The War of Words Over Zimbabwe Continues

Little Haiti Opposes ALD Revisionists



African Liberation Day has historically played a major role in keeping the revolutionary tradition alive in the US black community. This day has been used to introduce our community to liberation movements around the world. Held to counter xenophobia and racism, as well as to expose reactionaries, ALD has always served as an important event for building Black unity.

Dramatically dissing a worldwide ALD tradition, Pittsburgh’s Black Voices for Peace held a discussion on Zimbabwe which amounted to a categorical attack on ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe. The limited mass appeal of this event attracted less than twenty onlookers.

The presenter, Mike Matambanadzo, substantiated not one single allegation. His ridiculous assertions were at times unbelievable even to Black Voices, who upheld his propaganda nonetheless. A professor and a Zimbabwean exile, he framed his presentation on a wholesale repudiation of Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe African National Union/Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).

Wearing a Che Guevara tee, the professor stated early on that Morgan Tsvangarai’s MDC had won recent elections outright, an unsupportable position. The MDC itself recognizes that a runoff is necessary, yet Matambanadzo still insisted that they had won over fifty percent. He said that ZANU has bankrupted the country. The professor denied that ZANU contributed to the liberation struggle and discounted ZANU-PF’s long-time popularity not only in Zimbabwe but thru out the region and the rest of Africa.

Needing points from the outset, Black Voices and Matambanadzo cited Fidel Castro and Amilcar Cabral to contextualize their neo-colonialist revision of ALD.

Matambanadzo stated that an impoverished Zimbabwe had no computer at its embassy, therefore preventing him from returning home. As a well-paid professor, he may contribute one himself and thereby expedite the process for obtaining his passport. Yeah, right.

He stated that ZANU invaded DR Congo to loot the country of precious resources. When challenged on this point, he could not verify nor explain why ZANU had, at this juncture, turned its back on Black liberation and abandon the troubled Kabila government.

Black Voices passed out a confusing, wild statement by Horace Campbell, posted 31 July 03 in The Black Commentator, which subheads “Charles Taylor and Jonas Savimbi as freedom fighters”. Those words constitute revision in any context whatsoever. Obviously, Campbell at some time or another lacked clarity about Taylor and Savimbi, but Black Internationalists knew. CORE’s Roy Innis supported Savimbi because both lived on the neo-con payroll.

Where did Horace Campbell develop this gaslight theory that the liberation movement ever embraced those criminals? In making that claim, Campbell avoids declaring who took in and accepted Taylor or Savimbi. Why the cover up, when the masses should be informed. The US black liberation movement basically consists of groups and splinters which have rejected Savimbi and Taylor. Unlikely, but perhaps somewhere a Black Student Organization invited them to speak. The NAACP had clarity on those sub-imperialists.

Slinging garbage at Saddam Hussein, Campbell comes across like Curveball in the weeks up to and preceding the US invasion of Iraq. The primary contradiction posed by Iraq, the only industrialized Arab country, was its defiance; Iraqi Arab women had greater freedom under the Ba’athists than under US occupation, a point missed by Campbell.

Did Campbell ever read Galeano, Walter Rodney, Geo GM James, Fanon, Cabral, Biko, George Jackson, Lenin and Mao instead of neo-liberals and Trots. As a professor, he needs open his mind to Akua Njeri, Omali Yeshitela, Bob Brown, Abdul Alkalimat, Elizabeth Sibeko and Fred Hampton Jr. The Syracuse U professor can contact me and maybe I’ll make some introductions for him to some grass roots organizers.

Now Horace Campbell wants to articulate the Zimbabwe question. ZANU has never attacked another African state, tho they and the Tanzanians were tempted when Malawi assisted SADF's destabilization of the Mozambique revolution by providing bases for Renamo. ZANU has not behaved as a counterinsurgency force in Africa, despite Campbell's comparisons to Savimbi’s UNITA or Taylor. I kno Campbell is considered a heavyweight, yet imposing US bourgeois democratic standards on Imperialism’s new hot potato in Africa, he offers no solutions to contradictions which degrade life all over the Motherland. The fixes he wants for Zimbabwean society cannot be implemented from Syracuse U.

Imperialism’s transformation under neo-conservatism -- Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, offers the most definitive analysis for the New Millennium to date -- reveals the extent to which Campbell, Bill Fletcher and the rest of the crew actually tail the masses. In the end, Imperialism will make a clean sweep of Southern Africa behind pretexts provided them by neo-colonial social workers.

Meanwhile, straw man Matambanadzo’s unsubstantiated screwball allegations faced challenges but the small audience’s anti-Mugabe contingent shouted down and castigated my efforts to correct the record. Black Voices required no substantiation for his ridiculous claims.

Working class attendees seemed at a loss to sum up the event in their usual gracious terms, because the professor’s bizarre views conflicted with African Liberation Day tradition.

The speaker even said Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is one million percent, an unheard of ratiocination by any modern economics standard. He repeated this assertion for emphasis. Long before reaching 1,000,000% inflation, it would be more efficient for peasants to acquire foreign paper than for the government to print so many worthless denominations. The media has put this lie into people's minds, while simultaneously claiming that the government ordered a shipload of Chinese manufacture weapons. Nevermind the payment process.

