REFLECTIONS
ON
THE CHINWEIZU - ADDAI-SEBO ENCOUNTER
Addai-Sebo responds to Chinweizu Chinweizu in a short note written on November 3, 2006 over some issue. Dropped into that note is this: “We must now respond seriously to the challenge of the seizure or winning of state power. We need state power in order to act and make that decisive difference.” This occasions an instructive though disproportionate response from Chinweizu on November 9, 2006. In an e-mail to Nii K, dated April 26, 2010, Chinweizu copies his exchanges with Addai-Sebo and explains that in the exchanges his advice to Addai-Sebo “was to devote his energies to the political education of the young, and to avoid re-entering the struggle for state power.”
In fact, during the initial reaction to Addai-Sebo’s continued enthusiasm for seizure/winning of state power Chinweizu could be understood to be against seizure of state in favour of building State power. After castigating Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela for winning power while the colonial state structure remained intact, Chinweizu declares that “Our job, at this final stage of our lives, is to organize the appropriate knowledge and deliver it to those following us who need, seek and deserve it – for the project of building Afrikan power for the victory of the Afrikans.” So that Chinweizu, in his advice to Addai-Sebo, is not advising against a struggle to build State power but against the struggle to capture or seize or win state power. And he has excellent and valid reasons for saying that.
Reference to “the struggle for state power” in the e-mail to Nii K can therefore only be a reference to the struggle to seize/capture/win state power. Perhaps Addai-Sebo does not get the essence of Chinweizu’s reaction to his enthusiasm for power capturing. Hence, while he embraces Chinweizu’s educational project he forcefully insists on the need to seize power. This is what he says in his response to Chinweizu, dated November 10, 2006: “Thank you very much for refocusing my energies but we must also let the business of the seizure of power be our concern at the same time we are building the cadres. We must build the cadres and place ourselves in a state of constant preparedness.”
The introduced emphasis here displays Addai-Sebo’s limited understanding of Chinweizu’s position: Chinweizu calls for an education project to churn out cadres for an eventual involvement in a State-building process; Addai-Sebo agrees to the educational project idea but thinks that Chinweizu abandons every idea about state power and thus misses the vital point about building State power. When Chinweizu fails to be specific when he rejectionistly talks about “struggle for state power” in his Nii K e-mail he does not help matters. Of course, with his missing the strategic point about building State power, Addai-Sebo would not know why cadres could be churned out in anticipation of nothing.
And since we cannot have a void he insists on filling Chinweizu’s apparent vacuum with his power seizure/winning enterprise; an enterprise that falls short of learning the real lesson of the past struggles – to build power but not to seize it. Let Addai-Sebo’s enthusiasm, however, not wane since necessary though Chinweizu’s prescription for building State power is, it is not dialectical. The building of State power is the context within which political education to create cadres is undertaken. To let the building of State power await the maturity of cadres is to deny political education its true sustenance: only in the State-building process can anybody learn how to build the State. Constant involvement in practice enriches thought that, in turn, influences the direction of practice. To create a wedge between thought and practice is the very abandonment of the Consciencist principle that “Practice without thought is blind; thought without practice is empty.”
In his Nii K e-mail, Chinweizu discourages “the veterans” of the PNDC struggles from a “return to serious political activism” because he does not “expect the veterans of those struggles to have much appetite for (it)”. This perception of the Ghanaian Left among comrades on the continent predates the PNDC era when some of our South African comrades at AASU remarked that Ghanaians were forthcoming in fine speech-making at symposia but fell short of the real thing: action. Within months after that remark the bellows of December 31, 1981 boomed. The leader of that action was present at the symposium that attracted the remark.
The People’s Revolutionary League of Ghana (The League) organised that symposium. It became a part of the events that involved an attempt to create an alternate State power via the People’s/Workers’/Community Defence Committees. The PNDC leadership condemned that attempt as “creating a parallel State” and at the least opportunity apoliticised the defence committees, dismantled emergent structures and chased persons like Addai-Sebo, who scarcely understood the undercurrents, into exile with the collaboration of persons like Akoto Ampaw to whom Chinweizu copies his Nii K e-mail.
Hence, Chinweizu’s characterisation of the appetite of “the veterans” is not new. What he urges to be done by the Ghanaian Left in an eventual future had twice been attempted, first, by Nkrumah, whom he has a few uncomplimentaries to shower on, and, second, by The League with specific constraints in their respective eras. He appears to need a lot of learning from Ghanaian comrades; the relevant ones, of course. And all the indicators are that comrades like Chinweizu serve a better purpose and will serve a better purpose in the realisation of aims projected in our regenerative efforts to build the people’s State power.
