Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
Angela Davis, Donald DeFreeze, Elaine Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Fay Bellamy Powell, Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Gloria Richardson, Hakim Jamal, Huey P. NewtonJohn Africa, , Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maulana Karenga, Malik Zulu Shabazz.
What do all these names have in common? One cannot mention the likes of Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr, and Angela Davis without conjuring up a picture of a struggling people in America going back to the civil rights movement of the people of African descent whose forebears were taken as slaves from Africa. Add to them Assata Shakur, who last week passed on in Cuba at the age of 78 years after years in exile in that country. Where she was exiled after escaping from Capitalist America’s incarceration, having been framed by the system for being a most wanted terrorist.
Assata Olugbala Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron, was an American political activist, revolutionary, and a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). In 1977, she was convicted of the first-degree murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She escaped from prison in 1979 and was wanted by the FBI, with a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture, and an additional $1 million reward offered by the New Jersey attorney general. It is thus not difficult to see why America labelled her a terrorist and that she eventually had to spend the rest of her life in exile in Cuba. This can by no means be seen as surrendering, but in her own way, she continued to resist the system. If only to avoid the fate activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr met, paying with their lives when they were assassinated. Indeed, it is not the Malcolm Xs and Martin Luther King Jrs who paid with their lives for resisting the system. It did not matter whether you were at the forefront of the civil rights movement or not. You only need to be a slave and Black for that matter. Despite the presumed abolishment of slavery and the gains of the civil rights movement over the years since the days of slavery and enslavement and the subsequent presumed abolishment, as it has come to be, Black lives in America still do not matter. If one is to reflect on the ugly faces of capitalism in America, punctuated by brutalities such as the continued genocide of Africans in the American Diaspora, it has been evidenced by the killing of Africans in the Diaspora of America, particularly after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in 2020.
Most disheartening is that either the Mother Continent of the Africans in the Diaspora has been ignorant of what has been happening to their fellows or altogether indifferent and nonchalant. As one has been hearing few voices from Africa about the plight of their fellows in the Diaspora, especially the American Diaspora. On the contrary, what one has been seeing are African leaders falling over one another to establish rapport with America, even with today’s America under the leadership of Donald Trump, whose disdain and disrespect for African leaders and their people knows no limit and/or boundaries and secrecy but has been expressed openly with no holds barred.
Under these circumstances, Assata Shakur could not but find refuge in Cuba. A country that she knew could not deliver her back to predatory America and capitalism in the same way that centuries ago her African forebears delivered their African descendants to slavery and enslavement to Caucasian predators, and eventually to capitalism as is the case today. Being still beholden to capitalism in America is the same way Africa has been ever since the dawn of imperialism and colonialism came to be beholden and continues to be beholden to neocolonialism and capitalism.
It is sad in this age and era that a daughter of the African soil whose forebears were trafficked to America once again had to find herself on the run just for believing in her being as a descendant of Africa and thus as an African. Her plight remains unknown to Africa, and while America herself is aware and the rest of the world as much, they choose to remain silent.In the same way, the world has been turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the plight of the Palestinians. While America, and the world, is presumably a better place today for all, as much as for Africans and people of African descent in the Diaspora, they continue to sing the song: ‘We shall overcome some day.’ How long?
Sister Shakur is no more, having passed on literally in second exile by the fact that she had to run away from her first exile in America, where she was born not by her own choice or that of her forebears but by the dictates of the world economic order. An order that is still existent with its vicious tentacles bearing heavily on the masses of the world, condemning them to a life of destitution. Sister Shakur could not have bowed out of this world in a better place than Cuba. Hail the Republic of Cuba. Surely the light she lit in Cuba shall remain lit for others to continue to carry forward the torch of justice that eluded her and continues to elude many of her brethren and sisters wherever they find themselves on this globe of capitalist exploitation, degradation and denigration. Viva Assata Shakur! Viva Cuba!
