary leadership of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya has attained the highest standard of living in Africa. In 2007, in an article which appeared in the African Executive Magazine, Norah Owaraga noted that Libya, “unlike other oil producing countries such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, utilized the revenue from its oil to develop its country. The standard of living of the people of Libya is one of the highest in Africa, falling in the category of countries with a GNP per capita of between USD 2,200 and 6,000.” 

Read entire essay @   Black Agenda Report


tags: libya, black africa, arab africa, cultural imperialism


See also:

• Obama and Egyptian Liberation by Kevin Alexander Gray
• HOW THE BRITISH STOLE ZIMBABWE
• From American Military to Afrikan Consciousness: The Story of Askia Muhammad
• The Invention of "Illegal" Humans: a Recipe for Imperialism in Haiti
• Maxine Waters's chilling account of the US overthrow Haiti's President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide (dap @ stephanie)

Koola Boof calls out Afrocentric community

Kola Boof calls out Afrocentric peeps who, according to her, care more about dead languages and the ancient past than they do about actually existing indigenous black Egyptians (Nubians) living in Egypt under oppressive conditions.

The Black Americans run around saying, "HOTEP". Can you believe that? We never speak this way, but they want the fantasy grandeur of ancient Kings and Queens and they crave the past. Many of them "talk, talk, talk" about Africa and being BLACK....but their wives and children are white. It's all a farce, because they don't know who they are.

Ifi Amadiume also has a smart critique of the valorization of Ancient Egypt in her work Reinventing Africa.

I have some unpublished work on the topic: 

In Afrocentric circles there are only two exceptions that I am aware of to the otherwise blanket endorsement of the centrality of Afrocentric Egyptology: the Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah, and the African American scholar Amos Wilson. Armah has in recent years increasingly focused on Afrocentric Egyptology. In his work KMT: in the House of Life (2002), Armah argues that the reclamation of ancient Egyptian moral philosophy is a fundamental component of undoing cultural imperialism, decolonizing of the African mind, and advancing Afro-modernity. He maintains, however, that the massive Egyptian architectural projects and the hegemonic state-sponsored religion are less evidence of the anteriority and superiority of complex African societies and more the case of a negative testament of the machinations of a tiny African elite who manipulated the intellectual and material resources of the African Egyptian masses for their own self-interests. Amos Wilson, in his book, The Falsification of Afrikan History (1993), issues a more of a frontal assault on Afrocentric Egyptology. Wilson, another scholar who is highly regarded in Afrocentric circles, argues that the Afrocentrists’ inordinate focus on ancient Egypt is reactionary and satisfies a dysfunctional need to prove to Euro-westerners that blacks and whites are social and cultural equals.

To be fair, Boof does not acknowledge the fact that African Americans have been attacking the racist conspiracy to remove ancient Egypt out of Africa for centuries. David Walker wrote matter-of-factly about the Egyptians being black in 1829. A few decades later (1854) Frederick Douglass bitterly denounced the attempt to

separate the negro race from every intelligent nation and tribe in Africa, may fairly be regarded as one proof, that they have staked out the ground beforehand, and that they have aimed to construct a theory in support of a foregone conclusion.  The desirableness of isolating the negro race, and especially of separating them from the various peoples of northern Africa, is too plain to need remark.  Such isolation would remove stupendous difficulties in the way of getting the negro in a favorable attitude for the blows of scientific Christendom (Douglass 1854: 16). 

African Americans have to be given credit for raising this issue consistently for well over 100 years. That said Boof's critique is an important one. Why can't we study the Nubian language with the same vigor that we study the language of the ancient Egyptians? It is, after all, less challenging to speak for a dead civilization than to dialogue with living Africans who might not see the world as we see it. Wouldn't our energy be better used trying to communicate with actually existing black Egyptians? A dialogue with "Black" Egyptians (Nubians), I think, would put us in a better frame of reference for reflecting on the broader Nile Valley cultural/historical context which in turn would lead to better intuitive ideas about the ancient past and a concrete engagement with the Egyptian present. As it stands now, African Americans tend to dominate the conversation on ancient Egypt. We need a more robust and dynamic engagement. 


Boof also calls out minister Farrakhan for siding with Sudanese "Arab" oppressors rather than oppressed "black" Sudanese. Likewise she wonders about African American support for Palestians who are, she says, racists. The NOI has pointed to some serious problems in how the Sudan conflicts are framed (for example, jewish NGOs have been subversively manipulating the narrative to serve their own anti-islamic imperatives. I have witnessed some of this first hand) But I do think NOI is compromised to some degree by the need to shield Bashir and the rest of the gang in Khartoum from criticism. 


Minister Farrakhan and the NOI's international representative, Akbar Muhammad, on Darfur

		KOLA BOOF presents TODAY'S BLACK EGYPTIANS
	KOLA BOOF presents TODAY'S BLACK EGYPTIANSI Still Hear the Lion--Theo Van Gogh PHOTOS of KOLA BOOF THE BIN LADEN I KNEW by Kola Boof NEWS FROM AFRICA HOT NEWS TOPICS: Kola Boof takes on Jackie Susann and Kurt Cobain BOOKS by Kola Boof KOLA BOOF Awarded Sweden's Writer's Pen 2007, SCHOMBURG CENTER Osama Bin Laden and Kola Boof Kola Boof Gives Speech In ISRAEL Kola Boof Hoax Kola's Private Address Book BINT il NIL--KOLA BOOF File Photos of Kola Boof Radio Interview with Kola Boof's Adoptive American Mother Page 5--Controversial Poems PICTURES of Kola Boof KOLA BOOF mobipocket/Kindle e-books POEM HONORING WARD CHURCHILL Kola Boof----WIKIPEDIA	TODAY'S BLACK EGYPTIANS: 2006 An Essay through PHOTOS by Kola Boof About a year ago, one of my uncles wrote to me from Egypt, quite bitterly. He said: People are so busy discussing and fighting over whether or not the ancient Egyptians were  "black" ---that they forgot we're still here. We still exist. The Arabs who claim to be Egyptians have not exterminated ALL of us yet. Kola, you live in America, you're somebody over there. Why don't you say something? You're only claiming SUDAN. But that's not right. Your father was an Egyptian. And he's right. Because of my own bitterness...my hatred and loathing for my father's country...I have been remiss to mention anything about the country.

Read entire post @ Poetwoman.

tags: afrocentric, arab africa, black africa, egypt, kola boof, louis farrakhan, palestinians, racism, Sudan