Remembering Tajudeen: Speaking truth to power

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

WALTER TURNER: Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem worked under many titles and missions. Born in Nigeria, he received his doctorate degree in Oxford. He was director of London based Africa Research and Information Bureau and one of the founding editors of Africa Review and worked as secretary general of the seventh Pan-African Congress which was held in Uganda, the general secretary of Pan-African Movement, chairman of the Senate Development of Democracy, Justice in Africa, United Nations Millennium Campaign which was in Uganda.

He began to write actively a series of Pan-African postcards around the time of overturn of the Mabutu government. They morphed into Thursday postcards, which appeared in Pambazuka Newsletter. On May 25th 2009, African Liberation Day, Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem made his transition to the ancestors. Recently released a book entitled ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards’ on Pambazuka Press with the support of the African Women’s Development Fund and CODESRIA.

In the beginning there is a forward by Dr Horace Campbell who is Professor of African Studies and Political Sciences at Syracuse University. Dr Campbell has written extensively on Africa. He has a new book coming out on Pluto Press ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics’. He also has another publication on Africom ‘the US command on Africa’. He was a good friend of Tajudeen, and he talks to us today to talk about the life and work of Tajudeen and some of the ways that his work is being carried forward.

Horace, thank you for joining us.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Thank you for inviting me for this historic occasion, because it is too important that young people draw inspiration from the life and work and commitment of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.

WALTER TURNER: What were you working to say in your foreword about Tajudeen in that address and the one you made in London in July? What was some of the key points that you wanted to emphasise for many people who may not know of Tajudeen?

HORACE CAMPBELL: That Tajudeen committed himself to dignity, dignity of all people. He committed himself to this principle and he involved himself in organising, and he organised at different levels. He spent his time with the most oppressed, and Tajudeen also had a vision. That vision was a free Africa, a united Africa and African people creating spaces where they can be creative and change the planet in which we live, and these features of the life of Tajudeen are features that we hope that younger people will emulate as we go through the tribulation of the present moment.

WALTER TURNER: Horace whenever we talk you always say we are in a revolutionary moment, and I know you mean that in a broad sense, but I also know that you mean it in a sense of African peoples world wide. Why do you say that? Interpret that for us, Horace.

HORACE CAMPBELL: This revolutionary moment transcends boarders. As we speak in the United States of America, this crisis of environmental justice, it’s sharpening to us more than ever that we have to change this system of economic organisation.

Every moment that we are alive and breathing we have signals that the planet is in peril and we have passed a tipping point and drastic measures must be taken. It is just as if there was a wake up call – less than two weeks after President Obama announced that United States government would initiate offshore drilling, we have this terrible catastrophe orchestrated by Halliburton, and British Petroleum and Transocean in the gulf of Mexico. A catastrophe, which reminds those who have been paying attention, of the catastrophic conditions of mining and drilling that has gone on in Africa.

So the environmental question is at the forefront of the revolutionary conditions that we are in. If we add to that the question of the financial crisis – which is a manifestation of the crisis of capitalism – we say the way in which in United States of America the government is willing to expend trillions of dollars to bail out the banking system. That is, according to the thinking of the country, the profitability of banks is more important than health and welfare of ordinary citizens, so that the sharpening of the contradictions within the United States of America is forcing the people to make choices. Will they support old ideas of white supremacy, capitalist accumulation, profit before all, and environmental destruction and war or will they support peace, withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, reparation and social justice.

And these questions in United States are replicated in all parts of the world. We see it in South African, in Durban, we see it in Nigeria, we see it in the Congo, and we see it in Ethiopia, in Somalia and in Europe we are seeing it on the daily basis in Greece. We seeing it sireland (???), in all parts of the world. The question is will the wealthier, the well being of citizens, human beings, come before a small group, and the fall out of the crisis in Greece will be played out in Portugal, in Spain and in Britain and in Scotland. We are in a long period of revolutionary change. What we need are the ideas and the organisation so that counter-revolution, fascism does not take over in this period of economic crisis.

