Black Against Empire
Page 40
In organizing the first-ever Pan-African Cultural Festival, Algeria sought to play a key role in advancing the interests of African independence. After a decade of bloody guerilla warfare, the Algerians had forced the French out of their country in 1962. The socialist Algerian government wanted to remain independent from Europe and the United States. Algeria had broken off formal diplomatic relations with the United States in 1967 during the Six-Day War involving Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Nevertheless, American companies had invested in the oil and natural gas industry there, providing staff and equipment.
President Houari Boumedienne, one of the leaders of the bloody military struggle for Algerian independence, was a fervent anticolonialist and sought to advance Algerian interests by promoting African unity, Arab unity, and the organization of nonaligned nations that pursued self-determination and resisted falling under the influence of either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1968 and 1969, Boumedienne served as chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). From this post, he sought to strengthen Algeria’s hand in international affairs by building a Pan-African alliance for independence, supporting Pan-African unity generally, and specifically supporting the liberation struggles in African countries that had not yet gained independence. The Algerian government and the OAU organized the Pan-African Cultural Festival as part of this strategy. In particular, the Pan-Africanist leadership at the Algerian festival sought to transcend the racial, cultural, and political barriers that traditionally divided predominantly Arabic North Africa against predominantly black sub-Saharan Africa. The idea was to define the unity of Africa in geographic, class, and social terms. As Keita Mamadi, head of the Guinean delegation said, the conference sought to identify culture as an “arm of economic and social liberation.”15
Each of the forty-one member nations of the OAU was invited to send a delegation to demonstrate its indigenous cultures, including poets, musicians, and dancers. Liberation movements from still-colonized countries in Africa such as South Africa, South-West Africa, Rhodesia, and Angola were also invited to send delegations, as were liberation struggles from certain countries outside Africa, such as Vietnam.16 A contingent of black artists and political figures from the United States was also invited, including singer-pianist Nina Simone, jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, playwright Ed Bullins, and Nathan Hare, former director of the Black Studies Program at San Francisco State.17 The Algerians also invited Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and a delegation from the Black Panther Party.18
Having only recently won independence from France, and with anti-colonial struggles sweeping the globe, the Algerian government took the liberation movements seriously. According to Cleaver, the Algerians related to the Black Panthers “as the nucleus of a future, American government.”19 The New York Times explained the Algerian commitment: “The Algerians, who are only eight years removed from the end of their own war of independence, feel it is natural to support other liberation movements throughout the world. . . . They expect to play a leadership role in a completely decolonized Africa. They are also willing to recognize any movement outside Africa, such as the Panthers, that is struggling against what they consider an imperialist or fascist state.”20
In late May, Kathleen Cleaver, who was eight months pregnant, and Black Panther minister of culture Emory Douglas traveled to Algiers to meet Eldridge. In Paris, they were joined by Julia Hervé, the Pan-African activist and daughter of the eminent black author Richard Wright. Fluent in French and knowledgeable about African cultures and politics, Hervé served as a liaison and guide for the Panthers.21 On July 15, the Algerian government reported that Eldridge Cleaver had arrived in Algiers as a government guest.22 Black Panther chief of staff David Hilliard and minister of education Masai Hewitt also traveled to Algiers for the festival.23
The Black Panther delegation was put up in the government-run Hotel Aletti in the center of Algiers, which became a meeting place for all the political groups there. Kathleen Cleaver recalled, “Mealtimes in the enormous dining hall turned into a lively round of reunions, meetings, connections, and spontaneous gatherings, followed by further meetings in various parts of the sprawling hotel at all times of day and night.”24
