Which Agenda for Afro-descendants?

Jesús Chucho García

20/06/2013

Opinión

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During the last century’s decade of the seventies, cultural groups formed which reaffirmed the African Diaspora from a cultural perspective, most of them, however, were limited to an ineffective and out-of-context folkloristic focus; meanwhile, universities and cultural institutions, of both the public and private sector, mummified Africans and their descendants as “things” and objects of study.

Nevertheless, there were contributions which managed to reveal the existence of an extraordinary cultural diversity with great symbolic content and a wealth of elements which are invigorating our hemisphere, as much on the mainland as on the islands. But it was at the end of the decade of the eighties of the 20^th century that a transition took place from a naïve awareness to a critical consciousness through a process of de-objectification and unmaking its “thing-ness”, to move on to being subjects, protagonists and participants in contemporary struggles.

In the nineties, rooted in research with the perspective of those who live in Afro-communities, we started to de-construct and elaborate concepts which were more akin to our own historical processes, with our subjectivity. We established alliances and connections with many organizations from across the continent including sister organizations and anti-imperialists from the United States and the Caribbean, as well as from Africa.

Responses to Common Global Problems

The movement of people of African descent, in its diversity and ideological plurality, managed with extraordinary cohesion to advance on three basic lines of action. The first line was led by the need to interconnect nationally and transnationally in response to common global problems in the fight against racism and racial discrimination, having its greatest success in the pre-conference of the Americas Against Racism (Chile, 2000) and the Third Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Forms (Durban, 2001), considered the greatest achievement of recent centuries for Africans and their descendants. From there a Plan of Action was to evolve which today continues to serve as a guide and the issue was taken on by governments in Latin America and the Caribbean. Following this third World Conference Against Racism, the United Nations Organization (UN) accepted the concept of people of African-descent based on the initiative of Afro social movements.

Subsequently, the UN created four spaces where the concept of Afro-descendant became a concrete practice in the policies of that body and, at the same time, is an important reference for drawing up global policies.

Those spaces are:

1. The Working Group of Experts on Persons of African Descent;

2. The Group of Eminent Independent Experts on the Application of the Durban Declaration and the Program of Action;

3. The Inter-Governmental Working Group on the Effective Application of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action;

4. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism.

It is important to mention that the Organization of American States (OAS) has a Rapporteur on Human Rights of Afro-descendants, proposed by us in 2002 within the controversial Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

On another front, ECLAC (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), incorporated the Afro-descendant dimension into its social and economic studies.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, there are approximately 150 million Afro-descendants according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

Today the concept of “Afro-descendant” is universally recognized thanks to the drive of Afro-descendant organizations from all across the continent. The term “black” (or “negro” in Spanish), a colonial construction denigrating the African human condition, is today questioned by the intellectual self-determination and practice of Africans and their descendants, since it does not reflect or synthesize the relationship with history, the spirituality, nor the philosophy of African origin; and thus arose the prefix Afro, as it began to be applied by Barloventian Juan Pablo Sojo, who in 1943 wrote his essay on Afro-Venezuelan Notes and Themes, and was then taken up by Fernando Ortiz, in Cuba, with the concept of Afro-Cuban, Arthur Ramos in Brazil with the concept of Afro-Brazilian; and thus across all the geographic area of this continent, in order to recognize the African presence in the historical national constructions of each country, the prefix “Afro” is attached.

Without a doubt, “Afro-descendants” is a social and academic construction. It is also part of what we have called intellectual sovereignty linked to the concept of self-determination, the right of peoples and every human being to have a name, in this case for us, the children of the Diaspora, it falls to us to reconceive ourselves, breaking with the western-colonial definition of “black” or “negro” imposed for 500 years of submission to theories.

We are faced with an act of intellectual sovereignty, understanding this as an attitude of questioning everything that the other as judge tries to belittle, my perceptions, my ideas, my actions, my right to name myself; we can nevertheless accept fair criticisms from that other, to which we will be sensitive, in building consensus amongst ourselves; but we cannot accept that the other be judge and condemn my actions and what I have decided to be, arbitrarily in the name of some external power, whether that be called God, party, government, Founding Fathers of the Nation, State or other fictitious forms of the Holy Inquisition.