WALTER TURNER: What did your good friend Tajudeen, Horace, mean? How do you interpret it for us when he used the word Pan-Africanism. It’s used often in history but that was the title of his postcards when he began them, Pan-African Postcards. Talk about what Pan-Africanism means for the work you do and the work that Tajudeen was doing.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Pan-Africanism in the world we live now and the world that Tajudeen did, it’s about the dignity of all human beings. This concept of dignity today means that women should have access to health care. And as you read in the book of his postcards, one of the things that concerned Tajudeen, women should not die in child-birth. How do we create a social system that provides health care for all so that health care is a right by birth for everyone in the society?

So the Pan-Africanism of the era of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem – and in all eras – is the Pan-Africanism that repairs the dignity of not only human beings, but ecosystems and the planet earth. Recently, we have the development of the Pan-African Environmental Justice Network, that came to the forefront in Copenhagen. These are new areas of Pan-African struggle – over health, environment, dignity, education, and more importantly, peace. These new questions of Pan-Africanism, they are liberating us from the Pan-Africanism of states.

For a 100 years from 1900–1994, Pan-Africanism was conceptualised as the liberation of states and when South Africa ended apartheid, through the struggles of their people in 1994, the idea of Pan-Africanism being vested in the liberation of states was qualified that Pan-Africanism in the liberation of states is an important step, but its not sufficient for the dignity and wellbeing of the peoples.

I mean for that reason it is in South Africa where Treatment Action Campaign is carrying forward the struggles for healthcare, the struggles for water, electricity –what they call in South Africa ‘service delivery’. So if we can say in the 19th century Pan-Africanism was the fight to end slavery… When we fought to end slavery from the Haitian revolution to present we found that ending slavery was not sufficient to give us dignity. In the United States of America the foremost Pan-Africanist thinkers emerged in the struggles against Jim Crow and against disenfranchisement. W.E.B. DuBois called five Pan-African congresses. Those congresses also said that the question of independence of Africa is central to Pan-Africanism so we have a second queue to Pan-Africanism that talked about independence and ended in Jim Crow. But ending Jim Crow and civil rights legislation did not change the conditions of the people. Then we went to the stage of fighting against apartheid.

We are in a new stage of the Pan-Africanism in the biotic (10.51) century. This Pan-Africanism is not about governments, or about great leaders, because as we have seen leaders such as Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni, or Meles in Ethiopia, they use the language of the old Pan-Africanism to keep themselves in power, while oppressing the masses of the people. So the Pan-Africanism of today is about dignity and the well being of ordinary citizens and it is not racially exclusive, because Pan-Africanism is linked to the dignity, not only the Africans but of all peoples in the world.

WALTER TURNER: We are talking about the new book out ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards’, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. Speaking with Professor Horace Campbell of Syracuse University, good friend who is now doing the Pan-African Postcards. I was interested as I read you, Horace, that initially those postcards came at the time of the end of the Mobutu Sese Seko government and later we began to see them as Thursday postcards in Pambazuka. I am interested in some of that history but I am also interested in the points there that Tajudeen raised, some of his most brilliant pieces at least from my impression, corrupt leaders and mass murders, does Meles think that he is Africa’s George Bush? Zimbabwe is as good a place to draw the line as any right now. Talk about the root of the postcards in this, as Tajudeen says the need to liberate ourselves from liberators?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Yes, that is such a wonderful statement that you’ve just made, we must liberate ourselves from liberators, because Tajudeen was very clear that when liberators become murderers, become oppressors, we who supported those liberators, should also liberate ourselves from supporting those liberators.

The best example was Tajudeen’s own experience in Uganda, where he had been introduced to Yoweri Museveni by Abdulrahman Babu, who wanted Tajudeen to work from Uganda. Uganda had been through armed struggle for fighting against militarism and Museveni came to power in 1986 and presented himself as a liberator, so that Uganda should be the base for supporting the Pan-African movement and Tajudeen learnt bitterly the way in which the liberator, Museveni, was turning into an oppressor of the people, unleashing a militarism to the point in which today Uganda is a society where the accumulation of wealth by the ruling elite is so obscene, the ideas of the leaders are so backward that they have aligned themselves with the most conservative sections of United States, saying that homosexuals should be put to death and one of the things that Pan-Africanists must be very clear about, we can not fight for dignity for one group of people and oppress others and that is why women have emerged as leading spokespersons for Pan-Africanism, because they have been at the forefront of the fight against sexism and all forms of oppression.

