MEDIA & SOCIETY Proud to Be My Father’s Son….a Few Years Ago Posted by on May 28, 2008, 00:59

A few years ago, in 2004 to be exact,  Dr. Gamal Nkrumah wrote the following appraisal about his father, and in the process put his father in the proper context of African and general human history. He also assessed the relative worth of his father's actions, policies and philosophy to individuals such as Nyerere, Mandela and Kenyatta."Kwame Nkrumah was resolutely pro-people. This fact is the heart and soul of Nkrumaism. This is why I am proud to be my father's son. Nkrumah was pro-people. He could easily have been a Jomo Kenyatta, a Julius Nyerere or a Nelson Mandela. But he was a man of the people of Africa and her children overseas"

Now, what precisely did he mean by this statement?  Well, to understand that, one must recognize that his words were not the words of an admiring son who doted the achievements of a famous father, a father whom the African people selected as the African of the Millennium in a BBC organized vote. Not that Gamal does not cherish his father's memory as a father; but that his words were not a reflection of his sentimental love and respect for his father. They were a reflection of his historical, political-economic, activist, journalists, and academic assessment of his father.  It was an objective observation not a subjective one.
Equally true is his implicit view of the other three, Mr. Mandela, the late Mssrs. Kenyatta and Nyerere.

And what was this implicit view of these three gentlemen? Simply this; each of them settled for a piece of the neo-colonial pie; Kenyatta protected the white settler’s community in Kenya's position and that state remains to this day.  The "Mau Mau" movement, whose actual name was not Mau Mau as they generally referred to themselves as Muingi, Muigwithania, Muma wa Uiguano, which respectively stood for the concept of the movement, unifying understanding and oath or pledge of Unity.  They were also known as the KCA, an acronym for the Kikuyu Central Association, although all the activists were not Kikuyu. Now those who have survived to date refer to themselves as "Land and Freedom Army" veterans.  And they are still agitating around the question of the land as others are for example, the Masai people.  But Kenyatta, with assistance from people such as Thurgood Marshall set up a neo-colonial administration that was acceptable to the British and of course, to the leader of the imperialist pack, the US.  It was also a policy aimed at entrenching the privilege position of the white settlers in Kenya, a reality that exists to this day, which, of course is the reason that the Land and Freedom Army vets and other elements of Kenyan society are still obliged to struggle to reclaim the land.  The dominance of the white settlers, or to be precise the British settlers occupying and controlling contemporary Kenya is obvious.  They still see themselves as the lord and master over the kaffirs (to use the European settlers in South Africa slur word for our people), just look at the cases of Thomas Cholmondeley, the great-grandson of Lord Delamere, who was among the first wave of British invaders, his murder of Samson Ole Sisina, a preserver ranger, in 2005 and  Robert Njoya in 2006.   This policy approach was pursued by Kenyatta with growing vigor as time past and eventually prompted a break with his Vice President Oginga Odinga in Kenyatta's administration, he was the co-founder of KANU, along with Tom Mboya was an outspoken critic of Kenyatta and the author of the book Not Yet Uhuru which delineated the serious errors on the policies followed by the Kenyan state under the extremely reactionary Kenyatta, who in addition to his general errors set up a buffer of elite Kikuyus and ignored all other African elements in the country, as well as the majority of Kikuyus for that matter.  Despite Odinga's error on the question of regionalization relative to the achievement of a United Africa, his book is well worth reading, if one wants to know the truth about Kenyatta.  The extinguished spear.

The same is true of Nyerere, in fact Kwame Nkrumah openly called him a neo-colonialist for calling in the British Army against the Tanzanian troops who rebelled against him; it was Nyerere who was the spokesperson of the anti-Union Government faction in the 1964 OAU meeting opposing every aspect of Nkrumah's proposed Pan-African government, which would have insured the liberation of Africa and the death of neo-colonialism. It was Nyerere who, along with two other African heads of state, supported the attempt to break up Nigeria, which failed as we know.  He sided with the UK, US, Israel, and their kind against the overwhelming majority of Africa, even the overwhelming majority of the reaction in Africa. He said that, just as the Zionist needed a state in occupied Palestine, the Christians needed a separate state in Africa.  That was the reason he gave for supporting the break-up of Nigeria.  This, from a man who listed as one of his objections to Nkrumah's plans for unity that he did not support any changes in the colonial borders of Africa. This he said, in the 1964 meeting. By 1966 under the guidance of his masters in the US and UK he changed his tune, at least as far as breaking up oil-rich Nigeria, and seizing the areas that had the oil. It was Nyerere who rounded up the Africans from the US living  in Tanzania on the eve of the 6PAC meeting in 1974 (held in Tanzania's capital).  It was Nyerere who boasted that he succeeded because he was moderate in his approach to the imperialist, whereas Lumumba and Nkrumah failed because they were radical.

 It was Nyerere who wiped out the movement around Malcolm X' great colleague, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu of Zanzibar, he used to speak at Malcolm's OAU meetings in New York. Babu was the man responsible for setting up the deal with China for the TanZam railroad.  Nyerere pushed Babu out of the Tanzanian government, had him arrested and engaged in a bloody attack on the Moslems of Zanzibar. He stated that Islam was the enemy of Africa, and that he not only modeled his state on the UK but also the Catholic state, the Vatican.  Now here is a man who claimed to be socialist, claimed to be for African unity and what were his models, the British state, a major slave trading and colonizing state from the time of Queen Elizabeth the

First, and the Catholic Church, which sanctioned colonization of Africa and other parts of the world, as acts of bringing heathens to God, and which was directly responsible for administering and adjudicating the slave trade by means of Papal Bulls, this is a well known history, history Nyerere knew about, not some recent discovery or rehabilitated conspiracy theory.  Further, when the CPP government of Ghana was overthrown and the African liberation movement military bases in Ghana destroyed, Tanzania became the locus for the southern African liberation movement.  Nyerere tried to use this status to keep Cuba from helping the African liberation movement.  Remember, it was Cuba that sent forces to help Lumumba, it was Cuba that helped Africa defeat South Africa, Cubans, most of whom were Africans born in this hemisphere, died and bled for Africa in both instances, and this is what Nyerere opposed?

Is there any wonder that the CIA dubbed Nyerere as the best African leader? It is said, that as he approached his death, Nyerere made the statement that he had been wrong and Nkrumah had been right in those days when the fate of Africa was being determined.  A little late, wouldn't you say?
Now, for Nelson Mandela.  Leaving aside the question of the "Freedom Charter" which negated the African legal status as the collective owners of the land and merely concentrating on his deal to get out of prison.  In short, he settled for the following:  we will let you out, help you assume an administrative position of apparent, but faux, power in return for you foregoing any right to bring the crimes committed by us (the settlers and the imperialist generally) to the bar, foregoing any claim to the economic power of the state, even forcing the ANC leadership to change the para-state entities to privately owned, and of course the bulk of the guerrillas in South African prisons, both PAC and ANC affiliated must stay in prison, where they remain to this day.  Further, any socio-economic initiatives taken by Mandela and his cohorts had to scrupulously avoid any damages to what Kissinger had called the "orderly marketing" of the wealth of the area/zone.  In short, the same people were to control it, except for now, the ANC would act as a black face and take the brunt for the same exploitative policies that existed under "apartheid".