We are now in February and for Africans in North America it is a significant month. It is usually observed as Black History Month.
February is taken as an opportunity to acknowledge African people’s struggles and achievements and commemorate significant moments in the fight against white supremacy, capitalism, sexism and other forms of oppression.
Some of us use this month to reflect and rededicate ourselves to the revolutionary or radical African political tradition.
In the spirit of collective self-criticism, are we at the point where Black History Month is due for a name change and focus? Read more…
by J.D. Benjamin – BASICS Issue #23 (Nov/Dec 2010)
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the invocation of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970; the largest mass detention in Canadian history, only surpassed by the arrests during the G20 protests of this year.
Although the October Crisis began with the kidnapping of James Cross by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), the federal government had been considering using the War Measures Act against the left and nationalist movements in Quebec since at least May 1970. Read more…
BASICS Issue #24 – by S. da Silva
To many, the unprecedented crackdown and detention of over 1000 activists, dissidents, even regular people, at the G20 Summit in Toronto seemed to express the emergence of a ‘police state’ in Canada. For others, it was unbelievable that this could happen ‘here,’ that things like this only happened elsewhere, in ‘other’ places, like in third world countries or under military dictatorships.
Some Canadians may recall the internment of over 9000 ‘enemy aliens’ during World War I – mostly the Ukrainians who were reduced to slave-like labour, working under the barrel of a gun, clearing, draining, and cultivating new lands for more worthy settlers. Many more will also remember the dispossession and internment of some 22,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II. However, ceremonial apologies have rendered these events regrettable things of the past and have nothing to do with today, right? Wrong. Read more…
BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010)
by S. da Silva
In 1990, Canada was taken to the brink of civil war for what on the surface appeared to be about a golf course and some sacred trees. What was actually at stake, beyond the surface of things, was the fate of a nation, one that had suffered two and a half centuries of the colonial theft of their land, and was no longer going to take it.
This summer marks 20 years since the armed standoff between Mohawk Warriors and the Canadian Armed Forces near Oka, Quebec, a small Quebec town whose mayor at the time, Jean Ouellette, was trying to push through plans for the expansion of a golf course and the construction of condominiums. The land in question, however, had for decades, if not centuries, been the subject of a land claim upheld by the Mohawk nation of Kanehsatake, whose ancestral graves and grove of pine trees held to be sacred were situated on the land. Read more…
Submitted by Black August organizers in Toronto BASICS #15 (Sep/Oct 2009)
Black August was established in the California prison system in the early 1970s by men and women of the Black Liberation Movement. Black August holds great significance in the African tradition of resistance against white supremacy and imperialism in the United States. In the late 1970s, the observance and practice of Black August left the prisons of California and was practiced by African American revolutionaries throughout the United States. Since then it has spread and grown and there are Black August events in cities throughout the U.S. and internationally.
As the journalist and former Black Panther Kiilu Nyasha writes: “Black August, [was] first organized to honor our fallen freedom fighters, Jonathan and George Jackson, Khatari Gaulden, James McClain, William Christmas, and the sole survivor of the August 7, 1970 Courthouse Slave Rebellion, Ruchell Cinque Magee. It is still a time to embrace the principles of unity, self-sacrifice, political education, physical fitness and/or training in martial arts, resistance, and spiritual renewal. The concept, Black August, grew out of the need to expose to the light of day the glorious and heroic deeds of those African women and men who recognized and struggled against the injustices heaped upon people of color on a daily basis in America.” Read more…
by Norman (Otis) Richmond
BASICS # 15 (Sep / Oct 2009)
Twenty years ago in Oakland, California, during the month of August, Huey P. Newton was murdered.
It is August 22, 1989, at about 8:30 am in the morning. Gwen Johnston, the co-owner of Third World Books and Crafts (Toronto’s first African-Canadian-owned bookstore) phoned me —- the news is shocking, dreadful even. Mrs. Johnston is in tears, saying, “Otis, they have killed Huey”. Mrs. Johnston and her husband Lennie were huge supporters of Newton, the Black Panther Party and the struggle for African liberation and the liberation of humanity.
Whatever Huey’s shortcomings, Newton led many of us ideologically. For a brief moment in the history of Africans in America, Newton was “the tallest tree in the forest”.
Malcolm X was the first national leader in the African community in the United States to oppose the war in Vietnam. Dr. Martin Luther King later followed Malcolm’s lead on this issue. Newton took it to the next level: In 1970, when was released from prison in California, his first act was to offer troops to fight in Vietnam on the side of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism. On August 29, 1970, Newton wrote: “In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers to the National Liberation Front and provisional revolutionary government of South Vietnam an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is the American imperialist who is the leader of international bourgeois domination.” Read more…
Final part of a 3-part series on the life of Norman Bethune: Canadian doctor, internationalist, and revolutionary hero.
by J.D. Benjamin
Basics Issue #13 (Apr/May 2009)
The year 1937 marked the beginning of full-scale war between the Republic of China and the Japanese empire. Bethune saw China as the next great flashpoint in the worldwide struggle against fascism. “Spain and China, are part of the same battle,” he wrote. “I am going to China because that is where the need is the greatest.”
In 1938, Norman Bethune arrived in China and insisted on traveling to the North to join the Communists who were fighting a guerrilla war against the Japanese. Once there, he set about performing emergency battlefield surgery, training new medical staff, producing manuals and organizing mobile medical facilities. The conditions were extreme. Bethune traveled 4,800 kilometers in the course of his duties and once operated on 115 cases in 69 hours without rest, even when his team came under heavy artillery fire. Yet Bethune did not complain. “It is true I am tired,” he wrote, “but I don’t think I have been so happy for a long time. I am needed.”
The Chinese were amazed by this foreigner who had adopted their cause as his own and was literally willing to give them his blood. Bethune in turn was humbled by the Chinese dedication to liberate themselves and build a better world.
In late October 1939, Bethune was on a tour inspecting hospitals when a nearby brigade of the People’s Liberation Army came under attack by the Japanese. While operating on wounded soldiers, Bethune cut his finger, something he had done several times before. This time, infection set in. Bethune continued to work as best he could until the regimental commander, seeing Bethune’s deterioration, ordered him sent back. On November 12, in a small village in Hopei Province, Bethune died of blood poisoning.
Chairman Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party of China, had only met Bethune once, but upon hearing of his death Mao wrote an essay that would be studied by hundreds of millions of people in China and around the world. ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’ praised his internationalism and devotion to the people. Mao held up Bethune as a model to be emulated, writing, “We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very helpful to each other. A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.”
When we compare Mao’s estimation of Bethune with Bethune as a younger man, we can see the profound changes he had gone through. Gone was the Bethune of just a few years previous, with his drinking, womanizing, impatience and individualism. His commitment to serving the people and being part of a movement for a better society made him overcome these problems. He became not just a better person, but a hero for working people all over the world.
