Kwame Ture: In Memoriam

I cannot let the death of Kwame Ture go unremarked in a magazine called Africans Unbound. Although I did not know Kwame Ture personally, I followed his career. Like him, I was born in Trinidad and Tobago, so even though I never met him, I felt connected somehow. One of the things that he is reported to have said resonated very deeply with me. He said he remembered, as a young boy in Port of Spain, going to the movies and cheering for Tarzan, cheering for the US cavalry and the cowboys in the Hollywood-depicted version of "How the West was won". As a later revolutionary, he could somehow never forget or forgive himself, for having then, mere lad though he was, been on the wrong side of the revolutionary struggle. There is another famous Trinidadian, the Marxist C. L. R. James, who similarly looked back with some chagrin at his early years as school-teacher, when he succumbed to the bourgeois blandishments of a colonial society. He, too, later regretted some of the choices he made at a time when, "the surest sign that a Black man had arrived, was that he regularly kept the company of those lighter in complexion than himself." The divide-and-conquer game played by massa is profound. I, too, found myself on the wrong side of history by cheering for Tarzan even as the "natives" were subliminally degraded and disparaged -- I would never have guessed that people that looked like myself gave the world civilization, and that people that looked like Tarzan were Johnny-come-latelies. I, too, cheered for the cavalry, and absorbed the subliminal message that white conquest in the Americas had the stamp of approval of God himself, and that the "heathen savages" deserved the defeat they invariably suffered. And I, too, as the product of an "elite" school, found myself, at some level, alienated from the Black masses from whom I came. So, I understood at a primal level what Kwame Ture was saying when he said he could never forget, and always regretted, like C. L. R. James, not having made the correct revolutionary choices even as a youth.

The issue is a profound one. What does it say about the condition of a people, when one of its fiercist and most committed warriors, had first to unlearn thick layers of massa's indoctrination in order to get to the truth about himself and his people. When he first uttered those electrifying words, "Black Power!", it sent shivers down not only massa's spine, but that of Black people also. In saying it, it was clear that Kwame Ture, then Stokeley Carmichael, had freed his mind, and I have to confess that, at the time, I thought he had lost it as well! Even in Trinidad and Tobago at the time, which was only a few years beyond "independence", with a post-colonial Black government in power, the words had a depth of resonance that led directly, I believe, to what history records as the "Black Power" uprising in Trinidad of the early 1970s: the result of a bourgeois Black "middle-class" government, presuming to lead the very people, from whom, by Western miseducation and indoctrination, they had become alienated. The depth of the alienation is indicated by the fact that that bourgeois Government was led by Dr. Eric Williams, Oxford Ph.D, one who wrote Capitalism and Slavery, and who understood very well the colonialist and the imperialist, and their program, which was founded upon, and continues to draw sustenance from, the twin theft of land and labor -- see in this issue of Africans Unbound: Capitalism and the condition of Black folk: A dialogue -- that lies at its moral and ethical base. W. E. B du Bois, another master historian who understood these things, also was afflicted with the disease of alienation -- his "twin souls" -- which came pointedly to the fore in his quarrels with Marcus Garvey. The issue of alienation is an important one to which we shall return in these pages.

There is a second issue that the passing of Kwame Ture brings to mind. And that is the example of struggle. I am by no means a Marxist. And I cringe at the doctrine of "Scientific Socialism" which Ture's party, the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, continues to espouse to this day, my apprehension being that "scientific socialism" ultimately would fail, if tried, for the same reason that communism ultimately failed: there will always be the tendency to put Party above the people, which then becomes the fatal contradiction in the system. ( I am not being a defender of capitalism here, by the way, which has its own fatal flaws -- see in this issue of Africans Unbound: Capitalism and the condition of Black folk: A dialogue.) That said, I greatly admire Ture, because he never gave up the struggle. There is a form of spiritual transcendence that follows from doing the right thing, according to one's own lights and destiny, whatever the worldly cost. Kwame Ture did that, and it undoubtedly cost him, in worldly terms. Muhammad Ali did that, when faced with the stark choices of going to prison and losing his livelihood, or submitting to the draft for a war in which he did not believe and which moreover was manifestly wrong. He is already a legend because of it, and his place as an honored ancestor, when finally he makes the passage, is secure because of it. Bill Clinton (see this issue of Africans Unbound) is facing a similarly defining moment, and we will see what his legacy will be. Kwame Ture, likewise, will join the ranks of the honored ancestors, because he stood up for what he believed was right, damn the consequences. Would that all our leaders did the same.

Grisso

P.S. For more material on the life and passing of Kwame Ture go to:http://www.interchange.org/kwameture