Panel #4: 2022 GPAM People’s Intervention
Pan African Alternatives
Panel Chair: Makini Campbell
Panelists:
- Husamuddine Ismail, Old Omdurman RC Member, Sudan
- Michael Ralph, Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies
- Fanon che Wilkins, GPAM North America
- Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, GPAM North America
Watch this panel:
Panel Summary
Speaker 1: Husamuddine Ismail
Brother Husamuddine joined us as a member of the Old Omdurman Resistance Committee. He shared with us the most recent developments in the political process in Sudan, and the intentions of the Resistance Committees as the revolution was reaching the fourth year. In regards to the role of the U.S. in the political process, Brother Husamuddine concluded that America’s actions are not based on allowing the Sudanese people the systems by which they are governed, rather they are based on U.S. interests, including countering Russian and Chinese influence in the country. Brother Husamuddine added “we [some of the Resistance Committees] have met the American ambassador a few weeks ago, telling us that maybe it might be wise and practical, literally practical, for Resistance Committees to sit with the junta and have a settlement with them because they are deeply rooted in the in the state and they’re controlling everything in Sudan since independence, etc. Our opinion was that the revolution raised up against this kind of thoughts.”
The U.S. has not only been encouraging the Resistance Committees to stop civil and nonviolent resistance and negotiate with the security forces, but they were essential in the Framework agreement that was signed between a faction of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) and the military apparatus (including the rapid Support Forces). Brother Husamuddine shared that for the Resistance Committees, the Framework Agreement was providing a breather for the security apparatus, “by the help of the United States and its allies in the region, to reshape or reorganize the scene for the assistance of the counter revolutionary forces.” The U.S., a state that claims to promote democracy, has through its support for the Framework Agreement allowed the security apparatus “to escape from genocides being committed after the [October 2021] coup, and the most famous genocide of the third of June [2019].”
The revolutionaries in Sudan, however, are seeking conceptual and practical changes in how Sudan is to be politically governed: “in the coming period, Resistance Committees are thinking to deeply or to more extend the relationships, especially of those committees, who agree on on the necessity of continuing this resistance for the sake of bringing justice to the to the the fathers and mothers of the martyrs, to return the looted fortune, which the junta right now are managing on behalf of the Sudanese people, and to establish an independent state and [a] state that is independent from intervention, international intervention and regional intervention. By international intervention we mean the competition, the classic competition between the United States, Russia, and China, and by regional intervention, we mean the intervention of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Emiratis in manipulating the future of Sudan.”
Speaker 2: Michael Ralph (Contacted; audio inaudible)
Speaker 3: Jessica Aiwuyor Mitchell
Sister Jessica began with a brief overview of the contemporary reparations movement in the United States, in Africa, and the Caribbean, before elaborating on the reparations movement in the United States, and our understanding of comprehensive reparations.
What does the reparations movement in the US look like?
“So reparations for Africans and people of African descent is a global issue focusing on repair for the harms of slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, colonialism, and in the United States, the African descendants pushing for reparative justice we’re doing it at both the local and national level.” Sister Jessica mentioned the setup of the California Reparations Task Force in 2020, and a smaller initiative in Evanston, Illinois, which has led to a reparations resolution, and “the first ever time someone actually got cheque…regardless of criticism of the initiative, regardless of the the size of it is just a small amount.” There are also a number of commissioners Task force advocating for HR40, and different legislative and judicial efforts. Some of the leading advocates for these efforts are NCOBRA, the December 12 movement, the Malcolm X grassroots movement, and the movement for Black lives.
What does the reparations movement in Africa look like?
Ghana and Nigeria have created a framework to get reparations for stolen resources and artwork during colonialism. In Kenya, there is an ongoing push for reparations associated to the Mau Mau uprising and the torture and gross human rights violations that Kenyans faced under British colonialism. Despite a court settlement in 2019, the struggle continues as not every member of the May Mau or groups that were affected were recipients of the settlement. In Namibia there are reparative efforts for the Herero and Namaqua genocide, which is the genocide of more than 50,000 Africans under German colonial force in Namibia from 1904 to 1908. There was an agreement made for Germany to pay 940 pounds to the state, however, activists on the ground are pushing for reparations to be handed directly to the survivors.
What does the reparations movement in the Caribbean look like?
Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, and other Caribbean countries have been pushing for reparations from the United Kingdom and France, and to make the Western world take accountability for the crimes against African descendants. At the organizational level, CARICOM has been the leading institution making collective claims. On the CARICOM report of May 2018, 10 various areas of reparatory justice were outlined, and included debt cancellation, gender equality initiatives, health care and education.
Divisions in the movement?
Despite repartitions being a point of unity, some elements in the movement have used it to sow division among Black communities. Sister Jessica used two different approaches to the movement to speak to the layers of division: the lineage based approach and the harm based approach. The lineage based movement, currently manifest in organizations like American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) and more recently another group know as Foundational Black Americans, have used reparations to promote nativism and xenophobia. Sister Jessica used the efforts under the California Reparations task force to put an eligibility criteria limited to a descendant of an enslaved person or a free black person by the year of 1900. One of the reasons for such a limitation is to restrict Black immigrants from being able to receive reparations; a thinking based on “the idea of scarcity”. However, the reality is that there really weren’t that many black immigrants in the state of California before 1965, so such restrictions not only leads to invasive and traumatic processes of having to ‘prove’ one’s violent past, but also place more restrictions on the amount of Black Americans that can claim reparations in the state of California.
On the other hand, harms based reparations (also referred to as comprehensive reparations calls for a “focus on specifically repairing the harm endured by Black communities exposed to chattel slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism, and other continuing vestiges with forward thinking initiatives to safeguard the future of Black America also, regardless of national origin”. Comprehensive reparations stems from recognition that the different periods of violence inflicted on African descendants cannot be treated separately as their process and impact remain inextricable.
“When we think of comprehensive reparations, we have to think about even as we move forward with our own initiatives, how will it impact our community? What are the things that we’re doing to make it easier to access and think about reparations, again, beyond monetary compensation…[reparations is about] world making and really changing the structures and the systems that exist currently overall, for the betterment of people of African descent.”
Speaker 4: Fanon Che Wilkins
“I think that we have to really move with a sense of nuance and recognize the complexity in the challenges that solidarity presents for us. And I think that in my own work, historically, I’ve done a lot of work on Pan Africanism, and solidarity. And there was a particular investment in seeing these things come into fruition, and work in a way that was mutually beneficial for all involved, but it’s really much more difficult and more challenging than that. And so I just want to urge us to continue to move with an ethics of care, a sense of empathy for one another, and to really value our collective humanity and put it above political labels and things of that nature that often obscure more than they illuminate. So I just want to thank everybody. And it’s just been very, very fruitful. And I appreciate being here.”