It was in the Durban Conference in the month of September of the year 2001 that we achieved as social movements our recognition as Afro-descendants as expressed in the following paragraphs, recognized by the majority of countries which make up the UN:

"32. We recognize the value and diversity of the cultural heritage of Africans and people of African descent and affirm the importance and necessity of ensuring their full integration into social, economic and political life with a view to facilitating their full participation at all levels in the decision-making process;

"33. We consider it essential for all countries in the region of the Americas and all other areas of the African Diaspora to recognize the existence of their population of African descent and the cultural, economic, political and scientific contributions made by that population, and recognize the persistence of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance that specifically affect them, and recognize that, in many countries, their long-standing inequality in terms of access to, inter alia, education, health care and housing has been a profound cause of the socio-economic disparities that affect them;

"34. We recognize that people of African descent have for centuries been victims of racism, racial discrimination and enslavement and of the denial by history of many of their rights, and assert that they should be treated with fairness and respect for their dignity and should not suffer discrimination of any kind. Recognition should therefore be given to their rights to culture and their own identity; to participate freely and in equal conditions in political, social, economic and cultural life; to development in the context of their own aspirations and customs; to keep, maintain and foster their own forms of organization, their mode of life, culture, traditions and religious expressions; to maintain and use their own languages; to the protection of their traditional knowledge and their cultural and artistic heritage; to the use, enjoyment and conservation of the natural renewable resources of their habitat and to active participation in the design, implementation and development of educational systems and programmes, including those of a specific and characteristic nature; and where applicable to their ancestrally inhabited land;

"35. We recognize that in many parts of the world, Africans and people of African descent face barriers as a result of social biases and discrimination prevailing in public and private institutions and express our commitment to work towards the eradication of all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance faced by Africans and people of African descent;". (Our emphasis) (1)

As of 2002, the presence at the UN in Geneva, of representatives of the Afro-Descendant Movement – Afro-Venezuelan Network, Afro World and Black Communities Process of Colombia – and the support of the Espacio Afroamericano, led by Mercedes Moya, were decisive in imposing our agenda which would flow into the International Year for People of African Descent (2011) and the approval of the Decade for People of African Descent (2012-2022). We came through triumphant and gave conceptual content to the UN, and not the reverse.

Ethno-Social Debt

The second line of action sought to intercede in the development plans emanating from the Consensus of Washington, where the guidelines were set by the international banks (the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank) and in addition to them, capitalist companies with social responsibility (Kellogg's, Ford, amongst others). In this stage, the international banks’ aggressiveness was to produce a kind of “ethno-social debt”, due to the managers of those banks seducing our movements to intercede with our governments to apply for loans to resolve our structural crisis. Examples of this were the famous Pacific Plan (Colombia) or projects in the Afro communities of Peru and Ecuador. Here without doubt, it is worth mentioning the interest of the State Department of the U.S. in launching an offensive to influence the Afro movements through USAID, Inter-American Dialogue and the Inter-American Foundation. Here is the genesis of what we would later call the embryo of the Afro-right.

The third line is oriented toward the ideological differentiation of the Afro-descendant movement, which we could classify in three types of behaviour:

TYPE A describes a sector of the movement that conformed, with little critical sense, to government structures and little by little became demobilized as autonomous social movements, allowing themselves to be absorbed by the structure of the State/government, not knowing how to differentiate between the agenda of the State and the movement’s own agenda, and ending up with the State/government imposing the agenda on them.

TYPE B are those sectors which managed to participate in positions of public and legislative powers, becoming ministers, deputy ministers and directors of institutions, congress members, mayors, and who made some good moves, while others were swallowed up by the techno-bureaucracy which distanced them completely from the communities.

Those who gained seats as congress-people and senators in their congresses and national assemblies, managed to put forward some legislation favoring our communities, but often times these laws turned into a dead letter, perhaps because they did not emerge as a need completely felt by our communities or they were simply defective, without practical applicability in resolving day-to-day problems.

