Ujima Newspaper, Volume 1, Issue 5 - March 1977

UJIMA Volume 1, Number 5 LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY March, 1977 Focus On Southern Africa This month we are giving support to the National Student Coalition Against Racism. The coalition has declared March 25 and 26 as na¬ tional days of protest against Ameri¬ can foreign policy in Southern Africa. The Coalition which was founded in 1975 at a Boston conference on desegregation, has seventy chapters in cities and on campuses across the country. They will all be placing focus this month on the sorry dilemma of millions of Blacks in Southern Africa. Highlights of the activities planned for Los Angeles and surrounding areas include press conferences and campus appearances on March 16, 19, 20, and 21 by Tsietsi Mashinini, the nineteen year old South African student who was the central figure of the militant student protests in Sow¬ eto last year. He is one of the many native South African student leaders who currently lend great inspirational impetus to the continuing struggle for black dignity in his homeland. He is forced to live in London in the light of physical harassment by the South Af¬ rican police and a huge bounty just placed upon his head by the racist Vorster regime. Also planned by the NSCAR is a mass rally on March 26 in downtown Los Angeles outside the Federal Building. Participants will march to the Pershing Square area and stage demonstrations outside the offices of South African Airways at the Los Angeles International Airport. Ac¬ cording to Karen Carter of the Coali¬ tion, the demands of the protests are: 1. The U.S. must sever all ties with South Africa. 2. All South African political pris¬ oners must be set free. 3. Majority rule by the blacks of Southern Africa must be im¬ plemented with utmost speed. In spite of a shift in U.S. policy towards Southern Africa, articulated time and again by the Ford and the Carter administration, it is the Coali¬ tion’s view that this new outlook is superficial. Here in part is the position taken by the NSCAR: “The U.S. government supports the racist apartheid regime, both di¬ rectly and by massive investments of U. S. corporations in South Africa. With interlocking directorships covering all southern Africa, U.S. corporations prop up the racist re¬ gimes, comply with apartheid prac¬ tices and enrich themselves from the natural and human resources of the area. One of the myths of U.S. in¬ volvement in South Africa is that Blacks benefit from the enlightened racial outlook of U.S. corporations and the prosperity they bring. These arguments are false.* General Motors maintains separate facilities for its Black and white employees; Chrysler pays wages ($81 a month) which are below the official poverty line. Polaroid makes the identification passes Blacks must carry. Tsumeb mines extract 80%of the base miner¬ als of Namibia. In all, 360 U.S. cor¬ porations have 1.5 billion dollars in¬ vested in South Africa, and enjoy their highest returns of anywhere in the world. Blacks in South Africa con¬ tinue to live in hunger and poverty. Historically the U. S. has used the apartheid regimes to bolster white minority rule. Now, under pressure from the Black Freedom fighters from Angola to Soweto the U.S. government publicly supports the concept of Black majority rule. How¬ ever, while giving verbal backing to majority rule, U.S. talks with Vorster have focused on continuing aid through U.S. corporations, Israel and NATO allies to maintain the ra¬ cist apartheid regime and strengthen its bargaining power against the Black S.A. freedom fighters. Kissinger’s “peace” mission, predictably, has meant more killing of Blacks, more repression and more apartheid. We must understand that we are part of the struggle in southern Africa. U.S. foreign policy of investment in the area, and its military, economic and political support of apartheid is an extension of its domestic policy at home. Racist oppression of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Native CONTENT Enslaved White in South Africa . Page 2 Robinson’s Goal . Page 3 Students’ Grievances . Page 3 Impressions of Isreal . Page 4 Experiences in India . Page 4 Reflections on Oppression . Page 5 Communications Conference . Page 6 EDITORIAL . Page 3 African Youth, F anon’s Theory Americans is a daily aspect of Ameri¬ can life. South African Blacks are fighting for full civil rights — one person-one vote and Black majority rule NOW! Theirs has been an ongo¬ ing struggle against racist apartheid segregation, similar to the fight of Blacks in this country for equal rights, equal education, open housing and jobs with equal wages. And like in South Africa, we have to face this racism. The best way we can help advance Black rights in South Africa is by forc¬ ing the U. S. government to get out, lock, stock and barrel. (More on Africa on Page 2) PEOPLE’S RIGHT | The right of people to decide j their own destiny, to make ) their way in freedom, is not to i be measured by the yardstick i of colour or degree of social ! development. It is an inalien¬ able right of peoples which they are powerless to exer¬ cise when forces, stronger than they themselves, by whatever means, for whatever reasons, take this right away from them. Kwame Nkrumah, late leader of Ghana by John Alan “The stage following on indepen¬ dence is the most dangerous”— Oginga Odinga It has been reported by a New York Times correspondent, in South Africa, that the Black youth that sparked and led the demonstrations and strikes against the apartheid government of South Africa are busy reading banned copies of Frantz Fa- non’s The Wrteched of the earth. This report indicates that the activist youth are as much concerned with ideas as they are with demonstra¬ tions, strikes and guerrilla warfare. Of all the theorists of the African liberation movements of the 1950’s and the 1960’s, Fanon was the one that was the most concerned about what happens after a colonial coun¬ try has gained its independence; and his concern was not an abstract analysis, but very concrete and very human. He saw and experienced those movements from the point of view of the masses in revolt against the dehumanizing sys¬ tem of colonial exploitation that reduced humanity to an object among other objects to the ex¬ tent that a colonial peasant was less than an animal. It was from the lowest level of col¬ onial society that Fanon judged the validity of the national revolutions and the national bourgeoisie. For Fanon any abstract shiboleth about economics, democracy or morality was a heap of rubbish if it did not find concrete existence in the very lives of the masses. In the colonies the hol¬ lowness of western democracy was self-evident. In The Wrteched of the Earth Fanon wrote that all these values, “the triumph of the human individu¬ al, of clarity and of beauty — become lifeless, colorless knick-knacks. All those speeches seem like a collection of dead words; those values wjiich seem to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete con flicts in which the people are en¬ gaged.” And if the national bourgeoisie and its intelletual en¬ tourage assume these ‘values’ to be the goal of' the revolution and have not grounded themselves in the mass movement, whose very existence is a cry to transform society, then the re¬ volution is at the point of slipping precipitously into neo-colonialism. (Continued on Page 7)