On July 21, Algerian desert horsemen galloped through the capital firing rifles to announce the beginning of the first-ever Pan-African Cultural Festival. Four thousand Africans from twenty-four countries helped kick off the twelve-day celebration and series of discussions. The independent revolutionary countries of Guinea, Tanzania, Mali, and the Congo sent large dance troupes. Museums throughout Europe and Africa lent spectacular exhibits of African painting and sculpture. Fourteen countries produced plays and sent acting troupes. Others sent poets, writers, and musicians. Black faces in Algiers were a rarity, and Algerian men, accustomed to veiled women, whistled at black Senegalese singers wearing flowing, strapless gowns. Guinean swordsmen performed tribal dances. Tunisian belly dancers and Moroccan tumblers lifted Algerian spirits. Drummers, jugglers, pipers, and dancers energized a two-hour-long parade through the capital. President Houari Boumedienne denounced the idea of a colonial “civilizing mission,” which the French had promoted, and proclaimed that “culture is a weapon in our struggle for liberation.”25
Algeria’s minister of information, Mohammed Ben Yaya, assigned the Black Panthers a chic office on Rue de Duce Mariad, the main street in downtown Algiers.26 Emory Douglas brought a colorful portfolio of revolutionary artwork to the festival, including posters of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver and provocative graphics from the Black Panther newspaper, such as one of a black woman carrying a baby and wearing a rifle strapped on her back. He displayed the artwork in the window of the office, and crowds of Algerians gathered on the sidewalk to look at the pictures throughout the twelve days of the festival.27 The Panther delegation held a formal opening of its Afro-American Information Center on July 22, 1969. Hervé introduced the Panthers to the audience in French, explaining that when Malcolm X came to Africa, he was only one man, but now the Black Panthers had come as a fully developed revolutionary organization representing the Black Liberation Struggle. Largely sharing the Panthers’ view that American imperialism was their enemy, the Algerian audience responded enthusiastically, packing into the center to hear the speakers and asking lots of questions.28
The Pan-African Cultural Festival placed the Black Panthers amid representatives of anti-imperialist movements and governments from around the globe, and they immediately began networking on a new level internationally. Eldridge Cleaver met with the ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). The Koreans were particularly interested in the Black Panthers and invited Cleaver to attend the upcoming International Conference of Revolutionary Journalists in Pyongyang as a formal guest of the state. Cleaver also met with leaders of Al Fatah, the most powerful Palestinian liberation group led by Yasir Arafat, and he subsequently spoke in support of the Palestinian cause in his speech at the opening of the festival.29
During the festival, the Algerian government sponsored a meeting for representatives of all the liberation struggles there to discuss solidarity and opportunities for supporting each other. Attendees included leaders from the liberation struggles of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Angola, and South Africa, and Black Panther Party Central Committee members David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and Masai Hewitt. The discussion, moderated by a representative of the Algerian government, took place in the courtyard of the house in the Kasbah that had served as the headquarters of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian Revolution. In line with the theme of the festival, the conversation turned to the class character of the global liberation struggle. The representative from Haiti spoke about the rule of François Duvalier:
I would like to say a few words about Duvalier who rules our country, who is Black, who has said that he is in favor of “Negritude” and is one of the worst oppressors that has been known. The experience with Duvalier shows clearly h
ow “Negritude,” which at one point of history, de-colonization, was effective and did achieve a certain amount of liberation and repersonalization of peoples, how this same concept of “Negritude” now turns back against the people. And in the case of Duvalier proves that we have to wage a class struggle. And that in the context of this class struggle, we Black people—if we begin to depend on the power of money, on the power structure and money—we also then become tyrants, dictators, or Tonton Macoutes as in the case in Haiti. And this is why one must destroy all the capitalist structures which create monsters, be they White, Black, or Yellow.30
Eldridge Cleaver maintained that the United States was “bankrolling and arming all of the oppressive regimes around the world. The people have an interest in any amount of pressure that we can put on that government because, if we can just slow it down and force it to have to deal with us, then the other people would be able to liberate themselves and then in return we would expect them to come to our rescue. . . . Like Chairman Bobby Seale always said the best care package that we could send to the other liberation struggles around the world is the work we do at home.”31
AMBASSADORS