That is, if only he concedes that the actions we take today, including the education of the new generation, must be part of the process of not "capturing state power" but building a new State power to replace the existing state power structure. His undialectical dichotomy of the learning and building processes requires a dialectical fusion in a happy reunion. In the same way Addai-Sebo needs to disinherit himself from the archaic power capturing syndrome and properly re-orient. His efforts with his darling wife shall not be in vain with this disinheritance as their cadres would not need to stand-by for the opportune moment to capture state power but be involved now in the process of building a new State power structure in replacement of the current one that does not require being seized/captured/won but rather dissolved on Osagyefo’s terms.
In this respect, let it be understood that this process of building a new State power structure does not require the partial retirement of “the veterans” who might resign themselves to the harvesting and bequeathing of knowledge. The "veterans" must still be involved all-round. In the process of building the new State power questions about partial or absolute retirement do not arise. The struggle continues all-roundly till death do us part.
The above are comments passed on what Addai-Sebo and Chinweizu say. What are their exact words and their meaning? Let us structure out their arguments now in validation of the interpretation placed on their statements above. In this respect, we go back to Addai-Sebo’s initial e-mail. In that e-mail he calls for a response to the challenge of the seizure or winning of state power and emphasises that state power is needed in order to act and make that decisive difference. These are his words, “We must now respond seriously to the challenge of the seizure or winning of state power. We need state power in order to act and make that decisive difference.”
The suggestion here is that before we can act and make a difference we must first of all seize or win the current state power structure; without seizure/winning of control over this state power structure we cannot make a decisive difference. In fact, this is what, in the main, has been continually going on since 1966 when Kwame Nkrumah’s attempt to build a new structure of State to replace the current state power structure was aborted.
Chinweizu disagrees to Addai-Sebo’s prescription. He says unambiguously that “we need to understand that abolishing these colonial countries, with their states, and replacing them with Afrocentric states and societies is a necessary condition for getting Africa out of its humiliating situation. Seizing power in them is not on! … Unless the comprador mentality and system is eradicated, those who capture state power henceforth will only further entrench compradorism, not liberate Africa!” He repeats this with the statement that “Unless a comprehensive and basic mental revolution is accomplished in the next decade, by bringing millions of Africans to an Afrocentric political consciousness, those of the coming generation who attempt to seize state power in these comprador colonial Bantustan states will only become comprador warlords…”
For him, therefore, what requires to be done is a definition of “the problems and tasks of building Afrikan power in the 21st century.” He requires and insists on “Knowledge that is necessary for building Afrikan power in the next 50 years”. Clearly, then, Chinweizu focuses on building a new State power to replace the current neo-colonial power structure.
To achieve this, however, he contemplates a comprehensive and basic mental revolution for the next ten years, beginning from 2006 when he types these words. He makes this the condition for even those who will attempt to seize state power. That is where Chinweizu unintentionally creates special difficulties. Does he think that in case millions of Africans achieve a mental revolution within ten years it will then be right, we mean correct, to seize state power which, in his terms, means inheriting the colonial power system the Nkrumah-Mandela fashion? He has very strong words for those who inherit such systems of power.
For instance, he tells us to “Look at what happened to the Nkrumah-Mandela gangs after they inherited power from the colonialists.” Gangs! A very strong word for “elders” who suffered in our behalf! But this only emphasises his abhorrence for those who inherit the colonial power structure. Why then does he appear to endorse inheritance somehow in his cited statement in the preceding paragraph above? He clearly had a slip of fingers on the computer keyboard. What should rather arrest our attention is his phasing of the educational and action processes.
He suggests a decade for political education. He also suggests “the next 50 years” for building State power. Even if we assume that the decade for education is within the 50 year period we cannot help understanding him to conceive a process in which there are two phases, one preceding the other. This is why he finds it necessary to advise Addai-Sebo to concentrate on the political education of the youth because they are old and are now elders. If a revolutionary’s life span is divided into one of harvesting and bequeathing knowledge and another of activism then so must society have a period to be educated and another period to be active, he appears to tell us.
His exact words regarding the power capturing enterprise are that “we are too old to be getting into that. As elders, our task is to give political education to the up-and-coming generation of PanAfricanist activists so they can effectively tackle and solve Afrika’s problems. Ours is to harvest and bequeath knowledge to the under 30s.” It appears that it is only in Africa that revolutionaries in their 50s are deemed to be old and elders. While the neo-colonial state engages people to work for its continuance for at least 60 years of their lives revolutionaries seeking to effect a cessation of the neo-colonial state are declaring themselves incapable before age 60, partially resigning and urging others to do the same! This phasing of the lives of the forces of progress and of the revolutionary process itself sounds like a fifth columnist compradorial device to postpone revolutionary activity forever.