There has been a silence within the ranks of the Pan-Africanists over the attempted legislation in Uganda to put homosexuals to death. This idea that people who are of the same sexual orientation are somehow deviant and should be put to death was promoted by very conservative sections in the United States of America, so Pan-Africanists cannot be silent when there is oppression of peoples. So we have Meles in Ethiopia, we have Mugabe in Zimbabwe and you’ve heard me on this programme many times thinking about why I had to write the book ‘Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation’ because it is that mode of liberation where the liberators themselves become corrupt and became murderers, and Tajudeen was not shy in speaking to their faces, because Tajudeen was on first name basis with all of these leaders. He knew them, he operated as a writer, as a diplomat, and as an activist within the Pan-African movement. So, Tajudeen was not afraid to speak to these leaders and to write about what they were doing, and I believe that postcards and this book ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ will be such an educational tool to a younger generation, who have been be-saddled by leaders such as Robert Mugabe.

WALTER TURNER: You, Horace, you knew Tajudeen, you knew him well. In one of the pieces there he talks about a dialogue that you and him and a good friend from the University of Makerere were having about the up coming US elections. The book is absolutely breath-taking in terms of the depth, I mean he talks with ease about the developments in Venezuela, as well as he talks about Cuba, as well he talks about Africa, Asia, etcetera. Where does his brilliance come from? How it does make it so much from somebody who is on the ground, to print, to diplomacy, to global activism? I am asking you personally if you’ll share that with us.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Well, Tajudeen was a brilliant person as you said, and if you met Tajudeen, he was so relaxed. He was so unassuming and he could move in the inner circle. As you said he moved with presidents but he spent most with the down trodden. Tajudeen was a Rhodes Scholar, who went to Oxford University. Even when he was being interviewed by the panel of Dons from Oxford about accepting him to Oxford he made it very clear what he thought about Cecil Rhodes and the history of Rhodesia but he was so brilliant that they thought once he got to Oxford, he could be seduced by the rituals and by the pomp and the privilege that one would see in Oxford University, but he, while in Oxford, participated with like-minded persons who were also brilliant, who wanted to use their knowledge on the side of the people and he would say clearly that he was at Oxford and he met persons such as Susan Rice, but Susan Rice, who is now the ambassador of United States to United Nations, had no time for questions of anti-apartheid and fighting struggles for oppressed peoples. So, one could see that Oxford was a place that the ruling class used as a recruiting ground for those who would govern the masses of the people through out the world, but Tajudeen used his time in Oxford to agitate around questions of Palestine, around questions of Kenyan dictatorship, around questions of apartheid and yet while doing that he found time to do his research and write a brilliant thesis about militarism in Nigeria. The moment he completed his doctorial degree, Tajudeen went and served the people of Africa.

You mentioned it in the introduction that he was one of the founders of the Africa World Review, and the Africa Research Information Bulletin in London. Tajudeen was a glue in London that kept the left and radical progressive together. Radicals not only from Africa, from Latin America, from Asia and from Palestine and then Tajudeen went from there and worked in Uganda as the general secretary of the global Pan-African Movement at a great sacrifice to himself and to his family, because at that time he was having affair with his wife to be Munira and he subsequently had the two children, two beautiful children. But, what many people do not know is that Tajudeen did all of this at a great sacrifice because he should’ve been paid by the Ugandan government but the corruption in Uganda meant that the monies that were expended for the secretariat did not get to the secretariat, so Tajudeen was basically for about eight years working gratis for building this movement called the Global Pan African Movement, and that is why it is our belief that we as a movement owe great debt to Tajudeen and his family in England and his wider family in Nigeria where Tajudeen sought to build an institution. He build a community college named after his sister who died in child birth in Funtua and when we hear about violence in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims, we understand that Tajudeen in his life as a follower of the Islamic faith did not manifest all of those prejudices and differences that are being exploited by leaders. So we have an exemplary person, one who devoted his life, his talent and his brilliance towards the dignity and […]of the peoples in all parts of the world.