In the fall of 1969, the New York Times reported that while in Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver had begun discussions with the Vietnamese delegation to the festival about an exchange of prisoners of war for the release of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton from prison.32 These discussions were part of ongoing relations between antiwar groups and the North Vietnamese and were facilitated by the Panthers’ relations with the Chicago Seven. According to the U.S. House Committee on Internal Security, “During 1968 and until August 1969, the North Vietnamese government released a total of nine American POWs [ . . . as a] propaganda gambit,” which also served to enhance the position of pro-Hanoi “peace groups in the U.S.”33 Unlike the North Vietnamese government’s unilateral release of POWs to antiwar groups, any exchange of POWs for the jailed Panthers would have required the participation of the U.S. government, and the U.S. never made such a deal. But the North Vietnamese did send 379 letters from prisoners of war home to their families in the United States through the Black Panther Party.34
In the year following the Pan-African festival, while the Algerian government allowed the Cleavers to stay in Algiers, it did not initially extend official status to the Black Panther Party. In the spring of 1970, the status of the Black Panthers in Algeria began to improve, in part through the intervention of Mohammed Yazid, a powerful Algerian diplomat whose wife was American. The Algerian government accredited the Black Panthers as one of twelve liberation movements that merited support in overthrowing the governments in their respective countries. Among the other liberation movements it cited were those in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Palestine, Brazil, Rhodesia, South-West Africa, and South Africa.
The Black Panthers were the only Americans recognized by the Algerian government since it had broken off diplomatic relations with the United States. An Algerian spokesman explained the rationale to a reporter: “These groups are generally involved in a clear-cut colonial situation. What right have the Portuguese got to be in Africa? It’s as simple as that.”35 With the Black Panthers’ new official status, the Algerian government granted entrance and exit visas for guests; official identity cards, which made it possible to register cars and open post office boxes; and a monthly stipend.36
That June, the Algerians presented the Panthers with an embassy building for the International Section of the Black Panther Party. The embassy was a beautiful Mediterranean-style white stucco and marble building with open, airy archways and whitewashed stairwells in El Biar, a suburb in the hills outside Algiers. It stood two stories above-ground, surrounding a courtyard garden, and a sublevel contained quarters for a maid and a cook.37
In the summer of 1970, a delegation of Panthers and their allies made a trip through Asia, during which they were welcomed as official guests of the governments in North Vietnam, North Korea, and China. The eleven members of the delegation were Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown from the Black Panther Party; Robert Scheer and Jan Austin from Ramparts; Regina Blumenfeld and Randy Rappaport of the Women’s Liberation Movement; Alex Hing of the Red Guard; Ann Froines of the Panther Defense Committee of New Haven; Patricia Sumi of the Movement for a Democratic Military; Andy Truskier of the Peace and Freedom Party; and Janet Kranzberg.38
The group arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea, on July 14, 1970, and was greeted at the airport by Kang Ryang Uk, vice president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, and other dignitaries.39 The delegation traveled the country meeting with local officials to discuss ways that anti-imperialist movements in North Korea and the United States could help each other. The official North Korean government newspaper printed a statement expressing solidarity with the Black Panther Party. The statement discussed the imprisonment and abuse of Bobby Seale, the repression of the Black Panther Party, and the plight of American blacks generally and ended with a pledge of solidarity:
The Korean people send firm militant solidarity to the Black Panther Party of the U.S.A. and the American Negroes that have been shedding blood in their arduous but just struggle in the teeth of the brutal repression by the U.S. imperialists, the chieftain of world imperialism, the ring leader of world reaction and the common enemy of the world people, and they will give them active support and encouragement in the future too. The Black Panther Party of the U.S.A and the Negroes that are commanding the support and encouragement of the progressive American people and the revolutionary people of the whole world are bound to be crowned with a final victory in their just struggle.40