TYPE C refers to those organizations which have raised banners for the construction of a socialist society where the political/ideological reference points of the rebellion against slavery of Africans and their descendants are vital to building the new humanity demanded by millions of Afro-descendants. This new humanity, with ancestral bases captured in the ethics, the politics and the socio-economic development of the Americas, which has scarcely been taken into account by the ideologues who are molding socialism for the 21^st century (Venezuela), the Citizens’ Revolution (Ecuador) and Community Socialism (Evo Morales) or the neo-Tupamaros (Uruguay).

A solid bridge still does not exist between the parties which are in power in these countries and the revolutionary social movements of Afro-descendants. That is a great weakness and should come into the debate in national and international forums in anticipation of the Decade of Afro-descendant Peoples.

Our Contributions to a New Humanity

There would appear to exist an established vision of contemporary history in which the contributions of Africans and their descendants were only the anti-colonial struggles, like some initial quota in the wars of independence, and then became frozen two centuries ago. Our contributions run through the barriers of time; they were leading elements throughout the struggles of the second half of the 19^th century, the struggles against the dictatorships of the 20^th century and the construction of the plural opening of our Nation-States and participative democracies which broke with the “representative” democracies established by the U.S. and the OAS.

Today, the focal points for the construction of different socialist modalities (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Uruguay, without failing to mention Cuba) are essential points of reference in the struggle against the different forms of imperialist domination, against the different forms of violating our sovereignties, and it is there where the Afro-descendant movement should be inserted, beyond the struggle against racism and racial discrimination, or a census-taking focus, often-times practiced by the transnational agencies, multilateral bodies, the big NGOs, the international banks and the U.S. State Department. We are not saying that we need to lower our guard against racism, now that its practice has metamorphosed; on the contrary, we should reconstruct our struggles in a more political sense. We are not saying that we should not be counted in the rounds of census-taking as a strategy to elaborate better public policies; but the struggle goes further; it involves our political and ideological insertion in the new democracies, and our inclusion in the long-term strategies of our Nation-States in the process of transformation.

In this sense, today we should ask ourselves: how are we as Afros positioned in the statutes of the governing parties in those progressive focal points? Where do we Afros stand in the regional plans of ALBA? How are we Afro-descendants participating in relations between Africa and South America at the Summits which are held amongst the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South America, where Ecuador has, in these moments, a great responsibility as do Venezuela and Brazil? How are we Afro-descendants acting in the democratization of land and in sustainable development which guarantees food sovereignty? How are we Afros involved in the struggle to slow abnormal climate change produced by the emission of gases, deforestation, anarchic urbanism, knowing that the reserves of water and biodiversity in general are located in our ancestral territories?

The agenda of the movement should be focused irreversibly on the construction and consolidation of anti-imperialist and anti-racist socialist society for a new humanity. We cannot continue with half measures along this line. We know of the existence of policies oriented by the most racist and Afro-opportunist sectors of the United States to occupy Afro-descendent spheres, the strongest expression of which is in Colombia, Honduras and one sector of Brazil, since the former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice included the Afro question which was later reinforced by Hilary Clinton in her visit to Bahia de Todos los Santos. The most aggressive sector in the construction of the Afro-right was constituted by Colombia with the government of Uribe and now with the government of Santos. It is time to create and join forces with the Afro-progressive sectors of the Americas so as to be in tune with political and social dynamics and break the barrier of self-exclusion to which we have reduced ourselves (the ineffective folkloristic vogue, the focus on census-taking, the struggle against racism with scant impact). We should simply back the construction of an Afro-inclusive socialist model, starting from the historical experience built tragically in the Americas and the Caribbean, and with the reference points of Kwame Kruma, Amilcar Cabral, Shankara, Neto, Machel and Julius Nyerere. The decade of Afro-descendant peoples, proposed to the UN, should be, amongst other points of discussion, the impulse for revolutionary ideological struggle in the Afro-descendant movements of Latin America and the Caribbean.

(Translation – Donald Lee)

- Jesus Chucho Garcia is a Venezuela writer and researcher, General Coordinator of the Afroamerica Foundation and the African Diaspora.

(1) Report of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (Durban, August 31 to September 8, 2001) http://www.un-documents.net/durban-d.htm

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