WALTER TURNER: We are speaking to Horace Campbell. We are talking about the new book on Pambazuka press Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem’s ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards’ done with the assistance of the African Women’s Development Fund and CODESRIA. You mentioned something, Horace, in your presentation in July and you mentioned it again in the forward to the book that you wrote, and that you mentioned, and I know that you did this around the work around the campaign leading up to the election of Obama, you mentioned that Tajudeen always mentioned that he was the son of a ‘petty trader’. Why did you include that? Why did Tajudeen always make sure people knew that?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Because, there are so many in leadership positions who manifest great disdain for poor persons. There are many who are leaders, who come from humble backgrounds, but use their humble backgrounds as a basis to say I made it and so everyone else can make it. It’s like rag to riches story, but Tajudeen was making a statement that his mother was a humble trader. That there are millions of women in Africa who are seeking to eke out an existence, who want to have a better quality of life. What do we mean by that? They want very simple things, food, clothing, shelter and healthcare and the tragedy is in this era of great technological advances we can not provide these basic requirements for human beings, so we hear all kinds of statistics from the world bank about people in Africa living on less than a dollar a day, and we hear about the statistics of Millennium Development Goals. But, behind these statistics lay a fundamental understanding of the world that capitalism and the capitalist mode of production is the best way forward for human beings. But Tajudeen was pointing to the fact that ordinary people like his mother struggled for him to go to school and they are struggling to change their conditions and conditions of their family, and we cannot change these conditions through capitalism because capitalism has destroyed the lives of millions and capitalism promises to destroy planet earth if we do not change the social system.

WALTER TURNER: Horace, I haven’t been able to attend one but I know people that have. When I heard about it and read about it, it sounded like a mirror of the work that you done with Tajudeen globally and it seemed to be really be in some senses like sharing a baton around on the work around building a Pan-African community, and that’s a series of African initiatives that you have been holding at your institution with support from number of different areas. You had one on China, you had one on Zimbabwe. What are you focusing? What are you looking top do here, Horace, with the African initiatives that you have been part sponsoring?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Well our task within the spaces that we inhabit at the moment is to point to an alternative future. Our task is to point to the possibilities that were pointed to by our ancestors. Our ancestors lived through enslavement and they fought against enslavement and they organised for a better standard of living for us.

Within the university at the moment, the university is torn between the pathology of Africa, the idea of representing Africa as a failed state. Where, there are corrupt leaders, and there’s wars and terrorism and we need humanitarian involvement with international NGOs.

Our task in the Africa Initiative is to break the pathology about Africa, and to represent new scholarship that recognises that the African peoples have always been at the forefront of the fighting for Ubuntu. That is for peace, love, reconciliation and sharing and this peace, love, reconciliation and sharing will inform the Africa of the future, if the scholarship of today creates in the minds of the young people, the confidence that they can make history and that they can make changes.

It is the attempt to inspire confidence in young students black and white, Chinese and Indian, Latin American and Eurasian. That is our task for every moment that we live, that we do not support the kind of systems that undermine the confidence in young people, that tells them that they can not think for themselves, that they can not write and they can not make history.

So, our last meeting on Africa and China was to intervene in the growing industry that is called Chinaphobia in the United Sates, where there is an attempt to present China as the new exploiter of Africa. What we are seeing is that, the African peoples will organise with the Chinese people so that they will ensure that China does not become an exploiter of Africa. Even if there are some capitalists in China who would like to lay down this tradition, it is not for Europeans to tell Africans about Chinese potential exploitation, while there is contemporary United States and European exploitation of Africa.