Plus, the instructor made this claim as if no world economic crisis exists, as if any African economy may withstand IMF/World Bank and WTO currency manipulations.

Matambanadzo yakked as tho his CIA training conflated his sense of arrogance. Yet only an irrepressibly stupid idiot would try to convince an audience that 1,000,000% inflation exists in a country which fought for its freedom. As if nobody can take up arms against this alleged monster of a regime. Confronting mismanagement on the level presented by the exile professor, Zimbabwe’s seasoned army could easily coup the mis-leader Mugabe.

This Ph.D. denied the critical role ZANU fighters played in bringing about a negotiated settlement after years of violent warfare. ZANLA fighters kept Ian Smith‘s apartheid regime off balance and unable to operate. Matambanadzo gave all credit to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for settling all scores. He discredited anything ZANU ever accomplished.

He disavowed all reasons for ZANU having ever been immensely popular thru out the African world. Bob Marley played his greatest concert at Zimbabwe’s independence celebration. COSATU’s General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has in the past made unqualified remarks expressing admiration and support for ZANU-PF because it assisted freedom fighters. South Africa’s black presidents and members of other liberation movements from Mozambique to Tanzania have in years gone by fiercely defended the ZANU-PF fighting tradition.

Chalk ZANU popularity up to an X-File, if we may believe Black Voices for Peace.

Gail Alston joined the attack on ZANU for the AIDS epidemic, for masses of orphans, for patriarchy and sexism and other ills. Of course, AIDS coincidentally entered Africa as colonialism came to an end there. She asserted the former colonial regime had made life better for Africans. Matambanadzo strongly agreed, saying that Africans were better paid and trade unions had greater freedom when the Rhodesians held power.

Black Voices’ Fred Logan summed up that Africans did not suffer from these conditions under colonialism altho, he said, opposition to white domination seemed to form a sharper struggle than the one against ZANU’s “black capitalism”.

The Black Internationalist stance does not mean ZANU and its leadership do not have profound contradictions, that they may be at odds with the Zimbabwean masses, and that there may even exist a powerful neo-colonial sector there allied with Imperialism. But black capitalism is not necessarily Imperialist, and certainly not the primary contradiction, altho it remains odious. We must understand, the petty bourgeoisie in our community have always transformed from their militant garb when they recognized “race” peace. Telling sensational accounts of the Zimbabwean first lady’s wardrobe is best left for Jet Magazine. Spreading outright and obvious mendacities to support a half-baked analysis does not separate Black Voices from their criticisms of ZANU.

Imperialism remains the root cause of antagonistic relationships within society. Freedom fighters must continue to develop the analysis of Imperialism and build an ideological culture war to combat conditions imposed on us from this system. Instead, the “Black Left” provides ideological justifications for white power attacks on the comradeship of African peoples.

Because Matambanadzo hails from Zimbabwe, must we credentialize him as an authority? We would have accepted Yonah Alexander’s word on terrorism in 1985 in that case, the former think tank advisor to Reagan’s NSA. When he made his racist propaganda speech at CCAC back then, student and community activists lit into him like a pit bull on a pork chop. That type of response is now being rebuilt so that African Internationalism can shape black workers power.

Pittsburgh has a small activist community where cronyism and self-aggrandizement has in the past scarred mass perceptions of liberation politics. Contradictions which demobilized the once-promising Little Haiti BRC emerge out of this background. In the climate of a racist, predatory war, such forces have now become bold enuf to attack Black liberation in the open.

At the same time, Pittsburgh’s black workers have a great reputation for struggle. Many of us kno that the liberation dialectic does not involve criticism of this character. Black Voices “anti-capitalism” alongside Matambanadzo’s anti-dialectical propagandizing sharply contrasts with the Black Internationalist workers who have historically upheld African liberation and the day which commemorates it. It was rank how the reactionaries jumped up to pass out hugs and handshakes when they declared an end to their revisionist putsch.

ALD’s format for discussing contradictions within the liberation movement has been to frame that struggle within the context of Imperialism. Because, of course, dialectics is the study of contradictions. Unbridled attacks on black states permit Imperialism to move boldly against our friends and support our enemies. Black Voices and Horace Campbell’s 2003 article both invoke the name of Fidel Castro, but the Cuban Revolution has not made public criticisms of Zimbabwe. That difference draws the distinction between empiricism, and dialectics.

Imperialism, the fusion of industrial and banking finance, was called the highest stage of capitalism by Lenin. Nkrumah stated that neo-colonialism constitutes the final stage of Imperialism, making Klein’s book all the more relevant. African people have our contradictions with Mugabe. However, proposing impractical textbook “paradigms” for Zimbabwe, while offering up pretexts for Imperialism’s destabilization of another African state is counterinsurgency and neo-colonialism. The primary contradiction continues to be US Imperialism, which remains the enemy of Black Internationalists and the genuine African liberation movement in everywhere.