After Korea, the delegation traveled to Hanoi, North Vietnam, as the government’s official guests of honor for the “international day of solidarity with the black people of the United States” on August 18, 1970. In Hanoi, Phm Vn ng, the prime minister of North Vietnam, gave a sake toast to the Black Panthers: “In the West, you are a black in the shadow. In Vietnam, you are a black in the Sun!”41 Like the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese saw the Black Panther Party and its allies in the United States as freedom fighters waging a liberation struggle against a shared enemy—U.S. imperialism. The North Vietnamese government published an editorial in its official newspaper titled “An Inevitably Victorious Cause” celebrating the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States as a common cause:
The Vietnamese people, who are now opposing the American imperialist aggressors with arms, consider the black people of the United States in the struggle for their emancipation as their natural companions in arms and allies. The more the Nixon group develops its aggression in Indochina, the more it develops its repression and terror against the black people and the forces of peace and progress in America. It sheds the blood of young blacks in Indochina while their compatriots have need of their arms and their brains to engage the struggle in the U.S.A. We follow with deep sympathy the progress realized by the black people in the United States on the difficult path of resistance and courage, similar to our own struggle against aggression.42
The North Vietnamese invited Cleaver to speak to black GIs fighting in Vietnam from the Voice of Vietnam radio station in Hanoi. He gladly accepted. After introducing himself and giving a historical overview of the war, Cleaver called on black GIs fighting in Vietnam to join the Black Liberation Struggle. He argued that the U.S. government had put them on the front line against their own interests: “What they’re doing is programming this thing so that you cats are getting phased out on the battlefield. They’re sticking you out front so that you’ll get offed. And that way they’ll solve two problems with one little move: they solve the problem of keeping a large number of troops in Vietnam; and they solve the problem of keeping young warriors off the streets of Babylon. And that’s a dirty, vicious game that’s being run on you. And I don’t see how you can go for it.”43 From Vietnam, the delegation traveled to China for a government-sponsored tour of factories, hospitals, and new housing developments.44 Finally, the delegation retur
ned to Algiers.
On November 1, 1970, after seeing President Houari Boumedienne off at the airport, Wei Pao Chang, the Chinese ambassador to Algeria, made his way to the villa in El Biar for a reception at the Black Panther embassy. Two bronze plaques shone as he entered the gate, each emblazoned with the symbol of a crouching panther and the words “Black Panther Party—International Section” inscribed in Arabic. Upon entering the villa, Wei Pao Chang was greeted by Eldridge Cleaver, the towering Black Panther ambassador to Algeria, who was hosting the reception. Through translators provided by the Algerian government, Cleaver told Chang about his recent government-sponsored tour of China. The discussion turned to the United States. “We are enemies to the death with the American government,” Chang told Cleaver, “because of its support of the puppet regime in Formosa [Taiwan]. But we have great sympathy for the American people. We hope you will overcome the American monopolies.”45 Representatives of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the government of North Korea, and members of other socialist governments and liberation movements from around the world also attended the reception.
Each of the movements represented at the reception had started out nonviolently but had eventually turned to armed struggle. Johnnie Makatini, ambassador to Algeria from South Africa’s African National Congress, recalled, “It was the same year Albert Luthli won the Nobel Peace Prize that we opted for violence. On the day he came back from Stockholm, December 15, 1961, there were explosions all over the country.” Joseph Turpin, the ambassador to Algeria from Guinea-Bissau recalled that it was after the strike in Pijiguiti, when police killed fifty longshoremen, that “we decided armed struggle was the only way.” Cleaver explained the shift among American blacks: “With us it was the death of Martin Luther King.” King’s assassination, he explained, “exhausted the myth that you could get what you want without fighting, that when the plantation foreman cracks the whip you turn the other cheek.” The conversation turned at a later point to the theories of Frantz Fanon, a key supporter and perceptive analyst of the Algerian revolution, and to the Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. One of the guests said he was impressed by Cleaver’s grasp of revolutionary theory. “I had nine years to study it,” Cleaver said. The guest replied, “The French say that prisons are the antechambers of cabinet ministries.” Cleaver smiled. “We’re not there yet,” he said.46