Africans can see for themselves and what we need to do is to do the kind of scholarship the kind of agitation that will support the African peoples and the Chinese peoples, so that one of the important questions that came out in our last symposium in Syracuse was about the conditions of African workers. Their struggles for healthcare by African workers, their struggles for eight-hour days, their struggles against bad conditions in mines, so when that Chinese capitalists come to Africa in the Congo and in Zambia and reproduce labour conditions that are dangerous for the African peoples, the African workers will struggle against the Chinese capitalists as well as against European or African capitalists. So, it is how to build relations between China and Africa, between Chinese traditional medicine and African medicine, between Chinese cultural workers and African cultural workers. As one of our feminist sisters, […] said in the conference, that many people talk about bridges and infrastructure, and rail road and oil, but all of these are masculine concepts, because Chinese/African relations are reflected through human beings. What is the cultural contact between China and Africa and how will this enrich China and Africa, or how will it diminish China and Africa. So that we in the Africa initiative, we are seeking to break new bounds away from the cold war politics of Africa or the old terrorist narrative on Africa.

WALTER TURNER: The book is out, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards: Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem’. What do people here in the diaspora – that’s always been part of what you talk about Horace – what do people here in the United States, in the Caribbean –Tajudeen’s work was global, he was known more in Africa and Europe and many other places than perhaps we know or recognise him here – what’s our task in terms of what Tajudeen’s vision was and is?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Our task is a task that Malcolm X laid for us. Next week we are remembering Malcolm X’s life and death. Malcolm X was a freedom fighter who transformed himself from a pimp, from a preacher to a leader of international recognition. And Malcolm X said if you do not know what’s going on in the Congo, you will not know what’s going on in Mississippi.

In other words at a time when Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, and at a time when people were fighting with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, Malcolm X was saying one struggle and many fronts. The same struggle for dignity in Mississippi was the same struggle that going on in the Congo.

Today we have been domesticated by politics in each of our individual countries, so we do not know of the struggles of the Columbian workers against narco-traffickers and militarists. We do not know of struggles in Haiti, of the people of Haiti that want a government that is not controlled by drug traffickers and international humanitarian imperialist, they call NGOs. We do not know of struggles in France of women who want their dignity as women, whether they follow the Islamic faith or not. We do not know of the struggles inside of the Congo against rape and violation.

So what Tajudeen stood for was that he wrote on Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, Sudan, Jamaica, Guyana; He did not know boarders in the Pan-African world and that is what we are looking to. We are looking forward to the youth of today understanding that the struggles in Louisiana today over the deport and raise of oil spill can not be separated from the struggles in the Niger Delta where Shell oil company has spoilt and destroyed the environment.

WALTER TURNER: You have two books coming out Horace. Let us know what those titles are?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Well, the first one,which is coming out in August, I’ve just finished going through the page proofs – is ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA’ – has been published by Pluto Press and it addresses the convergence of the revolutionary forces in the United States and globally. The second one is exposure of United States Africa command and that will be published by Pambazuka. Press By the way every week, I now have weekly column called pan African postcard which is published at Pambazuka News and for the next five years Pambazuka will be working within the tradition of Tajudeen to build the unity of the peoples of Africas, Because the unity of the peoples of Africa and the coming together of the peoples of Africa will strengthen Africa in the midst of this economic crisis.

WALTER TURNER: Those are some big shoes Horace. Writing the Thursday postcard when I mentioned to you earlier, you responded with a bit of a smile and bit of a laugh. Those are big shoes to fill, the shoes of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

HORACE CAMPBELL: Oh, I do not hope to fill the shoes of Tajudeen. I am hoping to make a contribution. Tajudeen is someone who has made his contribution and Tajudeen’s contribution will stand on its own. I was trying to make my own contribution.

WALTER TURNER: Well, we certainly appreciate you Horace and we hope that you continue to take good care of yourself. And you continue to write and help us all to seize this particular moment. ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards’ by Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. We are talking with professor Horace Campbell. He has been gracious enough to spend time with us talking about the book coming out. Professor Campbell has two books coming out: ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA’, that’s coming out on Pluto Press very soon and ‘Africom’ which is coming out on Pambazuka Press. He has other book is out, the myth ‘Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation’ and you can read his column weekly in Pambazuka, which is www.pambazuka.org Horace please give our best to your family.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Thank you very much and I hope we will stay in touch.

WALTER TURNER: Pleasure my brother.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Thank you.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem's 'Speaking Truth to Power: Selected Pan-African Postcards' is available now from [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.