Chinweizu maps out a beautiful educational programme that will make sense within an on-going process of building a new State power structure to replace the neo-colonial state structure. For, since such a programme is based on knowledge acquired from research which always lags behind unfolding reality its relevance depends on being constantly enriched through practice. To do otherwise is to adopt a mechanistic and undialectical conception of the revolutionary process. It is, with all due respect, the lazy person’s way of doing things. In the revolutionary process, theory and practice work simultaneously to enrich each other. This consciencist outlook is the only basis from which the African Revolution can be prosecuted with economy of time, life and talent.
Possibly, Chinweizu might not take kindly to this assertion since he neglects to mention, for compulsory reading, Kwame Nkrumah’s books, especially Consciencism, which analyse the question of imperialism in its two phases of colonialism and neo-colonialism. He neglects such contemporary analyses of imperialism in preference to stories about semi-colonial China and 18th century Haiti. Towards Colonial Freedom, Africa Must Unite, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-colonisation and Class Struggle in Africa analyse contemporary imperialism and fashion out ways and means of uprooting it. Revolutionary Path, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, The Rhodesian Files, Dark Days in Ghana and papers like Revisiting African Socialism, etc. enlighten us on the difficulties of supplanting and replacing neo-colonial state structures.
Rather than studying these materials on contemporary imperialism Elder Chinweizu says we should study materials on pre-monopoly finance capitalism. Yet, any serious student of history knows that history being a process its study goes backwards to trace the genesis of a phenomenon like capitalism to its present state of development in order to deal with it. Lessons learnt over the entire period are then utilised to formulate and prosecute current programmes. Thus reading even historical fictions about the earlier stages is only a very small part of the learning process. The real material to be read is the analysis of the present day reality. And Kwame Nkrumah has bequeathed us with copious volumes of such analysis.
There is something uncomfortably mechanistic about Elder Chinweizu’s modus operandi. Consciencism teaches us that even the appearance of serenity of a situation masks its inexorable dynamism. Hence, our methods in dealing with any given situation must be fashioned out of that situation but not from some ancient situation. Any importation from an ancient situation requires validation within the present reality. Given the Ghanaian and South African reality, Nkrumah and Mandela could not have respectively destroyed the colonial state apparatus all at once even when they became Presidents of those countries. Nkrumah’s difficulties in his efforts at dealing with the unavoidably inherited colonial state apparatus and replacing it are well chronicled and analysed in Africa Must Unite. The so-called belated efforts at political education at Winneba were part of his drive at dismantling the inheritance.
And yet, Dear Elder Chinweizu says that Nkrumah failed because he, like Mandela, was ignorant of the centuries old Haitian struggles which Afrocentric studies have only recently (1985) unearthed long after his death in 1972. Is our veteran Elder aware that Kwame Nkrumah encouraged the institutionalisation of such studies and, in fact, in Ghana he established the Institute of African Studies from which some of us, like yours truly, benefitted when African Studies (Afro Studs, as we called it) was made compulsory for all first year students at the University of Ghana even more than a decade after his demise? In this respect, Elder Chinweizu inflicted the unkindest cut on Nkrumah with the following judgement:
Much of the failures of the Nkrumah-Mandela generation derived from their ignorance of the anti-imperialist struggles that took place before theirs. Luckily, by now, we have some Afrocentric studies of the Haitian and other struggles. [e.g. Jacob Carruthers, THE IRRITATED GENIE, Chicago: Kemetic Institute, 1985] Had these been available to the Nkrumahs, they would have been better prepared to carry on the fight against the neo-colonialism he rightly denounced. There’s hardly any of the pitfalls of the anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century that had not manifested in the Haitian struggle a century and half earlier. Had the Nkrumahs known of them, they would have been forearmed. And today’s up-and-coming activists need to know all of that.
For this mechanistic, unilinear, undialectical reason that Nkrumah and Mandela did not have access to unpublished works to guide them, leading to their failure, Elder Chinweizu called them a “gang” who were turned into comprador servants of imperialism by their inheritance! For his celebrated condemnation of these “elders”, our Elder & Veteran has these exact and self-typed words to dump on this and generations to come: “The system they took over turned all of them, some willingly and others not-so-willingly, into comprador servants of imperialism!” Such infantilist effusions were, once upon a time, commonplace with our comrades in the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. And such are bound to be the content of Veteran Chinweizu’s educational set up?
You see, after about four years of making that statement he still felt proud enough not only to keep on believing it but also to circulate it to Nii K, Akoto Ampaw and Bankie Bankie under the caption “Veteran activists and state power struggles”. One wonders what kind of discussion he had had with Nii K the previous night that encouraged him to circulate his years-old exchange with Addai-Sebo. E ye morbor! God bless Africa!
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